Puig: Lucky Streak or Secret Sauce?
Good fortune or genius, they are winning for now.
The fine fragrance space has been growing consistently over the past 5 years, but it has not been a smooth ride for everyone.
Based on sell-out data (2020-2024) across key markets (US, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, China and France), below is the leaderboard:
NB: Every percentage in the following are the CAGR on the available periods starting 2020 unless specified otherwise.
🥇 Puig: +26.0%
🥈 Interparfums: +19.5%
🥉 L’Oréal: +17.5%
→ Global CAGR: +17.4%
LVMH: +12.7%
Coty: +11.7%
Hermès: +9.4%
Estée Lauder: +9.1%
Shiseido: +8.7%
Chanel: +5.9%
As always, sell-out data should be taken with a grain of salt, considering that niche is proverbially misrepresented, as are brands who rely on their own retail or direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels. Their performance is often only partially captured, which may skew some numbers downward. This is especially true for Estée Lauder (Jo Malone), Chanel and LVMH (Dior, Guerlain and Louis Vuitton).
Regardless, what we are witnessing is spectacular growth for Puig.
If you think the math is completely off or sell out data is nonsense, Puig’s own financials, indicate a jump in revenue from €1.5Bn (2020) to €4.8Bn (2024) which boils down to a +32.9% CAGR.
That being said, what can we learn from them?
Success doesn’t always translate, but patterns often do.
Let’s take a closer look.
Luck or strategy?
Is Puig’s success a stroke of luck or is it the result of a systematic product development strategy?
Puig’s portfolio relies on its three most valuable brands:
Carolina Herrera: +33.7%
Jean Paul Gaultier: +33.2%
Rabanne: +18.3%
Performance seems pretty consistent across the board.
Looking at the different franchises, the story is no different:
Carolina Herrera
Bad Boy: +39.2%
Good Girl: +26.9%
Jean Paul Gaultier
Divine: +163% (YoY 2023-2024)
Scandal pour Homme: +31.8% (2021-2024)
Le Beau: +28.0%
Le Mâle: +19.4%
La Belle: +9.7%
Scandal pour Femme: -0.8%
Classique: -7.8%
Rabanne (*)
Fame: +12.8% (2022-2024)
Phantom: +11.9% (2021-2024)
1 Million – incl. “Million Gold for Him”: +6.6%
Invictus: +4.6%
Lady Million – incl. “Million Gold for Her“: -4.6%
Olympéa: -7.5%
(*) The average CAGR of Rabanne (18.3%) is larger than any of the franchises because of the introduction of Fame and Phantom over that time period.
Ok, one can argue that the growth of Puig’s portfolio is driven by new franchise launches (Phantom, Fame, Scandal pour Homme, Divine).
However, even older franchises such as Good Girl, Bad Boy and Le Mâle are faring spectacular and account for most of Puig’s growth these past years.
So let’s focus on those 3 franchises to understand if anything stands out and why they are going through the roof while most of their competitors old franchises reach maturity before progressively falling out of fashion.
👠 Good Girl
Below is how Good Girl’s sell-out has evolved over the years.
NB. This is a new feature that will soon be available on Omniscent!
Originally launched in 2016, Good Girl is the largest female franchise globally.
As we can see from the chart above, the contribution of the pillar itself has remained relatively modest and stable over the years.
What’s truly surprising is that the various flankers – Very Good Girl, Suprême, and more recently Blush and Blush Elixir – have not cannibalized the original. On the contrary, they have begun to chart their own trajectories.
Traditionally, the logic behind flankerization is simple: release a new version annually to refresh attention, support the pillar, and keep the franchise front of mind. The pillar remains the star. Flankers are just supporting actors.
What we see instead is a “franchise splintering” strategy.
Good Girl Blush wasn’t just a marketing pretext to boost the original. It was treated as a true pillar-scale launch, with matching investment and long-term intent – followed just a year later by a flanker of its own: Blush Elixir.
In other words, the flanker got its own flanker.
And the result? This new sub-franchise is now outpacing the original Good Girl in scale.
Moving on to Bad Boy.
⚡Bad Boy
Looks familiar?
The trajectory here tells a subtly different story.
The original Bad Boy peaked in 2021 and has since been losing momentum – its share increasingly cannibalized by newer flankers.
