Christopher de Lapuente: How the former Sephora CEO built a €16bn brand

When Chris de Lapuente first joined LVMH in 2011 to run Sephora, he couldn't have known that he would go on to scale the beauty behemoth from €2.5bn to €16bn in revenue. As it turns out his background – including a near three-decade stint at global consumer conglomerate Procter & Gamble (P&G) – had given him just the right toolkit to turn the billion-pound brand around.

Speaking to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast, de Lapuente traces a path that runs from a childhood split between two worlds in Portugal, through turning around a P&G business bleeding money in Turkey, to a Sephora strategy that only worked once he abandoned his original plans.

In our interview, you will learn about:

• The lesson his father's ruined fortune taught him about adaptability
• How he turned around a business that had lost $400m
• The moment that made him tear up his Sephora strategy and start again
• Why he believes omnichannel spend is the most important metric in retail

How Chris de Lapuente grew up in two worlds

He grew up in Cascais, a fishing village outside Lisbon now better known as a tourist resort. His father was Spanish, his mother English and the family had settled in Portugal to start their lives together. "I had a fantastic childhood, extremely happy," Chris de Lapuente says, “but I lived a parallel life.”

By day he attended an international British school alongside children from privileged backgrounds around the world. After school, his life on the beach and in the street was with Portuguese kids, many from very different circumstances. “I had this parallel life, which was fascinating, but it was fantastic fun."

That early exposure to different worlds left him with what he calls a lasting curiosity about the wider one. He has since lived in nine countries and 15 cities and travelled to more than 50. But beyond travel, the deeper influence on his leadership came from watching his father lose everything.

"He was a successful businessman in Portugal and there was a revolution in 1974," de Lapuente explains. “He was on the wrong side, and he got wiped out. So at the age of 40, he lost all his money and had to start from scratch all over again."

de Lapuente traces his own grit and his instinct for adaptability directly back to watching his father rebuild. "I learned focus. He got on extremely well with people. He could talk to the wealthiest of the wealthy and also to the average person in the street."

The school that built a hundred CEOs

De Lapuente and Harpin were a year apart in P&G's Newcastle brand management programme in the mid-1980s, de Lapuente on Fairy Liquid, Harpin on Vortex. "Procter & Gamble is an extraordinary school to learn about the fundamentals of business," de Lapuente says. "You learn that the consumer is boss."

Fairy Liquid was already turning over around £100m in sales when de Lapuente, still in his mid-twenties, was given responsibility for it, leading teams where most people in the room were older than him. "You're learning to run a business at a very young age. You know the buck stops with you."

He credits three things for a 28-year career that took him from brand manager to the youngest-ever president of P&G's global haircare division, a business worth more than $10bn. He sums it up in an acronym he now uses to coach younger leaders: PIE, or performance, image and exposure.

"There's no substitute for performance,” he says. "Whatever you're doing, you have to deliver and you want to deliver unusual results.” Image, he adds, is about character as much as competence: "You're a brand as a person. What do you stand for? Do people want to work for you?"

His view on followership is blunt: "There is an expression: choose a boss and not necessarily a company. If you're going to lead people, you need followers. You can't force people to follow you."

That philosophy, he argues, is one reason Procter & Gamble alumni have gone on to run so many major companies, including Harpin himself, Greg Jackson of Octopus Energy and several chief executives of BT such as Allison Kirkby.

"Procter has a culture of looking for rough diamonds," he says. "It doesn't necessarily go looking for the brightest people, but for people who are very driven, hungry and achievers." As the company promotes almost exclusively from within, he argues, there is relentless pressure on developing talent early.

Turning around a broken business in Turkey

The toughest test of de Lapuente's P&G career came when the company offered him Turkey, a business that had lost $400m. He arrived in 1994, in his late twenties, in the middle of an economic crisis that saw interest rates spike towards 600 per cent, in a country where he didn't speak the language.

"I was running the business by the seat of my pants," he recalls, "having to decide things without having all the consumer research to make decisions, and leading people whose language I didn't speak."

His answer was a single word, repeated three times: "Agility. Agility. Agility." That meant abandoning P&G's push at the time to run everything on a regional basis out of the European HQ in Brussels.

"We couldn't go to Brussels for decisions every five minutes," he says. "What works for the UK, Germany and France doesn't necessarily work in Turkey. We needed the flexibility to go local." Getting P&G's global leadership aligned behind a single mission, to turn a $1 profit within three years, was, he says, non-negotiable: "Everyone had to be aligned, otherwise it's just not going to happen."

From the South Pole to the top of Sephora

By the time he left P&G after 28 years, de Lapuente had a very different plan for his next chapter. A book called The Seven Summits, about two businessmen climbing the highest peak on every continent, had captured his imagination so completely he read it three times. He wanted to experience it himself.

