I’m sure many of us have fantasised some time or another about owning our own perfume store. The ambience, the brands we’d stock, how we’d do things differently… Well, Philip Hillege did just that in 2000 with Skins Cosmetics (shortened to Skins in 2024) when he and his business partner at the time, Michiel Poelmans, pioneered niche fragrance and skincare in the Netherlands.
Twenty-five years later, the original store in the “9 Streets” shopping area of Amsterdam’s Runstraat is well on its way to expanding to 16 in the Netherlands, three in Belgium and two in Germany. This major spurt in expansion is thanks to an injection of capital from Vendis Capital.
I’m based in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I’ve got to know Skins through its franchise deal with African Sales Company. Starting out with one store in Sandton City shopping mall in 2016, the local Skins tally now stands at six stores, with another four to five to follow in the future, according to Philip Hillege.
I got to see creative director Philip Hillege when he was in Johannesburg last year as part of the local contingent’s Meet the Creators event. But as it was all a bit of a whirlwind, we set aside time at a later stage for a proper interview.
Here, Philip Hillege talks about 25th anniversary plans, how the market has changed in the last quarter century, how they select brands for the Skins portfolio and why large investment was necessary for the growth of the business.
AS IF ROLLING OUT MORE STORES THIS YEAR ISN’T ENOUGH, DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING ELSE PLANNED?
In what has become a tradition over the last five years, every year we launch a collaboration with a brand creating our own product, which also carries the Skins name.
So, in June, we will be launching a collaboration with Juliette Has A Gun. We’ve been involved with this brand from day one. Now, they are a very big brand. The previous perfume collaborations have been with relatively smaller brands. So, yeah, a very ambitious project. It’s a matter of trust and friendship that we do this kind of thing.
Also, we’re planning to launch body, home and fragrance products under our own Skins name, since the collaborations with Skins have been so successful and people trust us.
We’ve set up a separate team for that. I’m not sure if we will launch this year because a lot of testing must be done with stability tests, etc. We’re still in a process of developing the perfume.
YOU DON’T WANT TO RUSH INTO SOMETHING LIKE THIS BECAUSE IT OBVIOUSLY WILL CARRY THE SKINS NAME. SO YOU WANT IT TO BE AS GOOD AS IT CAN POSSIBLY BE BEFORE YOU LAUNCH…
Exactly, because we don’t make concessions. We will develop these products together with great perfumers of brands in our network. We will never take some formula off the shelf, so working on the formula and the texture is a big process.
“We will never take some formula off the shelf, so working on the formula and the texture is a big process” – Philip Hillege
GOING BACK TO WHEN YOU LAUNCHED IN NOVEMBER 2000, HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE MARKET THEN?
The market was very saturated, and still is, especially in our small country, the Netherlands, with department and drug stores selling the same brands and all about discounts.
We were ambitious and I shall always make a little joke that the word “disruptor” was invented in 2001. We were a disruptor at the time in 2000, and it was our plan to shake up the market with brands which were all new to the Dutch market.
Aesop from Australia was one of the first of the seven brands of our portfolio. Laura Mercier was a few years on the market in the US. We made a list of cool brands with dedicated founders on board, which had a different mission and distribution. For example, Frédéric Malle.
We saw a new movement starting, also on service. In the Netherlands, all shops closed at six o’clock, and I was in my first job after studying at the Dutch company Herome Cosmetics.
When you wanted to go shopping, it would have to be on the weekend, because you worked from nine to six during the week. So we said we will open seven days a week, which was, at that time, rare, and until eight o’clock in the evening.
BUILDING CUSTOMER LOYALTY IS SO IMPORTANT IN THE RETAIL ENVIRONMENT. HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT THAT?
Salespeople working in a cosmetics store are pushed by targets for brands. Every week, there’s a different promotion. If you walked into a perfumery store, you would be pushed to that brand. So I knew that people would never get honest advice. And we always said from day one to all our team members, give personal advice, see what the customer likes.
Give them samples if they want to test it first, no pressure to buy because the buying pressure in our market was always buy now, get this discount or whatever.
