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Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
L'Oréal Is Launching a Global Campaign for World Refill Day
PARIS – L'Oréal is poised to launch a corporate campaign for refills, in tandem with World Refill Day on Monday. The campaign will be the group's first cross-divisional, multi-brand, multi-channel activation, called #JoinTheRefillMovement. It federates a dozen key brands from L'Oréal, including Lancôme, Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, Kiehl's, Mugler, Maison Margiela Fragrances, Prada, Valentino Beauty, l'Oréal Paris, Kérastase, L'Oréal Professionnel and La Roche-Posay. More from WWD Report: Explosion of Counterfeits and Dupes Makes Earning Trust Harder Than Ever for Retailers L'Oréal and Nvidia Collaborate to Bring Next-gen AI to Beauty Prada Group Creates Trust Fund With UNESCO for Sea Beyond Project There are to be related advertisements and social media content, alongside the hashtag the group conceived as a call to action. The campaign is meant to raise the awareness about refills' benefits. According to L'Oréal, 78 percent of consumers express interest in purchasing more sustainable products, but many are still not aware of how refill options can help the environment. The campaign highlights benefits – to both the planet and pocket. For instance, there's the fact that every time someone purchases a 100-ml. refill, rather than two 50-ml. bottles of La Vie Est Belle Elixir, there's a savings of 73 percent on glass, 66 percent on plastic and 61 percent on cardboard. 'It makes the consumer the hero,' said Blanca Juti, chief corporate affairs and engagement officer at L'Oréal. 'They can really take a stance. What's very exciting is that we're calling the consumer to join the movement with 12 brands. We have all categories – hair products, makeup, skin care and fragrance. 'We're doing it all over the world, in all regions, offline, online for the World Refill Day,' she continued. L'Oréal's refill campaign is part of an overarching, long-term sustainability commitment that includes reducing its environmental footprint and offering more eco-friendly options to consumers. 'We're always at the forefront of the latest technologies, latest innovations, really keeping our eye on the horizon about how we can continue to improve not only our operations, but also our ecosystem around us,' said Ezgi Barcenas, chief sustainability officer at L'Oréal. 'In everything we do, we try to lower our emissions, environmental footprint and impact,' she explained. 'Sustainability is woven in the product design all the way to how we bring products to market.' Last year 49 percent of the company's plastic packaging was refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable. L'Oréal also said its manufacturing facilities globally have been adapted to accommodate a 17-time increase in the number of refillable options over the past five years. 'Refills is a true new mindset in developing products for us in our four divisions,' said Jacques Playe, global head of packaging and product development at L'Oréal. 'We have a very strong product design activity to provide refill solutions for all the categories of product on offer.' Designing refills, he said, 'pushes us to innovate and to reinvent ourselves.' Take, for instance, a fragrance bottle. In the past, its pump was not removeable, so L'Oréal worked with glass makers and pump suppliers to create a new standard, with a pump that can be taken out. 'We propose this as a new standard for the full cosmetics and perfume industry,' said Playe. For the group, the refill campaign is an opportunity and responsibility to help drive behaviors in more circular models, according to Barcenas. 'In tackling that, what we're trying to solve for is sustainability, desirability and performance,' she said. 'We're really excited about this refill campaign that we're going big on this year.' This will involve ongoing activations and educational content, including brand spokespeople explaining how to refill products and people who create the refills. 'Hopefully with campaigns like this we can really make a change,' said Juti. Meanwhile, refill solutions will continue to be expanded across all of L'Oréal's product categories. Playe explained the challenge with refills is to reconcile three main issues: to keep product performance, desirability and sustainability. 'We do think that the refill is a very smart way to keep the premiumness of our luxury brands, while using fewer resources,' he said. Among the group's products with refills already is Lancôme Génifique serum with a refillable bottle that saves about 70 percent of the weight of the parent packaging. '[Refills] is a journey that started long ago,' said Juti, referring to when Mugler launched Angel, the fragrance, in 1992 as a product refillable via a fountain. 'Now we've got about 11,000 fountains in the world.' And they're used: an Angel bottle is refilled every 10 seconds somewhere around the globe. Hundreds of engineers have historically been focused on L'Oréal packaging, but Playe created two new teams, so as now to cover three big competency skills: engineering, science and industrial design. 'This is a true evolution,' he said, adding refills and lightweighting are the two main ways to reduce the amount of resources used in product packaging. Best of WWD Which Celebrity Brands Are Next for a Major Deal? Lady Gaga, Beyonce and More Possible Contenders for the Next Corporate Prize The Best Makeup Looks in Golden Globes History A Look Back at Golden Globes Best Makeup on the Red Carpet, From Megan Fox to Sophia Loren [PHOTOS]
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Report: Explosion of Counterfeits and Dupes Makes Earning Trust Harder Than Ever for Retailers
