“Why is the skincare industry not in great shape right now? Because everything is the same,” says Sue Y Nabi. The 49-year-old beauty industry veteran is speaking in her light-filled apartment overlooking London’s Hyde Park. “I’m fed up with ‘miracles’,” she continues. “And I don’t believe in focus groups — they’re good for telling you you’re not making mistakes, but they don’t give you the recipe for success.”
As she speaks, Nabi, a formidable figure with raven hair, gestures towards a coffee table covered with forest-green samples of her new skincare brand, Orveda, which will launch at Harvey Nichols, London, on July 1. The range is the culmination of three years of work and a sizeable personal investment from herself and her business partner, Nicolas Vu, whose background — unexpectedly — is in hip hop and music artist management.
The brand will come under intense scrutiny from the get-go. This is Nabi’s first independent venture since leaving L’Oréal in 2013, where she was president of Lancôme worldwide. Her reputation within the beauty industry as one of its most influential figures is unparalleled. In 2012, she created Lancôme’s bestselling fragrance, La Vie Est Belle, securing Lancôme’s status as the number one world luxury beauty brand. At the time, the brand’s record in fragrance was faltering; Lancôme went on to become the number one in Europe and five years later the perfume is still in the top three worldwide. Nabi helped expand the business to one with a turnover of €2.3bn. She was inclusive before being inclusive became a brand-concern. As president of L’Oréal Paris she changed its famous tagline, “Because I’m worth it”, to the less arrogant-sounding, “Because we’re worth it”, and hired the 68-year-old Jane Fonda as one of their faces. After building the company into a €4bn business, she left L’Oréal in 2013 and although L’Oréal rivals courted her for numerous consulting roles, she politely declined them all.