Charlotte Tilbury sales soared in 2020, sale price to Puig was £1.3bn

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Dec 24, 2021

Charlotte Tilbury saw rising sales during the height of the pandemic last year with online accounting for two-thirds of transactions and the company able to repay £3.2 million of furlough cash, accounts filed at Companies House show.

The eight-year-old cosmetics and skincare brand was sold for £1.3 billion during the year to Spain’s Puig, the accounts revealed, which is higher than the £1 billion price tag that had been widely assumed at the time. Make-up-artist-turned-beauty-entrepreneur Tilbury held a controlling stake at the time of the sale so would have received hundreds of millions of pounds from the deal. She remains a minority shareholder today.

So what about those rising sales? They were up 11.3% in 2020 to £258.5 million as key markets such as the UK, mainland Europe and Asia continued to buy the brand even though lockdowns were in force for part of the period.

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Those lockdowns meant its stores were shut for months at a time and this caused online sales to more than double. They rose 115% to £109 million. They were helped by a tech-enabled virtual store complete with Tilbury avatar and e-video beauty consultations. Important too was the fact that the company continued with its launch programme while some of its peers delayed launches in an environment where make-up in particular took a back seat.

But it seems that Tilbury’s strong social media presence helped keep the brand in consumers’ minds, something that was crucial at a time when social media comms were even more to the fore than usual. Tilbury herself has 4.4 million followers on Instagram.

Despite the higher sales, the company reported a pre-tax loss of £9.9 million (after a profit of £11.6 million in the previous year) due to one-off costs of £29 million linked to the Puig buyout. But underlying profits rose close to 44% at £32 million.