Posted on Jan 5, 2021 at 7:30 am
In the adhesive label segment, Labelys has taken strong positions in wine, spirits, cosmetics and many other industrial sectors. According to our information, now with 300 employees, Labelys has just reorganized its capital, giving control to its managers, Grégoire Desmettre and Julien de Swaan. The latter thus increase their participation to more than 40%. Bpifrance, which had supported the creation of the group, remains in the capital alongside the EMZ fund, a new entrant. Purple Development, Frédéric Sanchez’s fund, comes out of the round table.
Labelys was born in 2015 from a diversification of the CPI group, specializing in book printing. The company, whose flagship was the APE label printer from Poitevin, then gained its independence in 2018 with the support of bpifrance. Since then, in a consolidating market, it has continued to acquire complementary companies in terms of technologies, markets and geographic sectors. The whole, having doubled in volume in two years, now has five production sites in France, two in Switzerland and, recently Satergraf, in Spain. This Barcelona company achieves 7.5 million euros in sales in cosmetics, health and industry, opening the door to the Iberian market for Labelys.
Luminescent labels
Before that, in February 2020, the group had taken over the Charentais Nacara Impressions, a benchmark in cognac and spirits. However, this area sets the tone in terms of marketing. Grégoire Desmettre, president of Labelys, evokes the creative exuberance of this sector in terms of finishing, cutting, curve, shapes … “This then inspires other sectors including cosmetics”, notes the leader who describes a sector that will still evolve a lot technically and creatively.
The trend, he continues, tends towards “The ability to produce a unique label for each product”, obstacle to counterfeiting and guarantor of the traceability of the product that it identifies by nano-printing and other coding technologies. The other field of innovation is marketing, like luminescent labels that can distinguish a bottle at a party, for example. Labelys is not done with external growth. The group, posting 50 million turnover, plans to double in size within two years.
It primarily targets European development. According to Romain Gauvrit, of bpifrance, the new capital-intensive operation, which places management in the front line, was preferred to other proposals. Because Labelys, who resisted the crisis well, aroused envy. And for Charles Mercier, associate director of EMZ, the managers’ knowledge of the market is a guarantee of future performance, more secure than a sale to an industrial and financial group would have been.
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