From family workshop to international group: a regenerative journey
An interview with Davide Bollati, Chairman of cosmetics company Davines Group.
By Enrico Foglia and Alessandra Ciccotosto
1. From family roots to a global business
Let us begin with the story of Davines Group and its evolution from a small family-run laboratory into an international group generating more than €300 million in revenue. What were the key milestones and, above all, which choices played the greatest role in shaping the company’s identity as we know it today?
The Davines story began before Davines itself existed. It began with my grandparents, who were farmers, with their land and with the direct connection to nature that I experienced from childhood. It continued with my parents, skilled craftspeople and tireless workers, who had established a small contract cosmetics laboratory. They were largely self-taught, but they had an extraordinary work ethic. They never needed to explain what commitment meant: they demonstrated it every day through their example.
I joined the company after training as a pharmacist and completing a master’s degree in cosmetic chemistry in the United States. My decision to study pharmacy was almost accidental. It followed the advice of Professor Maggesi, a leading cosmetic chemist and a family friend. When I asked what I could do to help my parents, he simply replied, ‘Study pharmacy.’ I remain grateful for that advice to this day.
When I returned from the United States in 1992, I was 26. The business had revenue of around €1 million and employed about ten people. My first major decision was to recognise that generational succession could not simply mean taking over from my parents. I needed to find a new direction.
In effect, I created a start-up within the family business. My parents continued to focus on contract manufacturing, while I began building a business around our own brands, first Davines and then Comfort Zone, with an international outlook from the outset. I decided that English would be the company’s working language. That may seem unremarkable today, but at the time it was a radical change. I even remember the arrival of the fax machine as a significant innovation: while living in the United States, I had asked my parents to buy one so that I could communicate with the company.
That marked the beginning of our international growth. In the early years, we were fascinated by formulation of innovation and new ingredients. Our focus was firmly on products and the latest industry research. Then, in 2000, I visited Expo Hannover. Sustainability was the central theme, and the Dutch pavilion resembled an early vertical forest. Each floor featured crops and experiments exploring the relationship between architecture, production, and nature. That was when I realized there was something bigger than cosmetic innovation alone.
The visit planted a seed. Over the following years, our identity would emerge from the convergence of three paths: the connection to nature inherited from my family, a deep reflection on business ethics, and the determination to turn sustainability into a practical way of doing business.
We also made another decisive choice: to remain autonomous and independent. In recent years, we have entered the ranks of the world’s top 100 beauty companies, yet we remain a family-owned business whose growth has not been driven by acquisitions, private equity or a stock-market listing. This gives us freedom of thought, consistency and the ability to invest for the long term.
Over the past 34 years, the figures cited in the interview indicate that Davines Group has grown at an average annual rate of close to 15%, roughly three times the growth of the cosmetics market. Yet the most important achievement is not growth alone. It is our ability to grow while remaining recognisable, transforming a small family business into an international group without losing the roots from which everything began.
2. The choice that changed the paradigm
Looking back at the history of Davines Group, which decision did more than any other to change the way you understood the relationship between business, people, communities and the environment? And when did you realise that it was not simply a values-led choice, but also a strategic and commercial one?
Major change does not always begin with a strategic plan. Sometimes it begins with a wound.
Around 2005, when Davines had grown to approximately 100 people and €30 million in revenue, we experienced a deeply painful case of serious misconduct and breach of trust within the company. It had a profound impact on my family. I remember my mother being unable to sleep at night. It was not merely a financial loss. It was the breakdown of a relationship built on trust.
The incident forced us to pause and confront questions that we had perhaps left in the background until then: why do we get up in the morning? What is the purpose of the company? Which values do we truly want to defend? And how can we ensure that those values do not remain words written on a wall?
To help us navigate the crisis, we invited the philosopher Alberto Peretti, a researcher and counsellor influenced by the Olivetti tradition. With him, we began a long process of guided reflection that would accompany the company for 15 years. He did not hand us a ready-made list of values. Instead, he helped us bring to the surface what was already present in our history, our people and the way we worked.
That process gave rise to the Davines Ethical Charter. It remains one of the company’s founding documents and forms part of our onboarding programme. What matters most is that it emerged from a difficult moment. The initial spark was negative, but it found fertile ground: our family roots, our relationship with nature, the sustainability perspective discovered in Hannover, and our desire to build a more conscious business.
