The Supersonic r is priced at $569.99 and claims to dry hair without heat damage. It is also intended to lessen the strain on stylists’ wrists.

It will be available to purchase by professionals with a valid cosmetology licence from March. A future consumer rollout is planned, but not yet confirmed.

Family-owned Dyson has become a heavyweight in the hair tools space since launching its debut hair product, a dryer called the Supersonic, in 2016. It subsequently launched a professional version in 2018, and added more buzzy consumer tools like the Airwrap. It is investing £500 million ($629 million) to expand its beauty portfolio and plans to launch 20 new products by 2028.

The new Supersonic r’s name refers to the shape of the device, which is designed to be more ergonomic and lighter than traditional dryers. The dryer uses radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors, as well as a proprietary heater to deliver what the brand claims to be optimal airflow and temperature.

Learn more:

James Dyson’s Unlikely Second Act as a Beauty Mogul

Since 2016, the vacuum company has found an entirely new audience with its dryers and multi-stylers. Its latest launch, the Airstrait, is the first of an anticipated 20 new products over the next four years.

Billionaire Reinold Geiger is making a renewed push to take global cosmetics firm L’Occitane International SA private, the strongest indication yet that a succession plan is underway.

L’Occitane’s stock spiked this week after Bloomberg News reported private equity firm Blackstone Inc. is considering teaming up on a buyout with 76-year-old Geiger, who is chairman and holds a controlling stake in the skincare brand. It was the second time in almost six months shares surged over the possibility that the Austrian entrepreneur will delist the firm from the Hong Kong stock exchange.

If Geiger succeeds, it will cap a tumultuous three years for the company that sells products like citrus verbena hand cream and almond shower oil. Geiger relinquished his role as chief executive officer in 2021 to Andre J. Hoffmann, his business partner for nearly 30 years. Then, last month, Geiger announced Hoffmann will be replaced in April by a new CEO who previously worked at LVMH.

“As our group grows, we need to evolve,” Geiger said in a statement.

A vehicle ultimately controlled by Geiger owns more than 70 percent of L’Occitane, exchange filings show. An engineer by training who rarely gives media interviews, Geiger has a net worth of $2.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The future of Geiger’s fortune is part of a generational transfer of wealth that’s gathering pace around the world. In his case, it’s still unclear whether he intends to eventually hand the reins to one of his three sons.

“Part of the thinking about future governance and reorganisation, particularly related to succession, involves changes in ownership structures,” said Morten Bennedsen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and an expert on family businesses. “Ownership is part of transition planning.”

Two of Geiger’s three sons are in senior management positions at the company. Adrien, 38, is a global brand director and Nicolas, 42, an executive for the Americas. Both are also senior advisers at New York-based REDO Ventures, a venture capital firm with a broad portfolio that has invested alongside Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures in cryptocurrency trading-platform Bitpanda. Maximilien Geiger, 46, has also been involved in REDO and L’Occitane, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“They will become shareholders, but running the company is something different,” Geiger said in a 2012 interview with his business school alma mater, Insead. “I’m a very simple person. I don’t complicate things and may be not too intelligent. When you are too intelligent it’s difficult.”

A spokeswoman for L’Occitane didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Provence Roots

L’Occitane was founded in 1976 by Frenchman Olivier Baussan, who started out making essential oils from plants like lavender in the Provence countryside and selling them at local markets. Geiger became a minority shareholder in 1994, but has said the company was doing so badly he started working there in a bid to safeguard his investment.

He expanded L’Occitane globally, saying he decided to move into Asia after being impressed by the region’s work ethic. Initially, the strategy went so badly that his auditor warned the poor results could put the whole company in jeopardy. The retailer was listed in Hong Kong in a 2010 initial public offering and now has eight brands and some 3,000 locations in 90 countries. Yet it earns only about one-third of its revenue in Asia, while the Americas is its fastest growing region.

He started his first business in his early 20s, a tour operator specialising in ski holidays that flopped, as did his next endeavour, a machinery distributor. He had more success at AMS Packaging SA, which specialised in supplies for high-end perfumes and cosmetics and was later sold.

“I just wanted to have no boss and do things by myself,” he said in the interview. “I wasn’t motivated at all in becoming rich.”

