When Alexis Perakis-Valat assumed leadership of L’Oréal China in 2010, the country had grown to over 1 billion euros in sales and was already the company’s third-largest market.
Perakis-Valat took the reins thinking the heady days of rapid transformation were over. He was even a bit wistful about it.
“I was looking at old photographs and would say, ‘I wish I had lived through that phase,’” the executive reminisced during a recent interview.
Then came a pivotal meeting with Alibaba’s Daniel Zhang, who shared his vision of creating a digital mall for brands, to be called Tmall. Perakis-Valat immediately saw the potential and sprang into action.
L’Oréal Paris became the first international beauty brand to launch on Tmall in 2010. Six years later, when Perakis-Valat departed Shanghai to take on the role of president of L’Oréal’s Consumer Products Division, e-commerce had soared from zero percent to 21 percent of L’Oréal sales in the country, and overall turnover had more than doubled to almost $2 billion.
Now, as the recently appointed CEO of L’Oréal USA and president, North America, Perakis-Valat is charged with leading the organization through the AI revolution, all while growing the share of the world’s largest beauty company in its number-one market.
“My big obsession is to make sure that we prepare the teams for the future. It is performing while transforming,” said Perakis-Valat, during his first in-depth interview since assuming the role. The time is 8 a.m., and the executive, a morning person, is energetic and upbeat. “It’s about strengthening our teams and upskilling them and making them future-fit.”
The consequences are significant, given the scope of L’Oréal’s operations in North America. The U.S. is the largest subsidiary of the L’Oréal Groupe, accounting for 26.6 percent of its business in 2025 with $11 billion in sales. It numbers over 13,000 employees and business operations across 15 states, including headquarters in New York and offices in Los Angeles, a research and innovation center in New Jersey, and manufacturing sites in Arkansas, Kentucky and New Jersey, with two-thirds of the products sold in the U.S. manufactured in North America. The company operates retail stores in all 50 states, including 862 SalonCentric locations, 70 freestanding Aesop stores, 55 Kiehl’s stores and nine for Luxe beauty.
Perakis-Valat’s mandate is to leverage L’Oréal’s scale, while also integrating the opportunities that AI opens up, a role he’s been working toward for his entire career. A one-time rugby player, Perakis-Valat is often compared to a coach by those who know him best — intensely competitive but a team player who champions his colleagues and enables them to make the big plays.
“Alexis is a demanding and charismatic leader, who brings energy to the teams and helps them prioritize and focus on the big wins,” said L’Oréal chief executive officer Nicolas Hieronimus, who named Perakis-Valat to the role last September. “He combines strong analytical skills, beauty expertise and strategic acumen. His culture of delivery and famous fighting spirit will undoubtedly accelerate the already great momentum of our North American business.”
Alexis Perakis-Valat
Guerin Blask/WWD
Perakis-Valat took the reins on Jan. 1 and immediately hit the road. A scroll through his LinkedIn shows him on stage in Las Vegas for the Luxe division’s sales meeting one week, touring Walmart stores with Hieronimus and the executive committee in Bentonville, Ark., another. He attended the Sephora brand meeting in San Francisco, visited Canada to meet the teams there (and take in a Canadiens hockey game), landed in Washington State for retailer meetings and attended L’Oréal’s BeautyVerse conference in New York, taking smiling selfies every step of the way.
Engaging and energetic, he relishes getting to know the teams and his favorite question to ask when he meets people is what advice they would give him. Like many L’Oréal senior executives, he has had stints in Asia, Europe and the U.S., formative experiences that shaped his approach to taking on a new role.
“Early in my career, I learned to learn by listening,” said Perakis-Valat. “That was particularly true in China, which was like taking a cultural jump into the unknown. It felt like riding a dragon.
“I learned a little bit of the language, but you don’t master it, so you’ve got to listen and look at all of the weak signals,” continued Perakis-Valat. “It’s about being very alert about everything to understand what’s really going on.”
Colleagues describe Perakis-Valat as equal parts competitive and personable, an exacting leader who uses humor to defuse tense situations, someone who inspires his teams with intelligence and warmth.