The next step came when I met Eric Ezechieli and Paolo Di Cesare of Nativa at a TEDx event in Bologna. They described B Corps as companies that do not aspire to be the best in the world, but the best for the world. My reaction was immediate: these people spoke our language. They were giving a name and a methodology to something we had begun to build intuitively.
Joining the B Corp movement opened up a network of relationships, tools and opportunities. It helped us make our purpose intentional and translate our values into verifiable processes. We evolved from a business focused primarily on shareholders into an increasingly stakeholder-led organisation.
We therefore developed a Stakeholder Wheel identifying the communities to which the company is accountable: employees, customers, suppliers, salons, local areas, communities and the environment. The aim is not to maximise profit for the benefit of a single party, but to optimise it, using what a pharmacist might call a precision balance to find the right equilibrium between everyone’s interests.
When did I realise that this choice could also be strategic? There was no single moment. We saw it gradually in our results, in the quality of the organisation, in our ability to attract people, in the strength of our relationships and in the growth of the business. Ethics and sustainability were not parallel activities. They were becoming the company’s infrastructure.
The decision that changed the paradigm, therefore, was not simply achieving certification in 2016. It was choosing to question the purpose of the business and to adopt interdependence as a management principle. From that moment on, we could no longer see the company as an island. We began to understand it as part of an ecosystem.
3. From “Sustainable Beauty” to “For a Good Life”
What does the principle of kalokagathia, the harmony of beauty and virtue, mean in practical terms for Davines? And how does it shape your everyday decisions across business, innovation, products and company management?
When we changed the Davines brand tagline from ‘Sustainable Beauty’ to ‘For a Good Life’, we did not abandon sustainability. In a sense, we followed the logic of The Leopard: we changed in order to remain true to ourselves.
‘Sustainable Beauty’ remains our foundation. ‘For a Good Life’ broadens the horizon. Beauty on its own can become superficial. Virtue, if it remains abstract, may fail to change reality. Kalokagathia brings the two together: what is beautiful should also be good, and what is good should generate beauty, harmony and shared wellbeing.
For us, a ‘Good Life’ does not simply mean a pleasant life. The English word happiness can describe a fleeting feeling: your team winning, a good ice cream, a rewarding experience. We are more interested in eudaimonia, happiness understood as human flourishing.
I use the image of a tree. There are the roots, the trunk and then the blossom. Eudaimonia is the outcome of a journey, of a life in which, looking back, you can see that you built something meaningful not only for yourself, but for others as well.
At Davines Group, this principle means treating the value chain as a responsibility extending from the soil to the planet: healthy soil produces healthy ingredients; healthy products contribute to individual wellbeing; and healthy people and communities contribute to a healthier planet. It is a chain of interdependence that begins with a seed and reaches the global system.
‘For a Good Life’ also means balancing sustainability with performance. A sustainable product that does not work is not a good product. Markets are not transformed by asking people to compromise on quality. Innovation must combine sustainability, effectiveness, beauty and desirability. Sustainability cannot become an excuse for lower-performing products.
The same principle guides our environmental decisions. Since 2022, we have supported the collection of more than 3,500 tonnes of plastic waste from the environment, an amount equivalent to the plastic packaging we place on the market each year. This work is carried out through partner organisations operating in countries including Thailand, Brazil and the Philippines, where effective waste collection and sorting systems are not always available.
Sustainability is also embodied in the Davines Group Village in Parma, which opened in 2018 after a design and development process lasting around ten years. The Village is not simply an attractive headquarters. It is the physical expression of our identity, bringing together work, nature, research, production and wellbeing. Davines can be difficult to explain through a presentation alone, but when people arrive at the Village, they immediately understand what we are trying to be.
Finally, ‘For a Good Life’ means freedom and consistency. We chose to remain independent because it is difficult to pursue a long-term purpose without freedom. We do not simply want to build a successful company. We want to build a business in which products, people, investment, place and governance all move in the same direction.
4. The courage to be different
Was there a decision that made you think, ‘We are doing the right thing, but perhaps the market is not ready for it yet’? Looking back now, what did that choice teach you?
In fact, we have experienced that feeling many times. We have often done things that nobody asked us to do and that, viewed through a strictly financial lens, might have appeared unnecessarily expensive.
