Inside L’Occitane’s South of France Headquarters
A behind-the-scenes look at the historic French beauty brand L’Occitane. (Photo: Kathryn Romeyn)
Provence and beauty brand L’Occitane are inextricably linked. After all, everything about the made-in-the-South-of-France products just ooze the lavender fields, sun-drenched landscapes, and fresh herbal fragrances that mark the magical destination. Olivier Baussan founded L’Occitane in 1976, when he was just 20 years old, and gave it the name in homage to the former region of Occitania — in the Middle Ages, this was where troubadours, artists, poets, and painters took refuge from the French government. Baussan began making shampoos and bubble baths with essential oils extracted from herbs using an alambic distillation machine and delivering them via a converted hearse. Thirty-nine years later, the brand is stronger and more pervasive than ever with shops in more than 100 countries around the world.
While much of the rich heritage L’Occitane shares through retail spaces and vibrant packaging — we’re all familiar as they’re seemingly everywhere — much more is unveiled, like their humanitarian efforts, on a private tour of the vast headquarters and factory outside Manosque, a 30-minute drive from Aix-en-Provence in southwestern France. Driving into town, it’s obvious the brand has a large presence. While their essential oils now come directly from specialized growers throughout the region, the first thing that greets you upon arrival at the sunny complex is a showpiece garden featuring the wealth of aromatic flora used in their formulas: The obligatory lavender, along with centifolia rose, verbena, rosemary, thyme, sage, peony, and immortelle flower, among others.
Some 2,000 French employees (of their 7,000 total around the world) are scattered throughout the factory, warehouse, and laboratories, plus an institute in Marseilles that conducts tests — never on animals. In the giant 20,000 square meter warehouse, 200 staffers work sending out 6,000 palettes of product per month (equal to a whopping 18 million units) around the world. To say the operations are well oiled would be an understatement. Employees work in one of three eight-hour shifts in the yellow immortelle flower-filled headquarters, so things literally run 24/7.
Of course, the real beginning is at the contracted independent farms where all essential ingredients are grown (many are in France but, for example, eucalyptus comes from India, geranium from Egypt, and citrus from Italy). In the factory, it starts down a yellow and blue hallway with giant harvest images on the walls inside the enormous stock room, which holds row after row of stacked-high shelving stacked with blue, green, and white barrels, boxes, and cubes. Day and night, workers prepare some 800 different raw materials held here — essential and vegetable oils like sunflower, grape seed, almond and olive oils from the South of France, powders, shea butter from Burkina Faso — and packaging for transfer to the workshop. (Fun fact: Not only is all L’Occitane’s packaging made of recycled materials, but it features embossed Braille for sight-impaired customers.) In a small laboratory to the side, they’re conducting microbiological tests before the ingredients are sent off to be mixed.
The laboratory side of L’Occitane where materials are extracted and mixed. (Photo: Kathryn Romeyn)
Downstairs is the weighing workshop, where all materials are divvied up and divided in exacting amounts. In the white zone, the air is 30 times more pure than in the “real world.” There, one employee works solo, weighing by hand each ingredient on three different scales that go from milligrams to tons, sterilizing everything each time. For a little perspective, each product comprises 20 to 25 raw materials — 50 kilos of this, 10 liters of that. Indeed, it’s a slow, tedious process: About six to seven hours to simply weigh out one formula.
The materials themselves have some storied origins. To make one ton of floral water from the centifolia rose (also known as the Provence rose) takes 300 kilograms of flowers. As for the shea butter at the heart of the famous hand creams and body creams, it was curiosity that first led Baussan to discover it in Burkina Faso. After a chance meeting with a journalist en route from Cape Verde they described the old women in the West African nation who kneaded it and, amazingly, had young-looking arms. He went right away to check out the promising ingredient made from nuts that fall from bush trees, brought back a piece of the ultra-hydrating butter to his one-man R&D “team” to study, and began importing from 11 women there in the late ‘80s. Now L’Occitane sources its starring butter from around 15,000 individuals through an NGO and a variety of female cooperatives and foundations that organize microcredit loans so they can start their own business. (The company also teaches the women how to make soap they can sell in local markets.)
The rich materials are mixed to create a powerful effect. (Photo: Kathryn Romeyn)
Waste is kept to a minimum. Almond is a popular ingredient for the label, but not just the essential oil. Nuts are collected and crushed for scrubs as well. And lavender, which is one of the most emblematic plants of L’Occitane, has a special focus at the moment. In past years in the region, small cicadas have transmitted bacteria to the heavenly scented plant, causing them to gray. Now they’re working with a state institution to raise funds for research of ecological treatments that are eco-friendly and clones that are resistant to disease.
The magic really happens once all these powerful and rich ingredients come together. In the super sterile and whitewashed manufacturing workshop, two specialists receive three tons of materials to mix over the course of hours at precise temperatures before the blend is poured in 1,000 liter cubes for packaging. The popular Divine Cream — which features the anti-aging immortelle flower that never dies — takes about 24 hours to mix while hot; shower gels are a cold process combined by stirring.
Stage three is all aesthetics. Dozens of staffers in head-to-toe white, including hairnets and masks, work in lines as machines fill and spit out bottles, tubes, and jars of the finished product. The Shea Butter Hand Cream, packaged in silver foil tubes, receives its labels by hand as it comes down the line. (That particular job, ever tedious, has two-hour rotations.) But as precise as everything is in the high-ceilinged, colorful space, it’s also a surprisingly speedy process: This area processes about seven million units every month. As for the seemingly complicated inclusion of Braille on the packages, it’s because in the early ‘90s Baussan wanted to make sure his products could be used by everybody. Through the Foundation L’Occitane, donations are made for blindness research both internationally and, in the US, with Helen Keller International.
Stage three of the process where packaging of the final product takes place. (Photo: Kathryn Romeyn)
After passing the noisy, hot room full of metallic tanks where city water is purified for the products to a state totally sans trace elements or bacteria, we’re back in the skylight-lit lobby, where brown apothecary-style bottles from Baussan’s original output and his first alambic machine are displayed. Only one formula, the hand cream, has stayed the same since the very beginning, as constant research ensures continual improvements and updates. The overwhelming feeling is that L’Occitane has evolved tremendously over almost 40 years while retaining the original mission: To preserve and pass on.
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