The “Beauty” division of the Superga Invest group now has 6 industrial sites in France and 500 employees in France, Europe and Asia. The activity is divided into three business units: Subcontracting (filling, packaging, copacking, picking), Full Service, Promotion & Retail. For several years, the company has been investing massively in its production tool to become a privileged industrial partner of beauty and luxury brands. Between 2019 and 2021, 20 million euros were injected into the extension of the perfume division and the modernization and automation of its various sites.

“Our ambition is to operate sites that in all aspects (quality, safety, HSE, etc.) are as efficient as those of the brands, so that they can be fully confident in our ability to address their needs. We want to support all brands, from the smallest to the largest, thanks to a complementary offer and great agility on all of our production sites,” explains Leslie Bréau-Méniger, President of Superga Beauty.

Industrial excellence

The take-over in 2021 of the Cosmeurop site from L’Oréal enabled Superga Beauty to acquire a world-class factory, a historic flagship of French perfumery dedicated to the manufacture of Mugler and Azzaro perfumes. Although the L’Oréal group has undertaken to remain a partner of the site for a minimum period of 3 years, Superga Beauty has immediately initiated its industrial and commercial transformation to adapt it to the needs of full-service customers.

With 129 underground tanks, from 1,000 to 10,000 litres, a storage capacity of 744,000 litres of alcohol, and 11 packaging lines, including 4 automatic lines, Cosmeurop can produce 3 million litres of perfume per year and fill-in 20 to 25 million vials. The manufacturing unit is fully computer-assisted for total precision in the weighing, premixing, colouring and filtration stages. All perfume storage tanks are buried and connected to the conditioning room by almost 9 km of pipes, so that the perfumes never come into contact with the air. The plant offers a level of technicity and production capacities that are hardly seen in perfume subcontracting, and which have already won over big names.

“These unique installations guarantee exceptional reliability and quality. All the perfumes produced on site are directly connected to the packaging lines”, emphasizes Anne-Sophie Motelle, Managing Director of Cosmeurop.

Agility and full service

Sized to respond to large-scale projects, the Cosmeurop site supplements the filling and packaging capacities of the other Superga Beauty units, in particular the BPS Fragrances site, in Northern France, which has a maceration unit and 8 perfume filling lines. Thanks to its various sites, Superga Beauty is able to process small, medium and large series.

For Superga, however, the challenge was to make Cosmeurop gain in flexibility. Thus, most of the investments were aimed at transforming the site into an agile unit capable of satisfying the multiple full-service expectations of a wide variety of brands. The different sizes of the maceration tanks, the variety of packaging lines (automatic, semi-automatic and manual), thus make it possible to meet diversified needs, for minimum order quantities of 5,000 or 10,000 pieces. Below this, the group’s other sites take over.

Cosmeurop, which also has historical expertise and the appropriate tools for packaging refillable bottles fitted with screw-on rings, will also soon have a robotic line dedicated to small format bottles (10, 20 or 30 ml ). Enough to satisfy the two strongest trends of the moment!

A new in-house quality control laboratory is now available to conduct all tests and analyses brands require on finished products. Finally, a storage capacity of 17,000 pallets makes it possible to anticipate certain logistical needs of full service customers.

With Cosmeurop, Superga Beauty now has capacities capable of integrating into the industrial strategy of the largest groups, but also to address the needs of national and international players of all sizes who want made in France products.

“Capacity, expertise and agility are the main strengths we put at disposal of all kinds of brands,” concludes Anne-Sophie Motelle.