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On Monday, investment firm L Catterton announced it had taken a large minority stake in high perfumery brand Ex Nihilo.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but co-founder Benoît Verdier told The Business of Beauty that in 2025, the brand’s retail sales exceeded $100 million, and sources close to the brand said the stake exceeds the $29 million position taken by French private equity firm Eurazeo in 2024. Last week, BoF reported that Eurazeo was shutting down its brand investment arm.
“We started tracking Ex Nihilo a few years back, looking for fragrance brands with momentum and a deep brand resonance,” said L Catterton partner Miray Topay. Despite its heritage with LVMH, L Catterton has a smaller fragrance footprint with brands like Vyrao and Maison Berger. Ex Nihilo, co-founded in 2013 by Verdier, Sylvie Loday and Olivier Royère, was an early entrant to the niche perfume craze that has driven outsized growth for the fragrance category.
“[The category] is a bit opportunistic these days,” Verdier said. “Everyone is thinking, ‘I’m going to create my brand and make it sexy for a private equity firm.’ But for us, it was absolutely the opposite.” The latin phrase Ex Nihilo, he points out, roughly translates to “from scratch.”
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The brand aims to recast French “haute parfumerie” with a fresh, future-forward aesthetic. The original collection included nine fragrances; now there are 78, priced between $165 and $365. In 2023, Ex Nihilo launched Blue Talisman, which has become another hero scent and signalled to L Catterton that the brand was “ready for its next stage of growth,” said Topay.
Early launches like Fleur Narcotique, nosed by a then-obscure young perfumer named Quentin Bisch, helped propel the brand onto influential dressing vanities — Hailey Bieber is a reported fan — and into the doors of retailers like Harrod’s and Bergdorf Goodman. The co-founders gambled on opening an expensive flagship store in 2014 on Paris’ Rue Saint-Honoré, steps from the tony Hotel Côstes and Ritz Paris, that has become a proof-of-concept for its high touch, personalised retail theatre; new flagships have since opened in Dubai and Los Angeles.
The brand’s 2026 plans include reopening its Paris flagship, expanding its presence at stockists like Galleries Lafayette and looking into new retail spaces in US cities with L Catterton’s support.
“Some of the brands we look at are often in a single channel or geography, and they do super well, but there’s a question mark around whether or not the brand or the product will resonate,” Topay said. “Although Ex Nihilo is at an earlier stage of their journey, they’ve had tremendous success in multiple markets in Europe, the US and even in parts of Asia.”
French Scents, Fresh Sensibility
While other homegrown fragrance labels focused on historical references to Louis the XIV or Madame de Pompadour, Verdier said the brand has been more inspired by French avant garde aesthetics — less the perfumed halls of Versailles, more I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid in the Louvre Palace’s main courtyard.
“We want ultimately not to bring you back, but to create your future memories,” Verdier said.
The co-founders intuited early on that perfumers would become celebrities in their own right, and won the early partnership of noses like Bisch at Givaudan. (Loday, an engineer, worked at the fragrance house.) But it also did not want Ex Nihilo to forgo fragrance’s original couture roots.
“Haute perfumery was [originally] reserved for the elite,” Verdier said. “It was bespoke, more or less.” One of Ex Nihilo’s differentiated offerings is called the Osmologue, which allows shoppers to customise existing scents like Fleur Narcotique to their preferences.
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Verdier also said the brand was interested in new layering formats, but it will be a slow and steady process — Ex Nihilo launched its first body lotion in 2014 and only introduced hand creams 10 years later.
“We are not opportunistic. We take our time,” Verdier said.
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