By Liz Young
The maker of CoverGirl cosmetics and Hugo Boss fragrances is resetting its supply chain to be able to respond to fast-changing consumer trends.
Coty, one of the world's largest beauty companies, has struggled in recent years after supply-chain disruptions during the pandemic and amid an uncertain economy and changing consumer demand. Shoppers have gravitated recently toward newer, fast-growing brands such as Hailey Bieber's cosmetics and skin-care line Rhode.
Coty's like-for-like revenue fell 8% for the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year compared with the prior year. The company on Monday named Procter & Gamble veteran Markus Strobel as interim chief executive to succeed CEO Sue Nabi as part of a broader leadership overhaul amid a review of its consumer-beauty strategy. Coty has projected it will return to profitable sales growth in the second half of its current fiscal year.
The Amsterdam-based company makes products under brand names such as CoverGirl, Rimmel and Sally Hansen and manufactures fragrances under license agreements with luxury companies including Burberry, Hugo Boss and Marc Jacobs.
Chief Global Supply Chain Officer Graeme Carter spoke with The Wall Street Journal about how the company has sped up its production process over the past few years. Edited excerpts are below.
You shifted some manufacturing of Adidas and Nautica fragrances to the U.S. from Europe starting last year. Why?
I wanted to have the capability to make fragrances in the U.S. Five or six years ago, for purely cost reasons -- Covid and all of those challenges on all companies -- [the company] consolidated to a single source for most of our fragrance. I wasn't comfortable with that for business continuity, for geopolitical and other reasons like responsiveness to consumer demand. I need to be closer to the consumer.
I told the team that I wanted fragrances in North America. They said, "The ones we could do are Nautica, Davidoff and Adidas." And I said, "Yes, please do. A small increase in cost, but get on with it." We had done that before the change in the tariffs, and have significantly increased the volumes coming out of North America because of the tariffs.
How have you sped up product development at a time when products -- especially cosmetics -- can unexpectedly go viral on social media?
[He holds up a bottle of custom cologne.] This is what I call my furiously fast fragrance.
I asked our factories in Europe, "Ship to me 24 units of a fragrance you've never made before, quick as you can." So they produce this. The bottle is from one of our franchises. The fragrance inside is different. They created the label, and they 3D-printed the cap with my name on it and sent me 24 within 48 hours.
That is what we're doing on responsiveness. It's trying to get our factories to think agile, think immediate.
How long did it take Coty to produce a new fragrance, say, five years ago?
A new fragrance [could have taken up to] 18 months.
How did you create a fast, responsive supply chain?
What happened traditionally -- and not just at Coty -- is everything would happen sequentially, and it wouldn't be that important to anybody.
[A project, for example, might] sit in the marketing inbox for a couple of weeks, and then it would go to the artwork team, who would then send it to the supplier. And then this, and then that, whatever -- I think, at the time, we had a 14-week lead time on artworks.
[Coty as a whole has worked to speed up those processes.] I was finding in that 18 months, about a month was actual executional stuff being done. The rest was waiting for the next step, waiting for the next step, waiting for the next person, waiting for the approval.
Just taking out that time meant I could do it a lot quicker. And then the next bit was focusing on getting people to approve it immediately, and some of the digital tools to accelerate the design and the signoff process.
Write to Liz Young at liz.young@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 26, 2025 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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