Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones does not like being photographed. “Do I have to smile?” he says gruffly, before posing on the windowsill and couch of his Paris office in his grey suit, arms crossed in front of his chest. He exudes the air of a man who has done this many, many times before.
Such expertise derives from the fact that Sir Lindsay is frequently photographed with models, girls far taller than he is, who wear lipstick, eyeshadow and nail polish made by LOréal, the company he has worked for since 1969. He doesnt understand how the girls smile so easily – he says they make him feel like a grandfather, adding wryly: “A sexy grandfather.”
Sexiness is an intrinsic part of Sir Lindsays job. For nearly 20 years he was chief executive of LOréal, the worlds biggest beauty company and owner of brands such as Maybelline, Redken, Lanc?me and Vichy.
Although he stepped back from the day-to-day running of the company two years ago, handing over the job to Jean-Paul Agon, he remains chairman. It entails acting as the chief executives “intellectual ping-pong player” and as what he calls the company “emissary”, visiting people and places Mr Agon does not have time to see.
Sir Lindsay, who turns 62 this month, has spent the better part of his life trying to convince women and men that buying LOréals lotions and shampoos will make them feel good. But beauty products were not the reason he joined the French company.
LOréal is a curious destination for a man who had “no intention” of taking a job in the consumer goods industry after Oxford, where he read French and German, and an MBA at Insead. Yet he was drawn to the beauty company. “It was still quite a small company but was thought to be going places and was considered a great example of creative marketing and original advertising campaigns. It just seemed like a fun thing to do for a young man.”
At his desk Sir Lindsay appears nervous, fiddling with his glasses and brushing back his hair. But as he relaxes it becomes clearer what attracted him to LOréal: he likes to figure out what people want.
Cosmetics is “a business of intuition”, he explains. “Consumers dont tell you what they need; youve got to guess. Nobody was asking for iPods until somebody made one.”
He credits his predecessor, Fran?ois Dalle, with teaching him basic business sense while he was working his way up the ranks of LOréal, running its Italian and US operations along the way. Mr Dalle, he says, was an autocratic Frenchman who never spoke English and “would ask at the most expensive restaurant if the sole was fresh”.
“He single-handedly ran this company and did every marketing job for every brand, all at the same time. But he was a genius, so I still think occasionally when I look at a project what he would have said. He spoke in riddles so he was a very difficult man to interpret.
