Marc Puig

Marc Puig Guasch is chief executive and president of Puig, which was founded in 1914 by his grandfather Antonio Puig i Castelló in Barcelona, Spain. Puig, a fragrance and fashion company with perfume licenses for labels including Prada, Valentino and Jean Paul Gaultier , made inroads into fashion through acquiring Paco Rabanne in the '90s. In 2018, Puig acquired a majority stake Dries Van Noten , one of the last independent fashion labels.

After studying industrial engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Puig received an MBA from Harvard University. Puig joined Antonio Puig S.A. as director of research and development and new product development, and in 1996 was appointed President of Puig in the US. By 2001, he returned to Barcelona to take the position of president of the fashion division, overseeing Carolina Herrera , Nina Ricci and Paco Rabanne.

Puig became chief executive in 2004 and took action to combat the financial state of the company, closing five of its 10 factories to focus solely on high-fashion and prestigious fragrance brands. Following the company’s revival, Puig became chairman of the board in 2007.

The company is gaining new relevance in ready-to-wear — a move that began when Puig acquired Paco Rabanne at the end of the 1990s. Having closed the Paco Rabanne fashion business in 2006, Puig relaunched the womenswear collection in 2011 under the creative direction of Manish Arora . That same year, the company purchased a controlling interest of 45 percent in Jean Paul Gaultier from Hermès, which saw Puig’s entrance into haute couture. In June 2018, Puig spearheaded the company’s acquisition of Dries Van Noten, becoming the majority owner of the brand.

In 2020, Puig acquired a majority participation in make up brand Charlotte Tilbury . And in January 2021 the Derma division was created to incorporate Apivita and Uriage, two dermo cosmetics brands that were part of the the family investments but not part of Puig's company portfolio. These two movements solidified the diversification of the group that now plays in three different categories: make-up, skincare and fragance, and fashion. In 2022 Puig acquired a majority participation in the Swedish brand Byredo and also in the Indian brand Kama Ayurveda and the Colombian brand Loto del Sur. 

In the last couple of years, Puig has also launched a beauty line for Dries Van Noten (fragrances and lipsticks) as well as a make-up line for Carolina Herrera. And it has created an ecosystem of technological solutions to overcome the digital barriers for perfume buying such as Wiki Parfum, The Scent Visualizer and Air Parfum. 

Puig became the Fragrance Foundation Hall of Fame honoree in 2017. In April 2018, Puig was announced as a member of the International Advisory Board for IESE, the graduate business school of the University of Navarra alongside Victor K Fung of Li Fung Group and Isak Andic of Mango.