His catwalk moment kicked off in New York with a show by Carolina Herrera, which Puig acquired back in 1995. The Puigs also own five other fashion houses including Jean-Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci, Rabanne, and Dries Van Noten, whose fragrance businesses are the heart of a company that now ranks amongst the top luxury groups on the planet.
In 2023, Puig scored a 19 percent increase in annual revenues to €4.3bn (approx. $5.1bn), and a 33 percent rise in EBITDA to €849m (approx. $1bn). Its current market cap ended January at €15.8bn (approx. $18.7bn) on the Barcelona exchange, up more than 60 percent in one year. And the family owns 74 percent of shares in the group, and 93 percent of the voting rights, muchas gracias.
Though very much under the radar compared to behemoths like Louis Vuitton or Gucci – the stars of rivals LVMH and Kering – Puig still has huge reach. When one adds in their scent brands L’Artisan Parfumeur, Penhaligon’s, and Byredo, skincare lines like Kama Ayurveda and Apivita, or makeup label Charlotte Tilbury, you might discover you, like many others, have bought a Puig product in the past year.
A classic Catalan, Marc Puig is a mixture of brimming self-confidence and quiet self-deprecation. When asked about the origin of the company by Antonio Puig Castelló in Barcelona back in 1914, Puig says: “My great grandfather was a farmer in a little town north of Barcelona,” whose potatoes’ early season growth made them popular in Britain.
He was sent by his father to the UK to finish his studies, where he began importing fragrances he discovered in London back to Spain. Business thrived, until General Franco introduced autarky, closing Spanish borders in 1939, at which point the Puigs launched their first scent, Agua Lavanda, an aromatic fougère made of Mediterranean essences in a novel boulder-shaped flacon.
By the sixties, the family realized they could never be successful in America without a French label, which led to a deal in 1968 with Paco Rabanne, the Spanish-born designer in Paris.
Next came Herrera (1995), Nina Ricci, whose iconic L’Air du Temps (1998) remains an international top 10 fragrance, Gaultier from Hermès (2016) and Van Noten (2018). In all cases, Puig acquired the fragrance licenses before taking over the fashion house and gently replacing an aging designer.
Puig, who was named CEO in 2004, works closely with his cousin Manuel, who oversees the business’s fashion houses, where not every hand-over goes smoothly. When the Puigs replaced Gaultier with Duran Lantink, the New York Times called his October 2025 debut “ridiculous,” and sneered the fresh enfant terrible had “sent out the fashion equivalent of an unsolicited crotch shot.” Fashion Network called the debut “a trainwreck.”
That said, Van Noten’s replacement Julian Klausner has won rave reviews, especially for his menswear, and Rabanne’s successor Julien Dossena has also enjoyed a halo of praise.
“Historically, we got involved with these brands when they were losing a lot of money. That’s why they called us. So, the first thing we had to do was stop losses. Since then, Carolina Herrera’s fashion business has done very well, while we’ve had our ups and down at Rabanne. But if I take the fashion business as a whole, we have been growing consistently these past years,” says Puig.
While fashion is significant to the business, so too is fragrance. The bottles have becoming notable, from Ninia Ricci’s white crystal bottle by Marc Lalique, whose fragrance Hannibal Lector recognizes on Clarice Sterling, to Gaultier’s provocative Scandal shaped like the corset Madonna famously wore on her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. For Van Noten, they played on his penchant for exotic prints and ethnic motifs with a launch of 10 flacons made of porcelain, wood, metal or resin.
Unlike Jean-Paul’s outrageous ads for le Male Elixir, the Puigs are a discreet bunch. The family feted its 110th anniversary last year with an elegant coffee-table tome entitled Puig Home of Creativity, and Puig gave a rare Q&A in Paris to celebrate its launch, where he was brutally frank about his family’s business history. At one stage, the Puigs owned the fragrance licenses of Prada, Valentino, and Commes des Garçons – but let them lapse. “Fashion and beauty are two different activities. So, they must be in one direction to be consistent. We learned the hard way that pure licenses were something we didn’t want to do,” he grimaced.
Now, 95 percent of the group’s turnover is with brands it owns, which will lead Puig to Paris in March, where in one week, his four European fashion brands will stage their collections on the world’s most important catwalk.
A Harvard MBA, he became CEO when over-expansion led to group losses, which he staunched by shaving SKUs and closing five of the group’s 10 factories. By 2014, he had opened the Pritzker Prize-winning Rafael Moeno-designed Puig Tower, whose spiral shape evokes a perfume bottle.
It’s not a bad location to admire the family hobby – sailing classic boats in the Puig Vela Clàssica, founded in 2008. Infanta Cristina is a regular crew member on their boat Azur de Puig. Last year, the company took things to another level – sponsoring the Puig Women’s America’s Cup, the inaugural race for all-female teams – which put the Catalans directly into competition with its giant French rival, with its Louis Vuitton America’s Cup in the same bay.
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“Art, aesthetics, and tradition are the values that define Puig. The same that define the sport of classic sailing,” says Puig, one of fashion’s most discreet operators.