He was training for a 1,900-kilometre ski expedition to the South Pole and back with the polar explorer Richard Weber when, almost by accident, he found himself talking to a former P&G boss, Toni Belloni, by then LVMH's number two. That conversation led to Bernard Arnault. "I was seduced by his dream and vision of what he wanted to do in luxury," de Lapuente says.

He did both. De Lapuente joined LVMH to lead Sephora in early 2011 on the condition he could take three months' sabbatical from mid-November to February to complete the Antarctic expedition. He is candid that this was not a triumph of work-life balance.

"I am not a great role model for work-life balance," he says. "There is a lot of debate about it; I call it a richer, fuller life." He still keeps an annual list of ten personal goals, a habit borrowed from Stephen Covey's concept of "sharpening the saw", deliberately weighted so only four relate to his job.

Scaling Sephora from €2.5bn to €16bn

Sephora was founded in 1969 by the French entrepreneur Dominique Mandonnaud. LVMH bought the business in 1997. By the time de Lapuente arrived in 2011, Sephora had grown to somewhere between 500 and 1,000 stores and around €2.5bn in revenue, but it was effectively two rival companies, one CEO for North America, and one for the rest of the world. Both were competing, rather than collaborating.

"In my first 100 days at Sephora, I thought I'd made the biggest mistake going there," de Lapuente admits.

His original plan was to globalise Sephora the way he had learned to run brands at P&G. Having travelled the business and seen the differences up close, that plan didn't survive contact with the market. "I realised the business is very different," he says. "In Asia, the lead category is skincare. In Europe, it's fragrances. In America, it's makeup. You can't have a one-size-fits-all approach."

He pivoted deliberately, building a small global team slowly while pushing merchandising and assortment decisions down to the regional and local level. "I pivoted from a global mindset to running the business locally and regionally. It worked brilliantly."

Alongside that, de Lapuente drove Sephora toward what he calls a channel-agnostic culture, summed up in the acronym ATAWAW: Anytime, Anywhere, Any Device. "Customers who shop both online and in-store tend to spend three times more than people who just shop in one channel," he says, calling it the single most compelling number behind the strategy.

Sephora also relaunched in the UK after an earlier failed attempt where rents and an undifferentiated assortment made the model too expensive to work. The retailer returned through the acquisition of Feelunique, rebuilding flagship stores that de Lapuente says are now doing double or triple the business originally forecast. Under his decade running the business, revenue grew from €2.5bn to €16bn, weathering a dip through the Covid-19 pandemic along the way.

The leader who inspires Christopher de Lapuente

De Lapuente describes Bernard Arnault, LVMH's chairman and one of the world's richest people, as "an extraordinary visionary leader who dreams big", someone who runs a decentralised group he compares to "a fleet of speedboats" rather than a single €80bn tanker.

Arnault's obsession, he says, is desirability: building products people want rather than need. "He will listen when someone makes a case that is different from his, but he's an entrepreneur into excellence and agility."

Before he eventually retired from LVMH altogether, de Lapuente was determined not to leave Sephora without the right successor in place. An external hire didn't work out, so he stepped back into the CEO role while an internal candidate, Guillaume Motte, broadened his experience elsewhere in the group before taking over as Sephora's president and CEO.

"Since I left Sephora, the business continues to go from record to record, which gives me tremendous satisfaction," he says. He describes his current chapter, deliberately undecided, as a blank sheet of paper: more time for family, fitter than he has been in years and waiting for the right next challenge.

Four leadership lessons from Christopher de Lapuente

Adaptability is learned, not innate. De Lapuente says his resilience came from watching his father lose it all overnight in the 1974 Portuguese revolution and rebuild from nothing at 40. Leaders who have never had to adapt under pressure should build that muscle deliberately, before a crisis forces it on them.

Be willing to abandon your own strategy. De Lapuente arrived at Sephora planning to globalise it exactly as he'd learned at P&G. A hundred days in, he realised the model didn't fit and rebuilt the business. The willingness to admit a plan is wrong, fast, mattered more than the plan itself.

Find the number that proves your strategy. For de Lapuente, that number was simple: customers who shop both online and in-store spend three times more than those using a single channel. Having one compelling, well-evidenced metric made it far easier to align a global brand behind an omnichannel push.

Don't scale without a healthy core. De Lapuente only backed Sephora's return to the UK once he had the right acquisition to build scale on the ground. Be sure the core business is financially and organisationally healthy first, then scale into adjacencies close to it, not away from it.

Listen to the full conversation with Chris de Lapuente on the Business Leader podcast.