Beauty Chair

Discover ESSEC's first Beauty Chair, training leaders with a comprehensive vision of the sector and partnerships with leading beauty companies.

With incredible and dynamic innovation strategies (sustainable and digital transformation), empowered by endlessly renewed consumer expectations, the beauty market is ever more promising, year after year. ESSEC Business School, with a strong community of 5,000 Alumni working in the beauty sector through partnerships with perfumery schools such as ISIPCA or by accompanying startups in its ESSEC Ventures incubators, has acquired real educational legitimacy in this sector. The ESSEC Beauty Chair provides a pool of expertise and focuses on its passion for this sector.

“The ESSEC Beauty Chair is the first training for excellence in Europe dedicated to the beauty sector. Founded in January 2020, its objective is to provide students with a highly comprehensive vision of the challenges facing beauty professionals in the new world after the Pandemic. Trust and a shared vision of the beauty industry unite the founders (corporate partners and the ESSEC team) and connect all the players, bringing a unique spirit to the Chair’s activities.”

Véronique DRECQ

Chair founder

The ESSEC Beauty Chair is committed to student professionalization by allowing students to familiarize themselves with fields of expertise essential to the practice of their future profession.

The Chair not only offers solid academic content fully dedicated to the beauty spectrum but also provides opportunities to demonstrate its expertise and bring together its community around unifying topics such as Sustainability, Holistic beauty, or Inclusivity. Exchanging information and promoting inspiring formal or informal meetings for the future professionals that are our students is essential.

Some specific contents are opened exclusively to the ESSEC Beauty Chair students, while open events are accessible to other beauty enthusiasts in the ESSEC community.

Our Chair’s partners’ typology (suppliers, beauty products manufacturers, retailers) facilitate the understanding of the beauty spectrum and give a complete global overview of the beauty industry. Our partners’ representatives permanently share their experience and vision with the students and provide them with many hands-on case studies and up-to-date problems.

The Chair prepares future young leaders for a successful career in this promising sector. More specifically, the Chair is focused on brand management, retail strategy, data-driven marketing, communications, media strategy, and philanthropy within the Beauty Industry.

It promotes privileged thematic exchanges between significant companies, start-ups, and students, interactions that aim to enlighten students on their incoming professional choices.

Boarding the ESSEC Beauty Chair will enable to:

Develop an ability to solve complex situations by providing innovative solutions. Ability to make people adhere to the team’s vision and to stand up for its suggestions in front of the Chair's partners' representatives.
Increase sense of leadership: develop initiative-taking through role-playing, teamwork, field project, field trip, a collaborative approach, etc. The various activities will enable students to demonstrate their capacity for analysis, decision-making, and agility.
Integrate collective issues, i.e., integrating societal, cultural, and ethical concerns in future professional practices.
Become a respected proactive force in the beauty world for a more responsible and transparent industry.

The Chair combines academic activities (seminars, courses, e-beauty classes), field project, field trip to Grasse, and many company visits.