Bernard Arnault’s family is nearing the purchase of a majority stake in second-tier football club Paris FC, investing alongside Red Bull, as the billionaire clan diversifies into sports, people familiar with the matter said.

Under the terms discussed, the Arnault family will initially take a stake of about 55 percent through its holding company Agache, before buying out club chairman Pierre Ferracci’s 30 percent holding in 2027, said the people, requesting anonymity. Red Bull will acquire a stake of about 15 percent, they added.

Paris FC, founded in 1972, is currently the leader of France’s Ligue 2, one step below the top league. The club is less known than Paris Saint-Germain, the French capital’s main football team, whose international profile soared under the ownership of Qatar and with star players like Neymar and Kylian Mbappe.

The move to invest was a family decision involving Bernard Arnault and his five children, who all work at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, the luxury group he controls, a person familiar with the transaction’s rationale said.

French sports newspaper L’Equipe first reported the news on Wednesday. A representative for the Arnault family declined to comment.

Paris FC is known to have a large training academy which scouts for emerging football talent in the wider Paris region.

The future owners are not looking to challenge PSG immediately, but plan to have the team qualify for the top French league and eventually seek to take part in the European Champions League, according to L’Equipe. The club will benefit from a budget in a range between €100 million ($109 million) and €200 million over several years, the paper reported.

A spokesman for Red Bull declined to comment. A representative for Ferracci didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The news comes amid a recent foray by LVMH into sports sponsorships. Last week, the group signed a 10-year deal with Formula 1 worth potentially $1 billion, replacing Rolex SA. LVMH was also a major sponsor of the Olympic and Paralympic Games held in Paris over the summer.

Several French football clubs big and small have attracted takeover interest from investors in the past few years. Another Ligue 2 team located north of Paris, Red Star FC, is in talks to be acquired by private equity investor Steve Pagliuca, Bloomberg has reported.

Earlier on Wednesday, Red Bull announced former Liverpool FC manager Juergen Klopp will become its global head of football in January. Red Bull owns a number of teams, including Leipzig, Salzburg and the New York Red Bulls. It also has a stake in English Championship team Leeds United.

With this transaction, Arnault would join another prominent luxury family, the Pinaults, who own the football club Stade Rennais FC via their Artemis family vehicle. The Pinaults are the controlling shareholders of Gucci parent company Kering SA.

By Benoit Berthelot and Angelina Rascouet

Learn more:

LVMH and Formula 1 Announce 10-Year Partnership

The tie up will involve several of LVMH’s houses, including Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy and TAG Heuer.

Walk into any beauty retailer these days and it’s hard to avoid a barrage of buzzwords like “clean” and “natural.” But understanding what such vague marketing terms actually mean is often even more difficult than trying to unpack fashion’s green claims, according to a new report by sustainability rating platform Good on You.

“There’s a general lower level of transparency in the beauty industry compared to fashion,” said Good on You co-founder Sandra Capponi. Specific claims abound, from cruelty-free formulas to eco-friendly packaging, “but there’s a lack of substantiation.”

The report, published Wednesday, analysed nearly 240 beauty brands. In some areas — like providing insight into efforts to curb brands’ environmental footprint — both the beauty and fashion sector perform equally poorly, the analysis found. But in others beauty brands tend to be particularly opaque, lagging fashion in providing details about initiatives to provide supply-chain transparency and prevent human rights abuses, it concluded. Good On You has ranked more than 6,000 fashion brands’ sustainability performance since it was founded in 2015, but this is its first foray into beauty.

The rating programme assesses companies’ efforts to ensure their operations don’t harm people, planet or animals based on publicly available information using a five-point rating scale that ranks brands from “We Avoid” to “Great.” Nearly two thirds of the beauty brands it assessed rated “Not Good Enough,” or worse. Only two — skin and haircare start-up Disruptor London and organic beauty brand Odylique — ranked “Great.” Top performers included indie labels Tropic and Pai Skincare, as well as larger labels like Garnier, Lush, and the Amorepacific-owned Tata Harper.

