INTERVIEW Tim Probert – Editor, Personal Care Global
Michael Haspel is global vice president of personal & home care at Clariant. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina in the US and originally from New Jersey, Michael talks to editor Tim Probert about Clariant’s personal care strategy, opportunities in China and other trends
Tim Probert (TP): How long have you been in your current position as global vice president of personal & home care? Michael Haspel (MH): We restructured at the very end of 2022 and I started in this role officially at the start of 2023 with the new organisation in place. We reorganised from a regional
structure where each of us covered many market segments. We now have a global structure where we each cover single market segments. Currently, I have the personal, home and health care market segments.
TP: How long have you been with Clariant? MH: Since 2008. I started my career at Clariant in the industrial segments and then I moved to corporate roles like strategy and working in our commercial excellence team. From there, I moved back into a regional role. In that regional role, I was the sponsor for our strategy for personal care. So when we reorganised, I became the natural fit for heading up the segment that included the personal care business.
TP: What is Clariant’s strategy for personal care? MH: We had always identified active ingredients as a high growth area that we needed to participate more greatly in. After a few attempts to make some acquisitions that didn’t work out, we created an organic business. Today we call that Clariant
Actives and Natural Origins, and that was founded through partnerships with several active ingredient companies like BioSpectrum and PAT. Then we started developing
our own active ingredient portfolio with our research centre in Toulouse, France. We followed that with the acquisition of Beraca, first
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with a partnership. We built up our position and then acquired it fully. All that has become Actives
and Natural Origins, which we are now going to merge into the Lucas Meyer Cosmetics business, which is our latest acquisition in that area.
With the Lucas Meyer
acquisition, we feel we’ve built a leading active ingredient business and we expect that to take us forward with more strategic investments made by that team in that area.
TP: What do you mean by merging into the Lucas Meyer Cosmetics business? MH: The current Actives and Natural Origins business plus Baraca will be integrated into the Lucas Meyer entity. Lucas Meyer will remain independent of our overall functional ingredients segment for personal care. Lucas Meyer Cosmetics will continue to be operated as a global business by Antonio Lara, like he did as part of IFF, and will be a part of our Care Chemicals business unit along with our existing functional ingredient business that I am managing. We will maintain a sales
team for each portfolio and work together in the market place with our customers.
TP: In terms of visibility, the branding, you’ve changed the branding to Lucas Meyer by Clariant, and have different booths at trade shows. MH: At future trade shows, when we have the ability to merge the booths, we will have one presence – starting with in-cosmetics Global next year. We’ll still have two booths in Bangkok [in-cosmetics Asia on 5-7 November]. That’s more of a timing issue with pre- existing bookings. The Lucas Meyer Cosmetics brand will stay. It is a highly
INTERVIEW
Eyes on the prize
valuable brand, and it will remain part of Clariant branding.
TP: Are you looking at making further acquisitions in personal care? MH: We’re always looking at further acquisitions.
TP: Do you think there’s a particular gap in your portfolio? MH: At this point in time, the biggest gap in our portfolio would be natural emollients. That’s an area we would love to make some more inorganic moves to boost our portfolio. We have an organically
developed portfolio that we are working with, but I think it’s another area we could accelerate or would strategically be good for us to accelerate.
TP: What about sun care? MH: We acquired a portion of Vivimed Labs in India, and that has a full portfolio of organic sunscreens, UV filters, and we are actively selling those everywhere except for the US. We don’t have the registrations required for sales of those products in the US.
TP: Do you think the US authorities will change their mind on UV filters? MH: The US seems to have a different direction from the rest of the world when it comes to UV filters. The rest of the world is focused on organic UV filters and going more towards chemistries that are reef safe and safe for the contact on human skin. Europe in particular is going
away from inorganic filters. In the June 2024 PERSONAL CARE
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