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  • L’Occitane buys Australian skincare brand Grown Alchemist

    L’Occitane buys Australian skincare brand Grown Alchemist

    Hong Kong-listed beauty giant L’Occitane Group has acquired a majority stake in Australian-based clean skincare brand Grown Alchemist for an undisclosed sum.

    Grown Alchemist was founded in 2008 by Melbourne siblings, Jeremy and Keston Muijis, with a focus on futuristic anti-aging technology and unique botanical skincare formulas for optimal skin health. The brand opened a flagship store in Melbourne in 2020, “gearing for the next phase of [our] journey with a full-scale omnichannel presence to further augment global sales”.

    “With a unique and inspiring brand story and international fan base, Grown Alchemist is poised for international scalability and rapid growth,” said Andre Hoffmann, vice chairman & CEO of L’Occitane Group.

    The acquisition of Grown Alchemist is part of L’Occitane’s plan to further broaden its health-conscious beauty portfolio, attracting influential millennial and Gen Z customers.

    The deal follows L’Occitane’s acquisition of Sol de Janeiro’s 83-per-cent stake last November, which is known for the Brazilian Bum Bum Cream brand.

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  • UBS Quietly Advances Token Efforts With Clients

    UBS Quietly Advances Token Efforts With Clients

    UBS has been quietly running a tokenization trial with weighty institutional investors. The Swiss-based bank has been offering more than 100 institutional clients access to a pilot program to tokenize real assets. The project is operating on the Ethereum platform, the person said.

    This represents the next step in a push into putting assets on the blockchain and selling slices represented in coins. The project, being overseen by UBS investment banker Chetan Tolia, is looking at tokenizing traditional assets including debt, structured products, and physical gold.

    The Swiss wealth manager last week dipped its toes into cryptocurrencies, in a major concession to client demand. The tokenization program has quietly been running, separately out of UBS’ investment bank, for at least 12 months, the person said. UBS declined to comment.

    UBS has long held that it is interested in distributed ledger more than it is in cryptocurrencies themselves – which represent a threat to traditional banking. The Swiss bank transacts on we.trade, a blockchain-based trade finance platform, co-launched a so-called utility settlement coin with other banks, and is part of banking’s R3 blockchain consortium.

    It isn’t clear how long UBS intends to run the tokenization pilot or release it more widely, or which products it is tokenizing.