“Alexis is performance driven, but never distant. What makes him different is that he is personal, not corporate,” said Dr. Malina Ngai, group CEO of AS Watson Group, the Hong Kong-based retail giant with over 17,000 stores. “I manage performance country by country rather than by region, and in every conversation, Alexis remembers exactly who is who in each local team. Not just the country general manager, but the individuals behind the business. You feel he truly knows the people driving the business.”
“He is results-driven, very straightforward, fact-based,” agreed Barbara Lavernos, the deputy CEO of L’Oréal in charge of research, innovation and technology, who has known Perakis-Valat for over 30 years. “He knows thousands of KPIs. He has an incredible memory and has mastered the metrics of data, which allows him to extract key insights. He can tell you how any given category is doing in any given country,” she continued. “When I have a question on the market share of a competitor or us in a category, I go to Alexis directly. I don’t go to AI. He is my human L’Oréal GPT.”
At the same time, he’s adept at creating an overarching vision that teams can rally behind. As head of the Consumer Products Division, Perakis-Valat was able to make a large division ever larger. One of his big moves was to reenergize growth in the hair sector with a plan called Haircare 2020. “That was the trigger that made this category the number-one growth driver of the division in recent years,” said Hieronimus. “One of his favorite lines is ‘vision without execution is just hallucination. This was a perfect demonstration of that.’”
Sustainability is a key tenet of his leadership vision, and he implemented refillable formats, the use of lightweight recycled plastics in packaging, environmental labeling initiatives to help consumers understand the carbon and water footprint of their products and more while heading up CPD. “Beauty is and must continue to be a potent force for good,” said Perakis-Valat. “My approach is guided by three convictions: performance and purpose are inseparable; global challenges demand bold partnerships, and the greater our scale, the greater our responsibility to grow sustainably.”
Perakis-Valat also drove the company’s K-beauty strategy, rolling out 3CE globally and overseeing the acquisition of Dr. G. “He can pivot from high-level strategic thinking to getting his hands into all of the details without missing a beat,” said Cyril Chapuy, president of L’Oréal Luxe. “He made CPD way faster, more agile and more focused towards its growth engines. He’s always looking out for that sweet spot where we can use our global scale without losing our local speed.”
Amy Mayes | Amy Mayes Photograph
Although it’s early days, Perakis-Valat’s impact is already being felt. L’Oréal reported that first-quarter sales in North America rose 2 percent on a reported growth basis, with adjusted like-for-like growth of 7.6 percent, noting that all divisions posted strong performances.
It’s a strong start for a role that is high profile both inside and outside of L’Oréal, with former CEOs Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones and Jean-Paul Agon both rising to the top spot in the company after stints in the U.S. market. While Hieronimus is still years away from retirement, many company insiders believe this assignment will be an important testing ground for Perakis-Valat.
Already, as president of the Consumer Products Division, the group’s largest with 2025 sales of 16.09 billion euros, Perakis-Valat has demonstrated an exceptional ability to scale. When he assumed the role in 2016, the division had sales of 11.99 billion euros — meaning it grew almost 35 percent under his purview.
“Alexis has an infectious competitive energy. He always knows where the ball is going, can motivate everyone to pivot when needed and always has your back,” said Trisha Ayyagari, formerly the global brand president of Maybelline New York who is now the general manager of YSL, Prada and MiuMiu in the U.S.
“When it comes to competitiveness, beating the market is just table stakes,” she said. “Outdoing yourself year after year is the goal — how can we bring better innovation, understand consumers better? Setting yourself as the bar of the competition is a unique quality.”
During Perakis-Valat’s tenure, L’Oréal Paris, the world’s largest beauty brand, consistently outperformed the market over the last three years, with over 50 percent growth in hair care. The learnings from wins like that have helped shaped the executive’s strategic vision.
“It’s about building a very powerful, complementary team of talents from all horizons, very diverse in terms of cultures, with a blend of people from L’Oréal and also some from the outside,” said Perakis-Valat. “It’s also about brand building and innovation, and one of the things that I’m most proud of is in a world where everyone talks about indie brands, we had the number-one beauty brand in the world outperforming the market in the last three years.”