Brands including Revlon and Laura Mercier were among the worst-scoring companies, with both scoring fewer than 10 points out of 100. The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

That’s partly because the beauty industry has supply chains that are even more fragmented and complex than fashion’s, covering a dizzying array of components: A single eyeshadow pan might be minted in China and filled in Italy before it’s sold in Canada. It is likely to contain more than a dozen individual raw ingredients, each with their own distinct sourcing challenges. But brands also routinely fail to provide consumers with even basic information about what’s gone into their products, including detailed ingredient lists. “Of course that has huge human health impacts but the sustainability impacts are also real,” said Capponi.

Several commonly used raw materials are mired in controversies because of their links to environmental destruction or human rights abuses. The cultivation of palm oil, routinely used for its moisturising and texturising properties, has also contributed to significant deforestation. Almost all of the beauty brands assessed by Good on You use palm oil in their products, but fewer than half certify the source of the ingredient. Only 17 percent only use palm oil from certified sources. Even then, Good on You acknowledges that the certifications for sustainable palm oil also face criticism. Meanwhile mica, widely used in cosmetics to provide shimmer and sparkle, has been plagued by links to child labour. Nearly 80 percent of the beauty companies assessed by Good on You don’t disclose anything about their mica sourcing. And even when it comes to animal testing — arguably one of the most well-known ethical issues for beauty brands — nearly 80 percent of the brands analysed had no certification to show they’re not testing on animals.

Good on You says its website and app attract millions of users a day, who use its five-point rating scale to find brands that align with their values. It also works with retailers, including mall-owner Unibail Rodamco Westfield and Yoox Net-a-Porter, to help them promote more sustainable brands.

Its expansion into beauty rankings comes as retailers look to bolster the credibility of their sustainability claims amid a wide-ranging greenwashing crackdown. Regulators say they are looking for more transparency and precision in how brands are substantiating sustainability marketing.

Earlier this year, Sephora launched revamped sustainability labels two years in the making. The new “Planet Aware” labelling scheme is designed to highlight brands whose products are free from certain ingredients or that meet specific environmental criteria. To qualify companies will need to meet a minimum of 32 criteria across ingredient sourcing and formulation, packaging, corporate climate commitments and consumer transparency.

Good on You accelerated its plans to expand into beauty at the request of retail partners, including URW. The initial roster of beauty brands covered by its assessment partly reflect the portfolio in its mall locations.

“It’s something many retailers are grappling with; how to avoid greenwashing,” said Capponi. “That’s the next big focus; we have the information, now it’s about putting it in the hands of businesses to engage consumers and catalyse industry change.”

Sign up to The Business of Beauty newsletter, your must-read source for the day’s most important beauty and wellness news and analysis.

When Rhode opened a pop-up in New York in June, there were about one thousand people lined up before the doors even opened, every one of them hoping to buy the brand’s new blush or secure a glimpse of founder Hailey Bieber.

The pyjama-maker Petite Plume is taking a more low-key approach when it comes to its next big activation. For the holiday season, the brand will be launching its new line of homeware at Maman, a New York bakery with outposts across the US Northeast. Petite Plume will be sold on shelves in select locations, while baristas and other staff will don the brand’s aprons.

As a small, self-funded brand — and one without a celebrity like Bieber involved, though founder Emily Hikade’s background as a CIA officer is just as intriguing — Petite Plume’s real-life marketing strategy is to insert itself into buzzy locales rather than try to build one of its own from scratch. The brand has also partnered with the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and developed a collaboration with Veronica Beard that was stocked in 30 of that brand’s stores.

“The whole idea is meeting the customer where she is but finding a relevant way to do it,” said Fanny Quehe, Petite Plume’s chief marketing officer. “These partnerships help us capitalise on brick-and-mortar experiences without the massive investments that go into them,” she added.

