Company

The Story Of The Innovation Company

We'll make it our way

The Innovation Company® has developed, manufactured and offered a wide and functional range of innovative cosmetic raw materials for 37 years.

Originally named Créations Couleurs®, we were specialized only in colour cosmetics. Since then the product range has grown also to sun care and skin care, and hence two new divisions along with Créations Couleurs® were developed; Créations Solaires® and Créations Soins®.

Today all three divisions offer constantly new innovative raw materials and operate globally under the brand The Innovation Company®.

A COSMETIC DISCOVERY AND ADVENTURE

by Alain Saintrond

“I have been fortunate to be born in a professional world of sheer sensorial pleasure; beauty, fashion and fragrances.”

My great grand father was a chemical engineer who helped Grasse to make the first aldehydes at the turn of the 19th century. This lead to two perfumery bases, still so famous today, Coty Chypre in 1905 and the gracious Chanel No.5 in 1921. This floral aldehyde is clearly an example of a successful marriage between nature and synthetics, making the benchmarks of perfumery for over 100 years already.

My young youth is one of the senses, thanks to the grandparents, who were entrepreneurs in textiles, colors, food and wine. Being explained at age of nine, which white Bordeaux to choose with an Atlantic snapper fished that morning, made me also to understand the chance of having a possibility to make choices.

My parents were great inspiration, as well. My mother, who was a model, passionate about what to wear, and where, how, and why, gave me the feeling for the Air du Temps. My father, a great sales person for leading cosmetic manufacturers, as Max Factor, Elisabeth Arden, Lancôme, Balmain and YSL, taught me a feeling of ever changing trends.

I was fortunate to have worked in my early adult years in two sections of the C&T world, fragrance and colour. The fragrance compounding I experienced with International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. (IFF) and Bush Boake Allen Inc. (BBA). This was an eight-year wonderment of olfactive heaven. It involved history of products, companies, and how companies came and went. Then fortunate again, I had a chance to work with a world leader of cosmetics colors, the Mearl Corporation, the leader in quality and color of pearlescent pigments.

As you work for others, you are confronted to two main catalysts for creating your own company. First one is the frustration of not seeing your projects being allowed to exist and prosper. Second one is to see, which incredible opportunities can be lost by making wrong decisions, slow reactivity or just by internal political reasons.

Convinced by my skills as an entrepreneur in 1987, I started my own company, Creations Couleurs®. Originally it was mainly involved with colour cosmetics, but since then the company has evolved to cover also sun care and skin care, today it is called The Innovation Company®. The division for colour cosmetics is Creations Couleurs®, sun protection Creations Solaires® and skin care Creations Soins®.

What have we done since 1987?

I started in a home office and since those days we have built three buildings, including laboratories, offices and production plants. This year we are starting a fourth one, which is needed for warehousing, as the company grows at a rate of doubling its turnover about every five years. We have the most fully equipped R&D and analytical laboratories in our field for developing new products, and GMP facilities for manufacturing them. We are present with several affiliates on three continents, America, Asia and Europe.

Where are we going over the next three years?

At the moment we are very inspired by colour. We have given colour several dimensions and are presenting new trends in five different textures. These trends are designed for the next three years: 2015, 2016 and 2017.

In sun protection we are focusing to develop ever more performing UV-filters, with excellent application and cosmetic feel. Mainly they are physical UV-filters, which do not diffuse into the skin and capillary system.

In skin care we are showing different delivery systems for high performance efficiency. We are also demonstrating the synergy between synthetic and natural materials, and how to make them strongly to perform together. We are also finally working in the area of hair care, bringing new functionalities by using our volume technology.

As we are very fast decision makers, reactive to the market needs and definitely full of innovative ideas, in three years we might be involved with totally different things, what is planned today. That is the freedom, which I have in my company. Is it easy, no! But is it interesting, YES!