IN A NUTSHELL
type
family business
length / size
3 months
4 beez consultants
21 managers on client side
scope
Europe
INNOVATION
Consumer profiling
Design Thinking
Ideation & concept
Co-creation (Hackathon)
Founded in 1959 in Brittany, France, Yves Rocher is France’s leading beauty brand and it operates in 90 markets globally through over 3,000 owned shops. Since its inception, Yves Rocher promises to reconnect consumers with nature, a commitment reflected in its green packaging and plant imagery. The brand maintains a botanical garden in Brittany, conserving 1,500 plant species, and cultivates 60 hectares of fields using agro-ecology, with 93% of its products made in Brittany.
Dedicated to promoting sustainability and social progress, Yves Rocher is aligned with France’s Circular Economy Plan, which mandates no disposable plastics by 2040 and other waste reduction goals.
To support this transition, Yves Rocher needed groundbreaking innovation that would add value for both consumers and shareholders. This required collaboration across all departments: corporate social responsibility, sales, finance, R&D, marketing and production.
In March 2021, Yves Rocher’s Global Marketing PMO Director, Céline Damour, partnered with beez, a consultancy with extensive experience in innovation management, including in sustainable packaging, to take on this challenge.
Reframe
Yves Rocher had already decided to pursue a refill-at-home reuse model and identified five consumer personas.
beez reviewed 1,142 pages of data and created a 20-slide presentation summarising key consumer insights to refine these personas and their customer journey.
Several online meetings between beez and Yves Rocher helped prepare pre-reading materials and the co-creation workshop agenda. A week before the workshop, beez sent a 60-slide presentation with inspiring sustainable stories and insights about Yves Rocher’s customers and held an online conference to address any concerns.
Create
On 19-20 May, a two-day offsite co-creation workshop took place in Brittany. An ice-breaker dinner the night before helped participants, including new employees, get acquainted after months of remote work due to COVID-19.
Day 1 – Ideation
Participants split into three sub-groups for ideation sessions, using consumer personas and sustainable stories to generate packaging solutions. The day ended with a session to evaluate ideas based on desirability, convenience, effort for reuse, relevance of the sustainable claim, and environmental impact.
Day 2 – Prototyping
The team developed prototypes from the selected ideas, creating consumer concepts and working with a graphic designer to sketch packaging ideas.
beez provided a draft wrap-up two days after the workshop, with a final version sent on 4 June 2021, after feedback from Yves Rocher.
Outcome
Through collaborative efforts involving Céline Damour, her team, and 17 other employees from various departments, Yves Rocher successfully designed and launched fully recyclable eco-refills in March 2024. It required a redesign of its production process and new sourcing practices.
The 100% recyclable eco-refills contain 4 times less plastic than standard bottles and are, like the refillable bottle, made from recycled plastic collected from coastlines and certified Ocean Bound Plastic.
Adopting them means both reducing plastic consumption and contributing to the decontamination of coastlines.
How well you kick-start an innovation project is a key driver for its success. Taking the time to build consensus, align internal stakeholders, conduct research and design consumer personas does make a difference. Thanks to BEEZ’s co-creation approach, we created internal commitment and advanced prototypes that helped us sustain a 3-year innovation effort.
In a nutshell, key success factors were:
- Client Boldness: With its long-standing innovation culture, Yves Rocher was ready to encourage consumers to change their habits and adopt refill and reuse practices.
- Co-creation Commitment: Engaging 21 executives from seven departments in a focused (offsite), two-day co-creation workshop centered on the refill-at-home reuse model.
- Strategic Alignment: Ensuring stakeholder alignment and clear consumer personas.
