Social Justice
L’Occitane’s philanthropic approach to business is helping fight blindness in West Africa, where it is also supporting women in work and leadership.
With beauty brand L’Occitane in West Africa
Next time you pass a L’Occitane store pause for a moment to think not only about the luxurious natural ingredients contained within the products for sale, but also who grew and harvested those ingredients and where they came from. Do this and you will most certainly cross the threshold because L’Occitane is a global company that truly cares about people and the planet, and is doing its bit to look out for both.
Caring is key to the French skincare and fragrance brand and one of the driving reasons behind its global success. When you start from a place of caring about the product you are creating, the environment from which you are taking something from and the people involved, while staying true to that commitment, as L’Occitane has done since 1976, the positive impact that ripples outwards is heartening.
L’Occitane founder Olivier Baussan began the company with the dream of changing the world from within Provence with beauty products based on essential oils. Forty years on Baussan’s dream is that L’Occitane will continue to develop whilst preserving traditional methods. In Provence L’Occitane works with more than 70 local producers-harvesters-distillers. It can trace the origin of its key active ingredients and uses more than 300 plant-based ingredients in its formulations from lavender to shea butter.
Baussan went to Burkina Faso, West Africa in the 1980s to initiate a sustainable partnership with the women producers of shea butter. What resulted was a sustainable production chain that now employs more than 10,000 women. It’s a fair trade model but Baussan prefers to call it “co-development”. And he’s passionate about supporting projects that contribute to the development of the country which is currently ranked 181 out of 187 on the United Nations Developing Programme Human Development Index.
Every year, L’Occitane supports more than 50 projects with an annual budget of $1.5 million. With its programme Union for Vision, the Foundation is fighting avoidable blindness worldwide, supporting projects to bring access to quality eye care. In 2015 it celebrated 2 million beneficiaries and its goal is to reach 10 million beneficiaries by 2020.
It is also committed to supporting women’s leadership worldwide. In Burkina Faso more than 13,000 women have had access to its literacy programme, training and microcredit to support entrepreneurial projects. Internationally, it also supports the UN Women Fund for Gender Equality to promote women’s economic and political empowerment. Every year Solidarity products are sold in store and 100 per cent of the profits* finance NGO projects in these two fields of action.
“By supporting local communities and regions that are important to us, we hope to create a social and environmental dynamic over the long term,” Baussan says.