Isabelle d’Ornano spent part of her girlhood in a refugee camp with one suitcase to her name. Today, at 89, she still presides over Sisley’s Supervisory Board. The beauty brand she started with her husband in 1976 employs 5,000 people. It sells through 8,049 stores and outlets around the world. It has never taken an outside investor.
Her family were Polish aristocrats. Stalin seized their homes after the war, and they never got them back. The family landed in Spain with very little money. She was 15 when she took her first job, so she could cover her part of the rent. She tells Holly Peterson, in the Journal’s Earn Your Luck column, that work suited her from the start. It meant adventure and independence.
Her husband, Hubert d’Ornano, knew the beauty business. He had helped start Orlane, and his father had helped start Lancôme. In 1976 the couple started Sisley Paris on a simple bet. Plant extracts plus serious lab research could make luxury skin care. Plant formulas cost more, she says, because they need far more testing. She ran product research herself and had a hand in several of the brand’s signature creams and perfumes. Quality, she says, has nothing to do with luck. It comes from a team’s work and will.
Grow without getting fat
Her sharpest line is about money. “It’s an enormous advantage not to be on the stock exchange.” Owners who answer to investors, she says, spend their days explaining instead of building. Her advice to anyone with an idea is to begin small and let the company build its own strength. A splashy launch and magazine buzz don’t count. She embroiders her rules on cushions. One reads “You must grow without getting fat.” The handover is done too. Her son and daughter hold the two top jobs, and she keeps the board seat. Her uncle married Jackie Kennedy’s sister, and she says Jackie taught her how large an effect small things can have.
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This is an estate story, and a family-business one. Most family businesses are a lot smaller than Sisley. The lesson is the same. The founder decided, while sharp and healthy, who would run the thing and who would own it. She moved to a board role and let the next generation do the work. That’s a plan, and it was in place while she was still around to watch it work. Plenty of owners never get there. They keep every decision in their own head, and the handover happens in a hospital hallway. The no-investors rule has a lesson in it too. Money you take from outside investors buys their questions, and those questions eat your time.
If you own a business, a rental, or a share of the family farm, your plan needs one page. It says who takes over and how they get paid for it. This week, check one thing. Pull out your operating agreement or your will and see if it names a successor at all. If it’s blank, that’s the first fix. The umbrella goes in the car on the day before the rain.