Last year, Geiger considered taking the company private with a view to potentially relisting in Europe at a higher valuation. He eventually abandoned the idea, triggering a sharp slump in L’Occitane stock.

In a note published Tuesday, Jefferies analysts said the small number of international companies listed in Hong Kong may be revisiting their status because the original attractions of high valuation and building brand awareness, especially in China, “have been fading.”

To hammer home the point, minority shareholder Butler Hall Capital sent an open letter to L’Occitane’s board this week calling for a relisting in the US to unlock value, notably through a spin off of fast-growing brand Sol de Janeiro, maker of Brazilian “bum bum” cream. L’Occitane is trading at a deep discount and an offer below HK$45 ($5.75) would undervalue the company, it said. The shares closed at HK$27.75 on Thursday.

Minority investors trying to read into the chairman’s current strategy might want to take heed of his words in 2012.

“I love taking risks,” Geiger, a keen skier, said. “Skiing between two crevasses on a glacier is exciting, it’s adrenaline, you don’t want to fall in.”

By Tara Patel

Learn more:

Blackstone Said to Consider Bid for Skincare Company L’Occitane

Blackstone Inc. is considering a bid for skincare company L’Occitane International SA, according to people familiar with the matter.

Luxury fashion’s second-biggest group, Kering, reported fourth-quarter revenues that fell 4 percent on an organic basis, in line with analyst estimates.

Full-year 2023 sales at the French owner of brands including Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta fell 2 percent on an organic basis and 4 percent in reported terms to €19.6 ($21.15). Full-year operating profit at €4.75 billion was slightly below estimates.

”These results are tolerable, with no major negative surprises aside from the margin dilution at Bottega Veneta and Other Houses [the unit that houses Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and Boucheron],” RBC Capital Markets analyst Piral Dadhania wrote in a note to clients. ”Gucci is not performing worse than expected which is a relief, and the focus will turn to the earnings call and any potential commentary from management on margin outlook for Gucci as well as timing of inflection,” Dadhania added.

Indeed, in a series of meetings with financial analysts and the press Thursday, Kering is likely to face tough questions about why its brands are underperforming rival conglomerates like LVMH and Richemont. In a tough market,

While Gucci’s struggle to reinvigorate sales after a historic boom under designer Alessandro Michele ran out of steam has been well-documented. An overhaul of the brand’s image by new designer Sabato De Sarno is just now being rolled out to stores.

Markets may also decide to brush off the slowdown at powerhouse Saint Laurent, which could be a slight course correction following a multi-year surge in the US, which was a tricky market for many brands in 2023.

Its harder to explain why Balenciaga has continued do decline rather than bouncing back from last year’s catastrophic holiday quarter, when an ill-received marketing campaign put the brand at the center of US culture wars, sparking boycotts and vandalised boutiques. The basis of comparison was low.

Its equally unclear why Bottega Veneta’s business stumbled in the year of “quiet luxury” on social media, and as fashion fans swooned over Mathieu Blazy’s unpredictable yet discreet creative vision.

Stay tuned to BoF for more updates to this developing story.

When publicist and Glam Body founder Danika Berry set out to launch Black Beauty Founders, an organisation to provide resources and networking opportunities to Black women in the beauty industry, she expected to face the familiar hurdles of corralling investors, or convincing retailers to open up shelf space for Black brands.

What she didn’t anticipate was that she’d spend weeks mulling new tactics to shield her new organisation from conservative activists.

Berry had good reason to worry. When she launched a holiday of the same name (National Black Founders Day) back in August, to recognise the contributions of Black women to the industry, it was just over a month after the Supreme Court overturned university affirmative action programmes. By the fall, conservatives were targeting a host of companies and organisations with programmes aimed at supporting underrepresented groups. In October, a federal court ordered The Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm that invested in minority-owned brands to pause grant applications while it weighed a legal challenge. In November, a conservative group asked a US regulator to investigate whether Macy’s diversity goals were discriminatory.

Black Beauty Founders is going ahead later this month. But Berry said she pushed back the launch by a month so she could work out language that would speak to her underlying mission without running afoul of still-undefined new rules. Rather calling significant attention to “Black women,” her group’s website speaks to “all BIPOC women,” and uses other less-conspicuous terminology, she said.