“The customer loyalty from honest advice is one of the key factors in our service”
The customer loyalty from honest advice is one of the key factors in our service. Sometimes brands want to send a promotion girl for the weekend from Paris. But we don’t do that because it will send a wrong message to our customers, of pushing only that brand.
The thing we do in our stores are the events with the brand founders. These founders sometimes visit us for a weekend and then they are in the shop. Yeah, that’s fine. Even when we grow bigger and 25 years later, we really want to stay close to our DNA.
IN THE 25 YEARS YOU’VE BEEN IN BUSINESS NOW, WHAT HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST CHANGE IN THE MARKET?
When we started niche was so small and the brands in our portfolio sometimes had 150 to 200 points of sale globally. Now maybe they have 1 000 points of sale globally, but I would say Chanel has 3 000 in France. So still very small.
The biggest change is the shift in the consumer’s mind. People really want something different from the well-known brands. If I look at youngsters, you have girls and boys of 15 years of age in our shop looking for cool perfumes, like a status symbol similar to sneakers 10 years ago. People are more and more open to brands with a real story. You see that with everything.
If I look at the beer market 25 years ago in our country, it was Heineken and a few other big brands. Now, there’s 80 different small beer brands.
“There’s a picture of the farmer on the cheese. It’s like Frédéric Malle who started with a picture of the perfumer in the year 2000”
Even look at cheese. In the Netherlands, we’re a cheese country. There were always little artisan cheese shops. And in the supermarket, you had the supermarket cheese. But now in our supermarket, there’s a picture of the farmer on the cheese. It’s like Frédéric Malle who started with a picture of the perfumer in the year 2000.
THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF BLURRING BETWEEN NICHE AND DESIGNER BRANDS IN RECENT YEARS. DO YOU THINK “NICHE” STILL HAS MEANING OR IS IT NOW MORE ABOUT “LUXURY”?
The word “niche” is not at this moment the right word anymore.
I always talk now more about artisanal perfumery because there’s so many big groups in the sector. If you go to the Esxence perfume fair in Milan, where I’m a member of the selection committee, there’s 600 applications and 400 places available.
TALKING ABOUT SELECTING, HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT CHOOSING BRANDS FOR YOUR SKINS PORTFOLIO?
We have a committee of six people analysing new options from 60 to 70 brands every month. We really try to get down to the founders and if the brand story is good.
”We have a committee of six people analysing new options from 60 to 70 brands every month”
And if the passion of the founder is there, because the counter reaction is that you see so many brands without a soul and with an empty concept. Luckily, there’s every year new founders from whom we do see the real passion. But it’s getting increasingly difficult.
Sometimes, a bigger group can buy the brand. But if the soul of the brand is still there and if they don’t go, suddenly, mass distribution, then we will keep the brand.
HAVE THERE EVER BEEN TIMES WHEN YOU WORRIED ABOUT THE SURVIVAL OF THE BUSINESS?
No, luckily not. Because we’ve always had growth, even there was a big economic crisis in Europe in 2008 and 2009 and we saw many customers losing their jobs. But we also saw new customers in our shop every day.
The hardest thing sometimes is cash-flow management, though. Because when you’re a growing company, the business requires a lot of capital. And the stock of a new brand, you always must prepay first. Our collection of brands is always expanding.
Building a new store, we never choose any cheaper alternatives. It’s almost a one-million-euro investment for one new store.
Now we have a very good structure with very smart financial people. And I have the nicest cash-flow sheets in Excel. But in the early days, it was my little notes and I had to do the financial planning myself without a good CFO. And it could happen sometimes that I could not pay myself a salary for three or four months. Because first is the staff, then the suppliers, then the landlords and tax.
So, of course, there have been moments sometimes when I had to hold my breath.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO MENTION NAMES, BUT THERE MUST BE QUITE A FEW EXAMPLES OF BRANDS THAT YOU THOUGHT WOULD DO WELL IN SKINS BUT DIDN’T SUCCEED IN THE END?
