Adrien Geiger: Natural Inspiration

Natural Inspiration

Picture Provence and you probably see rows of lavender and baked earth, a dazzle of sunlight on water and people at one with the landscape. So how does L’Occitane en Provence, a business steeped in the poetry of the natural world, deal with the grim realities of climate change? We met with Adrien Geiger (2004, Engineering Science), L’Occitane’s first ever Group Sustainability Officer, to find out.

On paper, Adrien Geiger does not strike one as a natural environmentalist. By profession he is an engineer and, since joining L’Occitane in 2014, his career has been defined by high-profile corporate roles, including Chief Customer Experience Officer, Chief Growth Officer and Group Brand Manager.

And yet, despite the engineering and business acumen, Geiger is a lifelong advocate for sustainability. His first job was developing solar plants with French renewables firm Energies Nouvelle, and throughout his time at L’Occitane he has driven environmental initiatives from behind the scenes. Most recently, he was instrumental in L’Occitane’s 2019 partnership with Plastic Odyssey, which sent a vessel powered by plastic waste collected from the ocean on a three-year journey along the most polluted coasts of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Epic Challenge: L’Occitane’s Plastic Odyssey vessel at the start of its journey in June 2021

So how does Geiger reconcile his position at the heart of a global beauty business with his ideals and, indeed, his new job as L’Occitane’s first Group Sustainability Officer? Speaking via Zoom, Geiger explains that, in part, it is a natural progression. ‘L’Occitane has always been a brand very committed to the environment, and I was born in a way with that commitment. But even more than that I think this is something that people my age care about deeply. We are, I think, the first generation in universal agreement that climate change is an imminent threat to our species. So we feel an urgent responsibility to do something about it, however we can.’

The question of how to be environmentally sustainable while remaining a globally successful business is one that seems, on the face of it, insoluble. But, with a certain poetic symmetry, Geiger and L’Occitane are looking for the answer in the same place that humans created the problem – the natural world.

‘When we talk as a group about tackling the environmental crisis, we always look to nature as a source of inspiration, because nature has accumulated within itself literally millions of years of R&D. For example, if humans try to create a material equivalent to wood, we use 100 times more energy than a tree to make it, and 1,000 times more energy to recycle it. But if you go into a forest, everything is recycled, nothing is wasted and you can last forever.’ You can probably hear the engineer talking here. Indeed, speaking to Geiger, it soon becomes clear that the analytical skills he acquired at Somerville are fundamental to his appreciation of the natural world. ‘The most important thing I got from my engineering studies is the ability to simplify any problem and make it solvable. But this approach has also enabled me to see that nature often has the most elegant solutions.’

One example of a nature-based solution that Geiger advocates is the use of agroforestry to mitigate the damage caused by agriculture. This means that, instead of planting a single species of tree a million times to compensate for carbon emissions, you look at the local ecosystem to understand what you should plant in order to regenerate the soil, maintain biodiversity, reduce the risk of disease and capture carbon.

If you go into a forest, everything is recycled, nothing is wasted and you can last forever.

Doing something constructive to protect us from future crises gives us hope – and we all need that.

‘This type of planting is essential, because we cannot afford to kill the soil. That is important for us not only as a business which depends on natural ingredients to survive, but because it’s manifestly the right thing to do. Many businesses today have forgotten that every time you kill the soil, you’re taking out a loan that someone, somewhere is going to have to repay, because otherwise no one is going to be able to get food out of that land anymore.’

It’s not just environmental sustainability to which L’Occitane is committed. Geiger tells me that he is also pushing the business to embrace the concept of the ‘triple bottom line’. For the uninitiated, the triple bottom line is an economic model devised by British author and sustainable entrepreneur John Wilkington, which proposes that the value of any enterprise should be measured against three criteria: economic value, social value and environmental value.

One of the best analogies Geiger has for explaining the triple bottom line is bees – which seems almost too on-brand for L’Occitane. But it’s more sensible than it sounds. ‘Wherever bees settle,’ Geiger explains, ‘they create value for the world around them. They help the flowers reproduce and they support the ecosystem by producing honey and all those other by-products which enable other species to develop. So for us at L’Occitane, the big question is how can we become bees to the environment, surviving on the land, but also giving the same value back to the entire ecosystem?’ We have already heard about L’Occitane’s ideas on environmental sustainability (agroforestry, eliminating plastic, etc.). But how, I wonder, does a business create social value, and what defines its ecosystem? ‘It is tough,’ Geiger agrees, ‘not least because our ecosystem consists of 10,000 employees dispersed through multiple regions across the globe, each with its own brand identity, strategic objectives and plurality of individual politics and personalities.

‘But I think it’s worth it to try and create that social value. I mean, imagine the impact we will have if we persuade 10,000 people across the world to do one little thing each day to help the environment or their community, like a little hack or small action which doesn’t even need to cost anything necessarily. Then imagine if each of those 10,000 people were to persuade one or two others also to do that little thing each day; very quickly, you will have hundreds of thousands of people making a major difference.’

Perhaps the most bittersweet ally in Geiger’s efforts to gain support for social initiatives, he adds, has been Covid-19. ‘This pandemic has given humanity a brush with its own mortality. In response, people have a strong desire to know that what they’re doing has meaning. So, all of a sudden, we have got people from all across our business open to hearing about a type of value that goes beyond the bottom line. It’s a tough way to gain support, but we mustn’t waste this opportunity, because doing something constructive to protect us from future crises gives us hope – and we all need that.’

This seems a good note on which to end – in the possibility of hope and meaningful change right at the heart of a multinational business. After all, if change can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

Adrien evaluating the almond crop with Jean-Pierre Jaubert, sustainable almond producer, and Jean-Charles Lhommet, L’Occitane’s Biodiversity & Sustainable Ingredients Director