If you run a keyword search in this year’s Top 100, there is one word (and its many synonyms) that stands out: Transformation.
Rocked by a multitude of challenges since COVID-19 — including competition from buzzy digital brands and online sales platforms, shifting consumer tastes and mindsets, high debt levels, external factors like tariffs and geopolitical conflicts and profitability struggles — beauty’s majors have paid the price of overstretched resources.
Consequently, 2025 saw many implement massive restructuring drives involving significant shifts both within beauty operations and across broader portfolios over the past year.
Among the top 10 players alone, Unilever, The Estée Lauder Companies, Shiseido and Coty are implementing major changes with massive implications industry-wide. Unilever, for example, has shifted tack once again under Fernando Fernandez, who was named CEO in early 2025. Fernandez has made his ambitions in beauty, well-being and personal care clear: They will now be front and center in the company’s strategy. As part of drastic streamlining, Unilever cut a third of all office roles in Europe, around 3,200 jobs, and reviewed Unilever’s 200 top management roles. It also completed the spinoff of its ice cream activity in 2025, and earlier this year sold its food business to McCormick in a deal that valued it at $45 billion.
The Estée Lauder Companies, under Stéphane de La Faverie’s Beauty Reimagined strategy and Profit Recovery and Growth Plan, has laid off as many as 7,000 employees in the wake of significant headwinds since the pandemic, which notably highlighted the challenges of the company having become overdependent on its Chinese business.
As for Shiseido, with new CEO Kentaro Fujiwara at the helm since January 2025, it has implemented broad structural changes aimed at addressing challenges in China, travel retail and the Americas, with a number of leading executives leaving the company as it grouped together its China and Travel Retail operations and overhauled its Americas operation, where around 15% of the company’s workforce was reportedly laid off.
Coty also continues to struggle. CEO Sue Nabi exited in December after five years in the top job. The firm is reviewing options for its mass Consumer Beauty business and last April announced plans for 700 redundancies.
The list goes on. Colgate-Palmolive, Revlon, Natura, Oriflame, Kosé, Groupe Rocher, to name but a few, are all looking to rescale and press reset in order to recharge growth and healthier balance sheets. Beauty’s landscape continues to shift, and fast.
The news in October that L’Oréal was to acquire Creed and partner with Kering in a joint venture, with the right to enter into a 50-year exclusive license to create products for Gucci once its license with Coty expires in 2028, acted as a further bombshell for the market. Valued at around €4 billion, it is L’Oréal’s biggest deal ever, and its effect on the industry landscape is likely to be profound and wide-ranging, impacting everything from the M&A landscape to distribution partnerships and supply chain. It was also a massive about-turn for Kering, which had purchased Creed and announced plans to develop beauty in-house just two years previously, after a changing of the guard there under new CEO Luca de Meo, who took the reins last September.
Industry insiders predict the deal could reshape not only the market landscape, but also force some company and brand marriages that were not on the horizon otherwise. This March, for instance, The Estée Lauder Companies and Puig announced that they were in potential merger talks, a surprise to many. “The combined business would have revenues of just over $20 billion, and would give Estée Lauder a larger fragrance portfolio and diversify exposure to Europe and Latin America, whilst the opportunity for Puig would be part of wider and more balanced beauty group,” Céline Pannuti, head of European staples and beverage research at J.P. Morgan, wrote in a note.
In the meantime, such mega-deals raise questions over opportunities for buzzy players currently backed by private equity players looking to exit. “L’Oréal made a clear choice between acquiring a pre-backed indie brand and a big acquisition like this,” one industry expert told WWD at the time of the L’Oréal/Creed deal. A re-dealing of the cards could be on the near horizon.
