L’OCCITANE

A long and proud history of caring for the environment and empowering women sets this beauty company apart.

From the start, the founder of L’OCCITANE, Olivier Baussan, was moved by a desire to protect the nature that taught him so much: the secrets of plants, their exceptional properties, and the incredible powers of their active ingredients. Making a commitment to protect this nature and the people around it was an obvious, natural choice.

As the brand has grown, Baussan’s values have remained at its heart. He wanted to develop a brand that made sense, that respected nature and people. The brand has always taken up initiatives to help others and the environment. It invites customers to bring back their empty bottles so they can be recycled. And it put Braille on its products. L’OCCITANE prioritises these areas of commitments here in Australia.

At L’OCCITANE, they have partnered since the 1980s with the women of Burkina Faso, whose skill in making shea butter has been passed down from one generation to the next. In 2018, L’OCCITANE launched the RESIST programme (Resilience, Ecology, Strengthening, Independence, Structuration, Training), to support the shea butter supply chain in Burkina Faso. Through this programme, L’OCCITANE helps to secure women’s economic emancipation by diversifying their activities. Not only does it help the women’s unions to find new

Below, from left: Herbae L’Eau Star Set ($149); Delicious Almond Collection ($110). customers for their shea butter, it also encourages them to develop new activities, such as producing bissap (also known as roselle) – a drink made from the hibiscus flower. A cooperative is being set up that will enable two women’s unions to produce, harvest and sell hibiscus calyces.

The Mediterranean Basin is one of the richest ecosystems in the world. L’OCCITANE has set a target that by 2025, it will have contributed to protecting 1,000 species and varieties of plants. L’OCCITANE is dedicated to developing sustainable supply chains and helps to maintain them, to ensure their viable future, as well as the biodiversity that surrounds them.

One example is its use of key ingredient, immortelle, a plant that grows naturally in the wild. When immortelle is picked in the scrubland in a sustainable manner, it indirectly helps to prevent fires. However, when large volumes are harvested, a sustainable supply of immortelle cannot be ensured. That’s why, in 2004, L’OCCITANE launched the very first large-scale organic immortelle plantation programme. Until then, this flower had never been successfully domesticated. Of the some 500 recorded species of Helichrysum, the ‘italicum’ immortelle endemic to Corsica has an unsurpassed quality: its essential oil has a high concentration of valuable molecules that give it anti-ageing properties.

In Australia, L’OCCITANE launched the Ecosystem Restoration Fund in January to support ecosystems severely affected by natural disasters, such as the devastating fires in the Amazon and Australia, and to protect biodiversity for future generations.

L’OCCITANE’S female producers, who embody the brand’s mission, care for nature as much as they do for their children. In Burkina Faso, Salimata transmits her love for the shea tree to her daughter Mariétou: the process of making shea butter is a secret passed from mother to daughter. Thanks to this love, L’OCCITANE offers exceptional products that guarantee a fair trade relationship to the women with whom it partners. “Mother’s Day is an important day in Burkina Faso. My mum is really important to me. She brought me into this world and taught me a lot,” says Mariétou.

L’OCCITANE is committed to achieving a circular economy. When L’OCCITANE was created back in 1976, it was ahead of its time, launching a bottle return system for its glass bottled products, where they could be brought back to store. In 2009, it launched its first 100% recycled bottle, and it plans to transition to 100% sustainable PET plastic of all product bottles by 2025. It has a partnership with TerraCycle, a company specialising in recycling hard-to-recycle waste, in all Australian boutiques.