Waldencast's Michel Brousset: Beauty brand building is about "managing this level of complexity"

After 20 years in big beauty, with stints at L'Oréal and Procter & Gamble, Waldencast founder and CEO Michel Brousset set out to start over, with an eye on the future.

"We started with a dream, which was to create this big global company, but you [have to] start as an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur, just like founders are," said Brousset on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Brousset was most recently group president of L’Oréal's consumer products division in North America. In 2019, he started Waldencast by investing in and providing operational support for emerging brands. Early investments included refillable cosmetics line Kjaer Weis and Francisco Costa's beauty debut Costa Brazil, which was recently sold to Amyris. And while that is still one arm of the business, brand incubation is also a focus. It debuted its first foray last week, a travel-inspired line dubbed Whind, and it has three other brands in the works.

With multiple goals and scale as its focus, Waldencast recently announced its special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC), Waldencast Acquisition Corp, with $633 million to invest.

"As we were developing these two areas of how to create this new, next-generation company -- in a way, we're creating it from a blank sheet of paper, the way we want to create it and with the values that we want to create -- we started thinking relatively early that we wanted to do larger acquisitions," he said. "When we started developing and firming up how to do that is where we landed with a SPAC, as an efficient way of building that capability."

Still, Brousset said the focus for Waldencast is to bet on brands with a similar ethos. "If you look at all the brands in our portfolio, they have certain threads or flows between them, some commonality between them. They are brands that have in their DNA, not just a perspective on beauty, but also a perspective relative to important social values like sustainability, inclusivity, responsibility and conscious entrepreneurship, which happen to be our values," said Brousset.