Being a B Corp, for example, requires an enormous commitment. Today, we have a substantial sustainability team dedicated to maintaining our certification. We have carried out materiality assessments, developed complex strategies, subjected our activities to controls and audits, and invested millions of euros in initiatives that, in some cases, very few other companies undertake. Nobody required us to do so.
The same applies to our decision to encourage suppliers to move towards the B Corp model. We can now count 74 B Corp suppliers. We did not provide financial incentives. We created an environment in which becoming a more responsible business was recognised, encouraged and valued.
Other examples include our decision to continue manufacturing in Italy, build deep relationships with farmers, invest in the local area, and not sell the company despite offers that would have been extremely significant financially. These are decisions that an investment fund might struggle to understand, because some benefits emerge only over the long term.
But being ahead of the market does not mean believing that values can take the place of business. You must be able to make the right choice desirable, effective and competitive. Sustainability and performance have to advance together. Without performance, a product creates no impact because people will not adopt it. Without sustainability, it may sell in the short term, but it will not build the future.
We have also learned that not every decision needs to generate an immediately measurable return. Sometimes the first benefit is reputation. At other times, it is supplier trust, the ability to attract people, customers’ sense of belonging, or the strength of an international community.
When we bring together thousands of professionals and salons from around the world, we do not see only a commercial network. We see people who share values and recognise themselves as part of a community. That cohesion does not appear immediately in a profit and loss account, but it becomes a tangible advantage in difficult times.
What I have learned is that you need the courage to be different, combined with the humility to test continually whether your intuitions work. Purpose cannot justify a mediocre product. Equally, strong financial performance cannot justify a loss of integrity.
A business has to hold both together. It is precisely within this tension that innovation emerges.
5. The common good and profitability
In your experience leading Davines Group, have you found evidence that creating positive outcomes for communities and the environment can also translate, over the medium to long term, into competitive advantage and greater profitability for the business?
Yes, but understanding this requires us to move beyond the idea that the common good is a form of philanthropy external to the business.
A company does not exist separately from its people, suppliers and local area. The quality of the place in which it operates shapes its ability to attract talent, build relationships, innovate and grow. There is a clear relationship between the attractiveness of a place and the competitiveness of the businesses based there.
This understanding led us to help create ‘Parma, io ci sto!’, an association bringing together around 150 local businesses, including Davines Group, Chiesi, Barilla and Dallara. Together, we identified several strategic priorities for local development: food and agriculture, research, innovation, education and skills, tourism, culture and leisure.
What makes the model distinctive is that each company does not necessarily act within its own sector. A pharmaceutical company might support a food innovation project, or a food business might contribute to a healthcare initiative. On the surface, this may appear contradictory. In reality, it shows that the interests of the local area come before those of any single organisation.
We applied the same principle to KILOMETRO Verde Parma, a project involving more than 100 companies that has reached the milestone of 100,000 trees planted. We are also working to regenerate Parma’s historic centre through a new food market, cultural activities and a regenerative hospitality project developed with Chiesi.
The common good also creates value throughout the supply chain. We treat suppliers, including the smallest, as partners. The sincerity of a company’s values is revealed by how it behaves towards those with less bargaining power.
This approach has very practical consequences. During crises, as we saw in the pandemic, relationships built over time become operational and financial capital. A supplier with whom you have established a fair and loyal relationship will be more willing to work with you to find a solution. Trust accumulated over the years becomes resilience.
The same is true of the Davines commercial community. We bring together thousands of salons and professionals worldwide. The relationship is based not only on products, but on a shared identity. This community strengthens differentiation, loyalty and business resilience.
The financial results appear to support this approach. Over the past 34 years, Davines has recorded an indicative average annual growth rate close to 15%, compared with an estimated 4–5% for the cosmetics market. In the United States, the company’s largest market, revenue cited for the year of the interview was approximately €120 million, with an even greater proportional contribution to profit.
I am not suggesting that every environmental or social investment automatically produces a financial return. That would be an oversimplification. I do believe, however, that a consistent business capable of building trust, community and strong supply-chain relationships develops advantages that are difficult to replicate.
Profitability is not at odds with the common good. The real question is what kind of profit a company chooses to pursue. We do not seek to maximise it in the very short term, but to optimise it in relation to our stakeholders and the company’s long-term prosperity.
Profit remains essential, because lasting impact is impossible without financial balance. But profit is a means of keeping the business free, resilient and able to invest. It is not the only purpose.
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