Increasingly, it’s Rhode’s approach that’s the exception that proves the rule. Before the pandemic, temporary stores were a popular marketing strategy for online, direct-to-consumer brands; many had plenty of funding to throw into building elaborate setups that would only exist for a few months, and there were plenty of vacant storefronts in top-tier shopping neighbourhoods.

The glory days of pop-ups are long gone, however. Retail vacancies are at a decade-low in the US, and landlords are less willing to accept short-term leases. The expense is another hurdle: in the part of SoHo where Rhode had its pop-up, asking rents rose 27 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2024, according to CBRE. A few blocks over, another shopping corridor saw rents soar 60 percent in the same period. That doesn’t consider the cost of actually building out a temporary store, or staffing it.

Still, there’s a reason so many brands rushed to open pop-ups in previous years: creating a physical space that reflects a label’s vision is a compelling form of marketing, particularly when compared to social media ads and sponsored influencer posts. When done well, a pop-up could even get customers to do a brand’s marketing for it, in the form of in-store selfies and word-of-mouth.

Some brands are finding creative ways to produce that real-life magic on a budget. Petite Plume’s strategy of popping up in unexpected locations is one approach. Trunk shows and launch parties give people the opportunity to meet a brand’s founder over free champagne while they shop. Major events provide another opportunity: spa tools line HigherDose sets up wellness lounges featuring its infrared recovery mats and sauna blankets at Coachella and Art Basel. Draper James, the clothing line founded by actress Reese Witherspoon, will set up shop inside Hilton’s Graduate Hotels in college towns during big football weekends.

“The stickiness with a customer is much greater when you’ve had a personal interaction,” said Meg Bedford, chief executive of Loops Beauty, which hosts events with sororities and other clubs on college campuses. “It goes further than if it was just them buying our product at Target.”

Beyond Stores

Having a variety of different physical channels is important for brand-building, even when a company has stores of its own (as Draper James does), according to Murali Gokki, co-leader of the retail performance improvement practice at consulting firm Berkeley Research Group.

“Our data shows that customers right now have a plethora of choices and what they’re looking for is an excitement in how they purchase,” said Gokki.

Instead of opening a flagship, the skincare brand Orveda recently opened a spa in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighbourhood, to create a more “high-touch” experience for customers than regular stores, according to Coty, Orveda’s parent company.

At Orveda’s spa, customers learn about the brand’s premium products while using them during their facials. That’s the difference between a customer making a transaction and a customer becoming a proponent of a brand.

“A lot of what we saw post-Covid is that people are craving interactions,” said Andrea DiNunzio, general manager of luxury skincare, US, at Coty. “When you think about skincare, it’s a very intimate thing that requires a more intimate conversation that you have with a customer.”

Free Real Estate

For a profitable and self-funded brand like Petite Plume, opening a store is only justifiable when the financial risk can be mitigated, said Quehe. It often takes months, if not years, for permanent storefronts to break even, and even pop-ups are rarely profitable.

Partnering with another brand with an existing footprint or other consumer-facing businesses eliminates virtually all the costs associated with retail, save for product and marketing. And these costs can be split between the two parties.

“If you find a partner, it’s mutually beneficial. You just divide and conquer the expenses and there’s no fee to set up shop,” said Piper Parsley, vice president of brand marketing and e-commerce at Draper James. “Having two established brands come together allows you to cross promote on each other’s channels and … double your exposure.”

It’s even more effective when a brand hones in on a location where existing customers already shop. Loops chooses the colleges it works with based on whether there is a Target or CVS store near campus — retailers that stock its products.

“We first and foremost try to look at areas where we either know we have engagement from because people are shopping at the retailers around them,” said Bedford. From there, the brand finds content creators and micro-influencers in those communities to promote its products, combined with events such as spa nights at sororities with free Loops samples.

