While he can understand the urge to cut corners when a brand is facing economic headwinds, Bollati said that for Davines, that isn’t an option.
“The biggest challenges to profitability, especially in the last five years, have come from the social and economic instability affecting markets worldwide,” Bollati shared. “Fluctuating consumer confidence, rising costs of raw materials, geopolitical uncertainties, and global disruptions have all created pressure on margins and made everything more complex.”
In the face of global instability, Bollati believes it’s more important than ever for brands to double down on core values. For Davines, that’s sustainability and product quality. “People recognize and respond to authenticity,” he said. “When consumers see a brand that remains coherent, transparent, and responsible—especially when the world around us is unstable—trust grows. And that trust turns into loyalty, which is one of the strongest drivers of sustainable profitability.”
Central to the brand’s quality-control mission is Davines Group Village, a corporate-owned, carbon-neutral compound comprising a Scientific Garden, a Greenhouse, and a Green Kilometer. Also serving as corporate headquarters and home to the company’s Research & Innovation Laboratories and production and manufacturing facilities, this is where roughly 600 employees clock-in each day. (Worldwide, another approximately 400 Davines staffers are sprinkled among the company’s nine branches in New York, London, Paris, Dusseldorf, Deventer, Bilbao, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Mexico City.)
The 3,000-square-meter Garden, inspired by the UNESCO World Heritage site in Padua known as the Garden of Simples” and designed with proportions that nod to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, is cultivated using the company’s regenerative organic farming methods. The Greenhouse contains species that aren’t adaptive to the region’s climate but are nonetheless useful for laboratory research. And the Green Kilometer, a tree-lined belt, offsets harmful emissions from cars.
“The inauguration in 2018 of the Village was one of the great milestones of our journey,” said Bollati, recalling the family-owned company’s humble 1980s roots in its basement and garage. “It took many years, as we wanted to build a concrete representation of our values as a company.”
Tapping Italian architects Matteo Thun and Luca Colombo for the core structures and incorporating the expertise of London-based landscape specialists del Buono Gazerwitz for the green areas, the Village is considered one of the most visually and philosophically compelling workplaces in the country.
But as stunning and productive as it is, the Village is limited in terms of the ingredients it yields for the brand’s wide range of products. And that’s where the Davines alliance with Rodale Institute, an agricultural research and education nonprofit in Pennsylvania, comes into play. In 2021, the two entities collaborated on the European Regenerative Organic Center (EROC), situated directly across from the Davines headquarters.
A field spanning 17 hectares (approximately 42 acres), EROC is the site of experiments that compare and contrast conventional and regenerative organic agriculture (ROA) methods. So far, the partnership has yielded yarrow and calendula, which Davines tapped for a shampoo and a combination hair, face, and body butter.
Even more importantly, EROC is helping to further the Davines mission to bolster true, legitimate sustainability. “Through EROC, we aim not only to investigate the benefits of ROA, but also to carry on advocacy activities, through which we can inspire partners, organizations, institutions, universities, and farmers to embrace these practices,” said Bollati. “Hopefully, together, we can create a supply chain for ingredients that ensures ever growing sustainability.”