Davines Group’s Davide Bollati on His Beauty Brands’ Growth, Next Steps

MILAN — Davines Group has been rising steadily for the past 40 years — and it shows no signs of slowing down.

The Parma, Italy-based beauty company, which was founded in 1983 by the Bollati family and operates professional hair care brand Davines and skin care label Comfort Zone, has built a track record of growth year after year thanks to its expertise in developing high-performance, natural formulations and implementing environmentally friendly initiatives. 

These two factors have been a competitive advantage for Davines, which has built a global business serving the sustained appetite of customers for natural and professional beauty products.

The group, which made its debut in WWD Beauty Inc’s Top 100 ranking of the world’s largest beauty companies in 2024 and confirmed its 98th position also last year, keeps building momentum.

In 2025, its sales grew 3.9 percent to 306.7 million euros compared to the previous year. Revenues generated outside Italy accounted for 82 percent of total, while domestic sales were up 4 percent to 56.7 million euros.

Key drivers included growth in the U.S., the group’s best-performing market, where sales rose 9.8 percent versus 2024 and Davines hair care is distributed in about 8,500 salons.

In an interview with WWD, Davines Group’s chairman Davide Bollati underscored how “we’ve strengthened our synergy with the professional channel through our digital one.”

“We direct our consumers to hairdressers and salons, which is not to be taken for granted. It’s a move that requires discipline and doesn’t return visible or easily measurable results,” Bollati said. “We’re doing this in a moment when the American market is very dynamic, many of our competitors in the professional channel are having success by addressing final consumers directly, and salons are not a priority for them anymore.”

Bollati estimates that 30 to 40 percent of total sales of professional hair care in the U.S. are now generated outside of the salon environment.

Davines has taken an opposite approach, using services to help propel in-salon sales. A big growth driver most recently has been hair color, “which we have enhanced to strengthen our service-driven portfolio,” Bollati said.

Bollati’s’ family-run business has reported organic growth since its inception, save for the 2008 macro-financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic. But even during COVID-19, Bollati was on the frontlines in voicing the concerns of hairdressers and beauty operators in Italy, and supported professionals by postponing payment terms, implementing free online training sessions and sharing guidelines and tips to relaunch their businesses after the quarantine.

Led by Italy, Europe is the second best-performing region for Davines Group, with 2025 sales in France and the U.K. up 10.2 percent and 9.2 percent, respectively, versus 2024.

In 2025, the company invested 6 million euros to establish its new branch Davines España in Bilbao, Spain, signing a deal with its longtime distributor Beovipel. The operation was intended to strengthen the group’s European presence in its second market after Italy and along with France, and it implied that the company now directly handles Beovipel’s portfolio of 1,500 hairdressers, salons and spas in the market; it has absorbed its team of 60 employees and controls five academies for professional training in Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Alicante.

In all, Davines products are distributed in more than 90 countries and its staff grew 5 percent to more than 1,000 employees worldwide last year. Looking ahead, Bollati is eyeing additional markets including Brazil, India, China and Australia.

To propel further growth Davines Group has created an investment plan of 50 million euros for the next five years, mainly aimed at expanding the 30-hectare site of the Davines Group Village to increase its production capacity while enhancing its technical innovation and overall sustainability footprint. Last year the group took over a plant formerly owned by the Morris Profumi company, which is being converted from fragrance-manufacturing facility into one for cosmetics.

Other investments will include the creation of a foundation launching this year to further foster Davines Group’s activities linked to social, cultural and environmental causes, as well as a university with an auditorium designed by architectural studio Matteo Thun & Partners, which designed the Davines Group Village project.

The R&D department, which currently counts a workforce of 60 people out of the 600 employees in the Parma HQ, will be also enhanced, alongside the project developed with Rodale Institute, a U.S.-based nonprofit that specializes in regenerative organic agriculture.

“We’ve been experimenting a lot throughout our history, going from slow food to regenerative organic agriculture, improving the sustainability of our formulations and supply chain,” Bollati said. “They remain our reason to be: to strike that synergy between product performance and sustainability, which now doesn’t go under the ‘Sustainable Beauty’ motto but has evolved into the ‘For a good life’ claim,” Bollati said.

To wit, after 20 years, the company changed its tag line to express not just “what we do…[but] why we do it” and the deeper purpose behind its work, expanding the vision to include cultural enrichment and emotional connection, as represented by an animated video campaign released last month. 

Bollati has also received personal recognition for his company’s sustainable business model, such as an award from consulting firm EY in 2024. Not surprisingly, over the years his firm attracted the interest of the financial world, but Bollati always committed to independence. On the contrary, he’s now open to invest or acquire new brands that share his same vision, he said.

Meanwhile, he has made a personal move into hospitality. Bollati and the family behind the Parma-based Chiesi Farmaceutici biopharmaceutical company invested in the development of a hotel in their hometown, expected to open in September 2027. 

While keeping details under wraps, Bollati said the location can provide “a territory for experimentation” especially for the 1996-founded Comfort Zone brand, which is a leading player in the professional skin care category in Italy and present across spas and resorts in more than 40 countries worldwide.

In what Bollati defined as a “hybrid hospitality place,” he said, “there will be a Comfort Zone wellness space dedicated to the themes of preventive aging and longevity, with a focus on conscious skin care and science, but also the opportunity to explore other aspects, like mental health, holistic fitness and sleep science.”