As he gets even deeper into the U.S. business, insiders expect to see a similar trajectory. “Alexis will take the pulse of U.S. society and U.S. needs, and will make it happen,” said Lavernos. “He knows everyone at L’Oréal — every factory, every lab, every brand — and he’ll make sure we are even better in addressing U.S. consumers’ precise needs, instead of having products that are fantastic for lots of people. He will orient the entire L’Oréal organization to make sure that all of the capabilities are dedicated to pleasing U.S. customers.”
Already Perakis-Valat sees white space across divisions, noting that key categories like fragrance, skin-care serums and hair treatments are all underpenetrated in the U.S.
Understanding the evolving demographic dynamics of America is another key focus. “If you look at the demographic structure of the U.S. and project that into the future, it’s very positive for the beauty market,” he said. “Latino and multicultural consumers spend more on average on beauty than Caucasian and that’s going to power the market. And if you look to men and women who are 55-plus, that’s also a very interesting source of growth for the future.”
Like Agon who took the reins of the U.S. business just days before the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, Perakis-Valat has stepped into the role in the midst of one of the most volatile periods in American history. The outbreak of war with Iran caused gas prices to spike early in the spring, with consumer confidence plummeting as financial concerns increased, all compounded by a weakened dollar and continued uncertainty around tariffs.
Alexis Perakis-Valat
For now, the CEO is confident that L’Oréal’s cross-category model will help it weather any potential storms on the horizon. “Our offer enables consumers to get great quality at accessible pricing and at different levels,” he said. “The power of L’Oréal is that we have an offer for people who may be struggling, and at the same time, we’ve just announced the completion of the Kering deal, and we see incredible potential in the high-end of the business, too.”
The impact of AI on L’Oréal’s workforce has the potential to be equally as destabilizing, and here, Perakis-Valat is intensely focused. “My big obsession is to make sure that we prepare our teams for the future. I want to make sure that our brands go fast and develop fast, but that our teams transform as well,” he said.
“There’s a fine line between mobilization and anxiety,” Perakis-Valat continued. “There is a lot of noise today and it’s about lowering the noise and seeing the positive. Our teams have embraced e-commerce, digital, now it’s Gen AI. That is one of our fortes, but another is that we never rest on our laurels, and I really want to make sure that we keep elevating our teams to face the future.”
Here, Perakis-Valat draws on his experience in China. “We had to totally transform our organization and manage people through their skills, not their experience, because by definition you couldn’t hire e-commerce experts because e-commerce was new for everybody,” he said. “So you had to look at who was good with numbers, for example, and who was good at relationships, and then you had to reshuffle the organization at lightspeed to adapt.”
When Perakis-Valat says lightspeed, he means it. Asmita Dubey, today the chief digital and marketing officer of the L’Oréal Groupe, lived through a similar transformation firsthand with e-commerce in China. Perakis-Valat hired her to be CMO of L’Oréal China when she was the managing director of the advertising agency WPP, overseeing L’Oréal’s business in the country.
Dubey recalls starting her job on Jan. 4, 2013. Two days later, Perakis-Valat charged her with preparing a presentation for L’Oréal’s global strategic committee meeting on the then new e-commerce business in China less than three weeks later. (“In between, I had to go to New York and Paris to do my induction,” she recalled with a laugh.)
“At the time e-commerce was about 2-and-a-half percent of the business. Then we went to 5, then from 5 to 10, 10 to 15,” Dubey said. “Once you understand that this is where the business is going, this is where the consumer is, this is where the platform is — it becomes a 24-hour obsession.
“Every time we saw something new, we’d message each other,” she continued. “There is that pacing, that drive, to master a subject, to be excellent at it and to bring the whole company together.”
The same drive is as evident today as it was 31 years ago when Perakis-Valat was recruited by L’Oréal while fulfilling his French military duty in the navy. While he didn’t know much about the beauty business back then, he had an insatiable curiosity and desire to discover the world. Not much has changed.
“I love this business — it’s a blend of the emotional and functional, of intuition and analytics,” said Perakis-Valat. “It’s always changing. Every day is a new day.
“I’m a guy who gets bored pretty quickly,” he continued, “and I haven’t ever gotten bored since coming to the U.S. I’m learning new things every single day.”
