L’Oréal Appoints Lavernos President, Research, Innovation & Technologies

Barbara Lavernos, currently executive vice president, chief technologies and operations officer, will lead a new department including research, innovation and technologies, as of Feb. 1, 2021. She will be succeeded in her current role by  Antoine Vanlaeys. Jean-Paul Agon has decided to appoint Lavernos, who will continue leading Information Technologies (IT) and the major BeautyTech transformation project.

An engineer by training, Lavernos joined the Group in 1991 where she has pursued a diverse career. She became director of the Rambouillet plant in 2000 and was appointed global chief procurement officer in 2004. She was named general manager of Travel Retail for the Luxury Division in 2012, and for the entire Travel Retail department in 2013. In 2014, Agon appointed her chief operations officer and a member of the Group’s Executive Committee. 

She led an extraordinary transformation and modernisation, embarking all parts of the business on a profound digital transformationand redesigned the supply chain to increase flexibility and agility to respond to channel shifts, in particular the explosion of e-commerce. At the end of 2018, Agon also asked her to lead the “IT revolution,” with the ambition to become the world champion of “Beauty Tech.”

“I would like to thank Laurent Attal very warmly for his major contribution to the Group over the years. Laurent is a visionary who has a profound impact wherever he leads, giving organisations a new strategic lease of life. I wish him much joy and happiness in his new life,” said Agon. “To succeed him, I have chosen a woman of conviction, who has always addressed first the Group’s collective objectives, demonstrating strategic vision on the one hand and leading her team to perfect operational execution on the other. I have total confidence that Barbara Lavernos will apply again her great leadership skills and extraordinary energy to this new challenge, which is crucial for the future of L'Oréal. I am convinced that the combination of R&I and Technology will enable us to invent the Beauty of the future: a Beauty which relies on R&I – at the historic heart of our model based on science and innovation, now allied with new opportunities offered by technology.”