To Berry, the backlash represents another hurdle for entrepreneurs and brands that already struggle to raise funding and catch the attention of retailers.

“It’s not fair to us,” said Berry, who was also a longtime publicist for Black-founded brands like Mielle Organics, Camille Rose and Kaleidoscope. “There’s a [discrepancy] between how much we spend and how much funding we get. It’s why I created [this organisation] … and I don’t want to get in trouble for wanting to help Black women.”

Berry’s frustrations mirror those of many Black entrepreneurs, industry stakeholders and large companies that have been championing diversity and inclusion for years but must now weigh whether their commitments can weather a ferocious political and legal blowback.

The costs are piling up. Companies are renaming their DEI departments, or quietly winding them down. In December, Macy’s appointed a new chief legal officer with experience “steeped in diversity battles,” Bloomberg Law reported.

But the backlash has also helped trigger what some experts say is a much-needed shakeout in the corporate approach to DEI. As it becomes riskier to publicly engage on the topic, it’s becoming clearer which companies and individuals were committed to diversity for the long haul and which efforts were shallow attempts to jump on the 2020 bandwagon.

“Those of us who have experience in DEI were saying in 2020 that this is a marathon — not a sprint,” said Porter Braswell, founder and CEO of 2045 Studio, a membership network for BIPOC professionals. “Diversity fatigue is something that we knew was going to happen. There’s nothing that’s happening that’s surprising to those that have been in this space and really doing this work.”

Navigating New Anxieties

What most conservative activists are targeting is the “framing” of DEI, said Braswell, not necessarily the end goals. Companies, therefore, can approach some of this as a rebranding exercise, he said, and “market DEI differently.”

An October report by the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals, a trade organisation representing environmental, social and governance professionals (including many corporate DEI specialists), found in a survey that 86 percent of its members had changed the way they talk about their work publicly, or have reduced external communications. But only 9 percent reported a decrease in commitment to DEI itself.

Berry noted that while the language around her organisation and work have changed, her goals haven’t.

“This is a scare tactic [by conservative activists] to make us not want to get into the fight,” she said. “But I feel like we need to continue the fight and not allow these people to scare us.”

The New DEI Framework

The changes happening across DEI aren’t just cosmetic.

As many fashion and beauty companies began to navigate DEI goals for the first time in 2020, many were “too rigid” and clinical in their approach — focusing primarily on “box-checking” or reaching numerical targets by any means necessary, said Amber Cabral, a DEI strategist who runs her own consultancy.

Often, that led to brands working off a checklist of easy DEI wins — like creating employee resource groups and putting on celebrations for heritage months — without considering whether those groups’ meetings were well attended, or if employees whose cultures were being celebrated faced bias in the workplace.

In this new landscape, companies have to get more “tactical and practical,” in their approach — drilling down in areas like management training, communication and improving their hiring and onboarding practices, Cabral said.

This may also involve eschewing or tamping down on the use familiar corporate labels and DEI jargon — and focusing on ways to embed inclusivity into the day-to-day activities of a business, Braswell said. A job post doesn’t necessarily have to specify that only minorities apply. Instead, companies can broaden the qualifications for their jobs in areas like education and job experience — which should more organically diversify their candidate pool.

Companies will continue to need “support” in the form of a DEI consultant or head of DEI — even if it goes by another name — as well as legal counsel to help them sidestep complications, Cabral said. But they’ll need to be more thoughtful about how the role is defined, its budget and resources, and where the department sits within the organisation.

Most importantly, the new framework should take DEI out of the social impact bucket — which makes diversity seem like charity work. The function should have greater proximity to the C-suite and other departments (like marketing or research and design) where it’s rightfully connected to revenue targets and an increasingly diverse consumer base, experts say.

If companies need motivation to push through all this, they should think about their future customers — most of whom are likely to be ethnically-diverse, Braswell said.

“It’s undeniable that by the year 2045, this would be a majority racially-diverse United States,” he said. “So if fashion brands — more than any [other industry] — don’t understand the changing consumer demands and habits and have a workforce that’s reflective of those changes and makes products for those changes — they will be irrelevant.”