Yet once again, we see a now-familiar pattern: the emergence of a sub-franchise.
Bad Boy Cobalt Electrique quickly overtook the original, becoming the franchise’s top performer. Just like in the Good Girl universe, it was soon followed by a flanker of its own: Cobalt Elixir.
By 2024, the combined sales of Cobalt and Cobalt Elixir didn’t just outpace the original, they completely dwarfed it.
⚓ Le Mâle
At this point, no one should be surprised – we’re seeing the same pattern play out with Le Mâle.
Launched in 2023, Le Mâle Elixir has rapidly eclipsed the original and now dominates the franchise. And it should come as no shock that a new flanker, Le Mâle Elixir Absolu, followed earlier this year.
In a way, Le Beau and La Belle can also be seen as early examples of franchise splintering, diverging from the Le Mâle and Classique lines, respectively. Both launched in 2019, they have since evolved into standalone franchises with distinct personalities and their own sequences of flankers.
You could even make the case for Divine as part of this pattern: a conceptual cousin to Classique, now developing its own space within the portfolio.
Takeaway time
Did they invent something here?
Yes and no.
There has actually been multiples occurrences of franchise splintering in the past:
The Hypnotic Poison (1998) and Poison Girl (2016) lines are directly derived from the OG Poison perfume (1985)
YSL’s Black Opium (2014) and Mon Paris (2017) revived the respectively cult Opium and Paris franchises with full lines of their own
The Only One (2018) capitalized on the heritage of D&G’s The One
The Most Wanted (2021) is derived from the Wanted franchise (Created by Clarins, before being taken over by L’Oréal)
Alien Goddess (2021) and its own flankers Goddess Intense and Supra Florale (also from the Clarins portfolio)
More recently, Gentleman Society (2023) and its offsprings Extrême and Eau de Parfum Ambrée. The modern Gentleman (2017) already being the descendant of 1974’s Gentleman…
What’s new here is that while most of the examples above aim at reviving aging or declining lines, Puig is taking a risk to proactively splinter off its star product lines.
What does this reveal about our times?
A parallel ought to be made with other industries, in particular with the movies industry.
According to data, while the number of US wide releases (+1,000 theaters) remained constant (~150 per year), the share of franchise movies – that is sequels, prequels, remakes – has doubled in the past 20 years to reach 42% franchise movies a year vs. 58% non-franchise movies.
In sales terms, the numbers are mind-boggling:
In 1997, non-franchise movie sales were twice as large as franchise movies
In 2024, franchise movies sales were… 6 times larger than non-franchise (yes, you read it right)
The reasons are straightforward and diverse:
With growing marketing and production costs, capitalizing on proven successful brands reduces risk, secures long term profitability with later installments and enables merchandising and other revenue streams (park themes, TV shows, etc.)
The globalized movies industry now relies on a larger diversity of markets (which now includes China) and popular franchises (Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) seem to transcend language and cultural barriers to please the monocultural global citizen
As global anxieties rise, audiences are drawn to the comforting nostalgia of familiar stories and beloved characters
This should sound awfully familiar to us in fine fragrance.
Should it be replicated by other groups?
We need to consider some context here.
A little over a year ago in April 2024, Puig filed for what became the largest IPO of the year on the European market, raising a reported €3Bn.
The top priority of a soon-to-be public company is to impress investors with bold moves and eye watering revenue.
Judging by the growth outlined above, it seems to be working – for now. In their 2024 financial statements, they reported an €3.5Bn revenue for their fragrance & fashion division, up from €3.1Bn in 2023. Their stock has been sliding since IPO (from €25.5 to €16.6 at the time of writing), but that is largely due to macro conditions. No beauty or luxury company has been left unscathed (except Hermès, perhaps).
However, milking franchises to unprecedented levels may very well carry long term brand risks. The threat of dupes looms over brands – driven by a mix of eroding consumer purchasing power, social media-fueled awareness, and a growing sense that fragrances are becoming commoditized.
Blurring the lines within a brand’s ecosystem may be a double edged sword.
Time will tell.
Great breakdown! The complexity for a brand like Carolina Herrera will be to manage a wide portfolio with the launch of La Bomba, a totally new pillar. Will be interesting to see if their launches manage to continue to be incremental and avoid cannibalization.