“Our innovations help us create unique signatures”, Samantha Mane

Premium Beauty News – Mane is the world’s fifth largest company in its industry, and the only international player to still be family-owned and independent. Is that an advantage, nowadays?

Samantha Mane – Since it was founded in 1871, our family company has remained strongly attached to its independence. To our clients, it guarantees performance, dynamism, and resilience. But most importantly, it helps us remain true to our long-term vision. And that is a real advantage in such a changing, fast-moving environment! We remain focused on our objectives, even when the market takes a downturn.

Premium Beauty News – What are the key drivers behind your success?

Samantha Mane - Our main driver is our ability to keep innovating. In 2024, 7.7% of our revenues were reinvested in R&D. We aim to offer our clients innovative molecules or extracts that meet their current challenges. Our investments are focused on green chemistry and biotechnologies, which we have mastered for quite a while. We keep developing our expertise, in line with our clients’ expectations: our products’ performance is non-negotiable for them. And this requires enhancing our teams’ talents, which is an essential condition for growth.

Another key factor is our ability to foresee market trends due to our presence in 40 countries all around the world. We are a global group that has always grown focusing on markets, consumers and their habits. Our businesses must definitely understand trends and adapt as fast as possible.

Lastly, we are boosting our digital transformation to get increasingly more agile.

Premium Beauty News – What are your main investment priorities?

Samantha Mane – A significant part of our investments answers a major strategic question: how to create a signature through our creations? Perfume formulas are not protected, which is why Mane offers differentiating ingredients. Naturalness is part of our DNA. We invest in environmentally friendly sourcing and extraction processes that make it possible to reinvent iconic ingredients. We add new molecules to creators’ palette based on the principles of green chemistry or using biotechnologies. Then we try and have these captive molecules patented. We keep diversifying, because we want to produce natural ingredients that stand out.

Another priority for us is to invest in digital tools. These help improve the efficiency of our processes through assistance to creation, enhanced creativity with data processing, improved market understanding, and sensorial analysis.

Premium Beauty News – Regarding this, what is the role of your platform Wellmotion?

Samantha Mane - Our proprietary platform Wellmotion is a creation tool that guides the creative process from the start, based on the emotions we want to trigger in consumers. We have invested in a research project with CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) and the SkillCell startup to objectify and measure the emotions they feel.

This actually involves analysing the biomarkers found in saliva. Taking such samples is less invasive than using brain imaging devices, and it helps measure an individual’s responses to a fragrance.

Premium Beauty News – Your search for exclusive signatures led you to update the traditional technique of enfleurage, with the collection E-Pure Jungle Essence. How did the market respond?

Samantha Mane - This strategy answered a question we had in-house: how to get back to perfume basics and reinvent an ancient manual technique? As a matter of fact, this process enhances the olfactory profile of iconic flowers, without heating. So, it captures their purest essence. After five years of development, we introduced enfleurage for the first time at the World Perfumery Congress (WPC) in 2018.

Both our clients and master perfumers proved very positive about it. Our E-Pure Jungle Essence collection provides fragrances with a singular profile. Demand is increasing among the niche and premium brands in search of authenticity, quality, and creative storytelling.

Premium Beauty News – What are the main challenges of perfume manufacturers today?

Samantha Mane – The first is sustainability! This issue is key throughout the value chain, from ethical and responsible natural material sourcing to formulation. Also, transparency has become a key challenge for brands.

Then, we deal with increasingly complex regulatory frameworks (IFRA, CSS, the European Cosmetics Directive, REACH...) which are updated as progress is made in Analytical Sciences. We are moving towards less harmonization, with specific standards in certain countries, for example Turkey. Generally speaking, our clients’ specifications are even more restrictive, so we have to adapt. This requires great agility and much foresight. We need to work on tomorrow’s raw materials, those that will replace the ingredients we can no longer use.

This is actually one of the reasons why our teams created Greenmotion in 2011: our ecodesign tool was designed to continuously improve formulations. It applies to both natural and synthetic ingredients, and it assesses formulas and materials according to the 12 principles of green chemistry to guide formulation choices. We opened it to the whole industry and are pretty proud it now serves as a basis to the new IFRA Green Chemistry Compass. We also use it as part of a sustainable co-creation process with our clients. This tool helps create increasingly sustainable formulas.

Lastly, I would like to evoke the rapidly changing consumption habits: expectations, channels and triggering factors in buying decisions, the desire for new sensory and emotional experiences, but above all, the crave for personalization.

Premium Beauty News – What’s your view on tomorrow’s perfumes?

Samantha Mane - To me, tomorrow’s perfumes should be sustainable, meaningful, inspired by nature, and also reflect consumers’ identities.