Breaking Through the Noise

Physical touchpoints that aren’t pegged to stores can also be a great way to form a closer, more lasting connection with customers or potential tastemakers.

Philosophy, another skincare brand under the Coty umbrella, transformed an old conference room in its headquarters in the Empire State Building in April into a clinic where influencers, key customers and beauty press are invited to meet with the brand’s scientific advisors and try out new products. The company also films its livestream shopping videos there. The primary goal is generating brand awareness, said DiNunzio.

Just like how many luxury brands woo their top-spending customers, HigherDose invites its most loyal shoppers and brand ambassadors to free wellness events. Whereas its wellness lounges at major events such serve as a top-of-funnel marketing channel to acquire new customers, the activations and experiences offered to top clients are a means of generating loyalty.

A 360-Retail Approach

In-store pop-ups, trunk shows and other events are not just an effective means of creating brand affinity but also serve as a proof of concept for future stores or major wholesale partnerships.

For instance, Draper James hosted a pop-up inside Sewing Down South, a pillow store in Charleston, S.C., which exceeded its sales expectations. The company had been considering opening its own store there, and the pop-up solidified its plan to start scouting locations.

Before it was able to land major wholesale accounts, womenswear brand Amir Taghi hosted trunk shows inside the homes of its top clients as a way to build a following. The travelling trunk shows began in Aspen and have gone around the country from Palm Beach to Los Angeles. Building on the success of this format — the label will generate more than $1 million in sales from trunk shows in 2024 — Taghi has signed on Moda Operandi and Elyse Walker as retail partners in recent months.

A full retail distribution strategy is ultimately necessary for sales expansion. One-off pop-ups and partnerships may be easy to facilitate but difficult to replicate at scale, according to BRF’s Gokki.

“When you host more events, it’s more inventory and more complexity, but not necessarily revenue add because you’re only there for a limited amount of time,” he said. “You need a permanent position with retail shelf space to really grow the business.”

Denim company Citizens of Humanity Group, which also owns Agolde, has one store of its own, in Aspen, Colorado. It approaches events and physical activations as part of its overall retail strategy. “We think of it as a triangle or a stool,” said chief executive Amy Williams. “One leg is the special events or partnerships that can’t be orchestrated in a store. And then we think about our retail partners such as Net-a-Porter.”

“The last piece of the puzzle is stores, which we hope to open a handful globally,” Williams added.

In its latest executive shuffle, Estée Lauder Companies has announced key leadership changes to its West Coast-based brands. Somer Tejwani will be promoted to SVP and global general manager of Too Faced, while Michelle Shigemasa has been appointed SVP and global general manager of Smashbox Cosmetics and Glamglow.

The two executives will serve as the successors to ELC’s global president of California brands Tara Simon. The news comes one week after the announcement that Simon would become the company’s North America president, succeeding North America group president Mark Loomis, who will retire at the end of fiscal year 2025. Tejwani, Shigemasa, and Simon will take their posts on Jan 1, 2025, followed by Loomis and ELC CEO Fabrizio Freda’s retirement at the end of fiscal year 2025.

Tejwani and Shigemasa will help Too Faced, Smashbox, and Glamglow “by elevating their brand equity, inspiring creativity, and enhancing consumer engagement through immersive brand experiences and product education,” said ELC executive group president Stéphane de La Faverie. Both hope to drive growth through innovative product launches and strengthening their respective brands’ equity in an increasingly competitive prestige beauty market.

Tejwani joined Too Faced’s marketing team in 2012, and the brand was acquired by ELC four years later. Shigemasa has recently held CEO roles at Ariana Grande’s R.E.M. Beauty, Shani Darden Skin Care, and Unilever Prestige. She re-joins ELC after serving 13 years at Smashbox in leadership roles through 2017.

Learn more:

Estée Lauder Companies Announces Leadership Changes

The beauty conglomerate names two replacements for its North America group president, who will retire in 2025.