Yeah, of course. Every brand we select and launch, we want to always be in our collection, because our goal is long-term partnerships, like Diptyque, Aesop, Laura Mercier or Creed.
But sometimes you launch a brand, do a press day, activities, all the stuff from your marketing calendar and training, and you see after, say, two years, the customer’s not buying it in the end.
Then it’s very difficult to call the brand owner to say, “Sorry, you know, I like you as a person, we’ve tried everything, but the brand is not selling.” That I would say is the most difficult thing and is a learning along the way.
AND THEN YOU GET EXAMPLES OF BRANDS THAT DO WELL IN SKINS IN THE NETHERLANDS BUT NOT NECESSARILY IN SOUTH AFRICA…
Yes, for example, our Skins Boxes are a huge success both in the Netherlands and South Africa. People love them.
To buy these boxes with all the gift-with-purchase sizes and with a good deal of value, we always see a lot of traction after we launch them, with certain perfumes hitting the charts in the Netherlands and doing nothing in South Africa.
YOU’VE HAD MAJOR INVESTMENT RECENTLY IN THE BUSINESS. AT WHAT STAGE DID IT BECOME NECESSARY TO GO THAT ROUTE?
I started the business with Michiel Poelmans as a 50-50 partnership in terms of shares. After 10 years, he moved to America with a new wife and to start a new life, then I had another investor, a friend whose father invested the first loan into Skins. And along the way, until 2023, I was lucky in my network to have five friends who were also entrepreneurs and had cash to invest.
“I wanted to go to Germany because brands in our portfolio were all saying we have such a hard time finding the right partners there”
I saw so much potential in the market of opening more than one store per year. We needed more cash to go faster. I wanted to open five or six stores a year, and I wanted to go to Germany because many brands in our portfolio were all saying we have such a hard time finding the right partners there.
As mentioned previously, building one new store takes, like, a million euros, cash, and then it’s dead cash because part stock and part just your interior, it takes a long time to earn it back.
I started thinking, how should we do this? We needed growth money, but retail and banks are a difficult mix, because retail is about bankruptcy in the news in the last few years, with many chains going bankrupt because of the Internet and changing consumer behaviour.
The only thing was to find an investor partner, so we worked with a speciality firm who seek investors. We had a good interest of 20 parties, which was a lot, even to the surprise of the advisory company.
We had many, many talks and really had the luxury of choosing the right partner, Vendis Capital, who we’ve worked with now for over a year. In the past we could only open one store per year. Since the entrance of Vendis as partner, our goal is eight to 10 stores per year divided over the Netherlands (the plan is around 20 in this country), Belgium and Germany.
Vendis also provide us with lots of people. The right people.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
You have to imagine that all these 25 years, I was the one standing on the construction floor with the construction company [laughs], realising the show.
Really time consuming. Now we have a team of experienced builders to help with this. Also on finance, software development.
ARE YOUR PREVIOUS INVESTORS STILL INVOLVED?
In the end, investment companies only want shareholders on board who work in the company, not shareholders with a passive role. They cannot carry too many silent investors. So my friend investors had to exit, too.
Now we have Vendis, Claudia Pouw-Dullaart the CEO, me and the management team as the shareholders. South Africa is a separate entity.
DO YOUR STAFF HAVE SHARES IN THE BUSINESS?
Yes, we have a separate part of the shares for staff, so they can also invest with their own personal savings.
It’s all very strict with tax rules, so we cannot give them any bonuses. It must come from their own savings. It’s a great way to have staff involved beyond obviously getting paid well or that kind of thing.
YOU SAID AT THE START OF OUR CALL YOU’RE GOING ON A BREAK TOMORROW WITH YOUR FAMILY. WILL YOU SWITCH OFF PROPERLY, OR ARE YOU GOING TO TAKE WORK WITH YOU?
I always carry my laptop, which I don’t mind. It’s my rhythm for the last 25 years. I have a nice holiday when I don’t open my laptop with a thousand emails [laughs]. So I just keep up a little bit. One hour a day maximum.
See more on the Skins Netherlands and Skins South Africa websites.