Despite AI technology coming to the rescue with solutions to clean up retail's counterfeit problem, the fraud economy keeps growing. With many misconceptions about the impact of counterfeits, Entrupy Inc., the AI-powered authentication solution company, publishes its 'State of the Fake' report each year to correct this disinformation in its mission of protecting people and educating consumers. From 2024 to 2025, Vidyuth Srinivasan, chief executive officer of Entrupy, said its responsibility feels magnified, calling out the greater acceptance of fakes becoming mainstream today. More from WWD Prada Group Creates Trust Fund With UNESCO for Sea Beyond Project EXCLUSIVE: Chanel Launches Circular Materials Hub Nevold Global Fashion Agenda Addresses Sustainability's Struggles: Uncertainty Looms Amid Policy Shifts, Economic Pressures and Tariffs 'It has motivated us at Entrupy to redouble our efforts to have a larger voice and impact our stakeholders,' said Srinivasan, who noted that fakes aren't reducing by overall volume. 'This is a serious problem that shows no signs of stopping and needs a more scaled approach if we have any hope of stopping the bleed between the counterfeit market and the legitimate one.' Entrupy's AI technology found 91.6 percent of tested items to be authentic in the last year, while 8.4 percent were unidentified. The authors of the report said that these numbers reflect culture, consumer behavior and the evolving resale landscape. Notably, Entrupy works with some of the world's leading luxury brands to authenticate goods including Prada, Givenchy, Chloe, Dior, Chanel, Celine, Goyard, Valentino, Burberry, Fendi and Gucci, among many others. While Entrupy's research found that no country is immune to counterfeiting, the Americas count for 47 percent of all Entrupy submissions for a total of $772 million of authenticated goods in 2024 and $68 million of unidentified goods. Comparatively, Asia-Pacific accounts for 42 percent of submissions for a total of $766 million of authenticated goods in 2024 and $64 million of unidentified goods. Europe and the Middle East account for 11 percent of submissions for a total of $227 million of authenticated goods in 2024 and $22 million of unidentified goods. The five most faked brands, based on the total number of unidentified items by volume (not percentage), in the last year were Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Chanel and Saint Laurent. Notably, Entrupy's data revealed $12,190,340 worth of fake Gucci bags submitted for verification. Chanel accounted for even more with $500,470,067 in counterfeit goods detected. In the Americas, specifically, the top three fakes were revealed as Louis Vuitton (8.7 percent), Gucci (8.3 percent) and Chanel (6.3 percent). The top five brands with an elevated risk of fakes, based on the volume of submissions for authentication per brand, are Goyard, Prada, Givenchy, Loewe and Saint Laurent. At 18.4 percent, Goyard maintained its spot as the top faked brand by volume, specifically for its St. Louis Tote. Dior, Hermès and Celine's unidentified rates dropped compared to last year and are no longer on Entrupy's top five list. The five most faked materials were found to be Prada nylon (21.3 percent), Louis Vuitton leather or special collection material (9.9 percent), Louis Vuitton monogram canvas (8.1 percent), Gucci leather or special collection material (7 percent) and Chanel calfskin or lambskin leather (6.7 percent). Importantly, Entrupy calls out dupe culture as a driving force behind the fraud economy. The hashtag for 'dupe' gained 6.3 billion views on TikTok in 2024 with the platform fostering 'dupe-hunting' content that 'pushes copycat culture into the mainstream and makes imitation feel like innovation.' 'It's almost an act of rebellion,' Srinivasan said. 'Consumers are basically saying 'These prices don't work for me, this economy doesn't work for me, but I want what I want, why should I deprive myself?'' Moreover, Entrupy's experts said Walmart's $30 Hermès Birkin lookalike marked a turning point: the gap between exclusivity and irony is collapsing. 'Between the viral chatter about Walmart 'Birkins' and people questioning whether even big-name retailers are selling fakes, there's a real shift happening,' Srinivasan said. Legally, the company pointed out that the line is blurry between dupes and fakes, making enforcing legal action murky and uneven. Operations behind counterfeiting have become highly coordinated and transactional with scale, coordination and impact growing quickly. Counterfeit bots are also on the rise with 3 percent of counterfeit purchases now enabled by chatbots. The return fraud economy, which focuses on fraudulent returns and claims, cost U.S. retailers $103 billion in 2024, accounting for more than 15 percent of all returns. These scams can take place in a variety of processes including a classic swap where a real item is purchased then swapped for a fake and returned, a resale platform loophole where a high-quality fake is sent back to a targeted resale platform and return-as-a-service where organized crime rings use fake identities, mule accounts or bulk operations to create a revenue stream through fake returns. 'The rise of fake and dupe culture on social media has made trust harder to earn and easier to lose,' Srinivasan said. 'We're also seeing an explosion of counterfeits in apparel. At this point, protecting your brand is directly linked to protecting your customers, and the only way to do it is via building trust.' Best of WWD The Definitive Timeline for Sean 'Diddy' Combs' Sean John Fashion Brand: Lawsuits, Runway Shows and Who Owns It Now What the Highest-paid CEOs at U.S. Fashion and Retail Companies Make Confidence Holds Up, But How Much Can Consumers Take?
