Start as a family business, Davines, the Italian high-end grooming group, has become one of the most important brands in the Italian cosmetics industry. Now, the group’s new challenge is the Asian market.
The Davines Group began as a research laboratory producing high-end hair care products for the world’s leading cosmetics brands. Gianni and Silvana Polatti began their journey to research and produce hair care products in Parma in 1983. Silvana provided the chemical expertise needed to develop high-quality products, while Gianni delivered the uniqueness of the products by establishing strong business relationships.
Over the next decade, the company’s structure improved. In 1993, the group expanded their field of action by launching the eponymous brand Davines, dedicated to the professional haircare market. This was followed in 1996 by the establishment of Comfort Zone, a cosmetics line offering premium products for high-end spas and beauty centres. The company has achieved growth on these two lines.
The products of the Davines Group reflect the effective combination of quality and performance of cosmetic formulations, and in Davide’s vision, products become a means of expressing humanism. Sustainable family values not only become a key factor in defining the right actions within and outside the company, but also translate into the ingredients of the products themselves.
As a result, Davines group is one of the companies committed to changing the ultimate goal of economic growth from profit to social service. In 2018, Davines Village, the new headquarters of the Davines Group in Parma, is a model of sustainable architecture and production.
A commitment to ethics and the environment has always been a guiding principle for the future development of the Davines Group. For each product sold in 2022, the Davines Group will collect or remove an equal amount of plastic from the environment, achieving plastic neutralization and certification by the end of the year, which is the goal of a renewed partnership with the social enterprise Plastic Bank. The Davins Group achieved a turnover of nearly 192 million euros in 2021, an increase of 26% over the previous year.”
As a small to medium-sized company, the Davins Group operates in an industry composed of global giants and grows its business mainly through international expansion. The company started internationalization in 1994, and by the end of 2016, it had carried out business in more than 80 countries and regions. In addition to its headquarters in Parma, davins Group also has offices in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong. Among them, the Hong Kong branch serves the booming Chinese market, and the group has been exploring the development mode and resource allocation in the Chinese market.
Davines’s Chief Executive Officer Anthony Molet in North America said “The professional beauty and hairdressing industry has huge potential and our market share today is just over 1%, so there is still a lot of growth potential in the current distribution channels and the group aims to increase this to 2% to 3% in the next few years.” In the bigger growth markets, China is key.
Chinese consumers are paying more attention to hair care products than ever before, and the trend is particularly evident among the younger generation. From 2015 to 2021, the size of China’s high-end haircare market jumped from 3.9 billion to 17.9 billion yuan ($0.248 billion to $1.136 billion), according to data from Euromonitor information consulting company in 2021. By 2025, it is expected to reach 26.7 billion yuan (about $1.695 billion) and continue to rise.
Davines entered the Chinese market in 2018, launched seven hair care lines and more than 60 products at its overseas Tmall flagship store, with prices ranging from 78 yuan to 698 yuan ($12.29 to $109.98). At the same time, they take the Chinese social media Xiao Hong Shu as the entry point to gain the attention of Chinese consumers in the interaction with users. However, the Davines Group’s ambitions to conquer the Chinese market do not end there.
“The new challenge for the organization is Asia,” Bollati said. “Our business in Western Europe and North America has been growing strongly, and Russia and Japan are also performing well, ranking in the top 10 in terms of sales. Now we are preparing to enter the Chinese market on our own terms (sustainable and cruelty-free), which is why we opened an office in Shanghai not long ago.”
