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Unattractive

As EU industry ministers head to Brussels, a new survey shows that European CEOs are increasingly considering shifting investment from Europe to other countries, writes Barbara Moens.

Context: Boosting competitiveness is a key priority for European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who is pushing to implement Mario Draghi’s recommendations to prevent the bloc from falling further behind its global rivals. But the EU has struggled to put them into action.

EU industry ministers are meeting today in Brussels to discuss progress made on simplifying EU legislation, one of von der Leyen’s key strategies to boost economic growth, in addition to tearing down barriers inside the single market.

Ahead of that discussion, the European Round Table for Industry (ERT) has released a new report warning that Europe is “wasting a good crisis” as the bloc has so far not been able to reform.

The ERT’s survey of the chairs and chief executives of around 60 major multinational European companies shows that over a third of CEOs will invest less than planned in Europe or have put their investment decisions on hold. Only eight per cent of CEOs in the survey said they would invest more in Europe than planned.

Meanwhile, 45 per cent said they would invest more in the US than planned.

That outlook is in stark contrast with the optimism of chief executives after the recommendations of both Draghi and Enrico Letta, who in a separate report made recommendations on how to fully integrate the single market.

The ERT survey shows that CEOs are alarmed at the lack of urgency in delivering on Draghi and Letta’s reforms, with 76 per cent saying they have so far seen “little or no positive impact” from EU initiatives.

“Current geopolitics and geoeconomics mean Europe has no time to waste to restore its competitiveness and prosperity. The stakes are too high now to hide behind the cliché of ‘blaming Brussels’,” said Anthony Gooch Gálvez of ERT.

EU countries remain reluctant to recognise qualifications from elsewhere in the bloc, causing one of many barriers to growth

After sending more than 20 letters to German and French authorities over an 18-month period, Ludovic Gerboin just gave up. His attempts to get his French master baker certificate recognised in Germany had hit a wall. 

Back in 2004, the boulanger from Laval had met the love of his life in Bavaria and wanted to open a bakery there. He eventually bit the bullet and took Germany’s Bäckermeister exam. The rules seemed arbitrary, the 47-year-old told the Financial Times: “It was so frustrating.”

Since Gerboin’s experience, the EU has issued a directive aiming to simplify the recognition of professional qualifications. But entrepreneurs and companies operating in services across EU borders still struggle with a web of seemingly arbitrary restrictions.

More than half of the barriers to the single market in services that the bloc identified in 2002 still exist today — in part due to Germany’s reluctance to open up its highly regulated professions to intra-EU competition.

In the whole history of the single market, only one French baker has ever had their certificate from their home country recognised in Germany, according to an EU database. 

Research has repeatedly shown that removing those barriers would hugely benefit the bloc’s lagging economy, as services account for about 70 per cent of its GDP. The IMF estimated in 2024 that Europe’s internal barriers in services were equivalent to a tariff of 110 per cent. 

“Services are an engine of growth,” said Lisandra Flach, economics professor at the University of Munich. Her research showed that services accounted for 82 per cent of European economic growth between 2000 and 2023. Making it easier for companies to offer services across borders within Europe would offer a source of growth, she said — especially at a time when the region’s economy faces pressure from US President Donald Trump’s trade wars.

In reality, however, European companies still face a patchwork of regulation and non-tariff barriers to trade in services within the bloc. Rules governing sectors such as financial markets, transport and energy vary widely by country, while access to many professions is limited by byzantine national rules.

Overall, a quarter of European applicants seeking recognition of foreign qualifications were rejected in 2024, according to an FT data analysis. A further 10 per cent were asked to sit exams or “undergo an adaptation period” before they could be approved.

In total, 711,000 foreign qualifications have been recognised in another member state since 1997, including 356 bakers.

Nurses, doctors and secondary schoolteachers account for 60 per cent of the total, but there is a long tail of smaller professions — including acupuncturists, drone pilots, saddle makers and wine tasters — among the 6,679 regulated activities listed.

Economists warn that such barriers curb not just labour mobility but also investment, innovation and competitiveness.

“Intra-EU trade in services is stuck at a measly 8 per cent of GDP, as compared to 24 per cent for goods, laying bare how limited our not-so-single market really is,” said Anthony Gooch Gálvez, of the European Round Table for Industry. The services sector, he said, was the “sleeping giant” of European integration. “It’s time to wake up.”

Why has the bloc never ensured that French bakers could simply set up shop in Germany? In theory, the principle of free movement of services is anchored in European law. The 2006 Services Directive was intended as a key pillar enabling the freedom to establish a business or to provide or receive services in another European country.

In practice, many aspects of the directive were not implemented or enforced at national level, leaving existing barriers untouched. National rules continue to restrict access to about 5,700 services activities that account for about 22 per cent of the European workforce.

Regulations are especially thorny in Germany, the bloc’s largest member, where guilds of skilled crafts date back to the Middle Ages. In 53 professions, entrepreneurs need a master certificate to run or open a business.

Preparing for the theoretical and practical exams for such certificates generally takes at least one year for full-time students or up to three-and-a-half years part-time. Costs can easily add up to €10,000 along with the wages people forgo while they are studying — and the exams must be done in German.

The government in Berlin even tightened the rules in 2019 when it added 12 more professions to the list, including tilers and makers of wooden toys and barrels. Supporters of such regulations argue they act as a guarantee of quality, but economists see them as barriers to entry that reduce competition and keep prices high.

Even covering a vehicle with a vinyl film — known as car wrapping — is protected by Germany’s centuries-old guild rules, Bremen district court ruled this year. The court found that car wrapping counted as the production of “signs and illuminated advertising”, one of the professions in Germany that require a master certificate. 

The EU’s single market for goods has been extensively tested in court. But there has been far less legal action to enforce a single market in services. And attempts from Brussels to improve it have often been faced with a political backlash.

The French nationalist politician Philippe de Villiers became the poster child for the opposition to the Services Directive when he warned about the threat of the “Polish plumber”, who became a symbolic figure representing eastern European workers allegedly undercutting local labour markets and regulations.

His populist rhetoric fuelled public anxiety in France and across Europe that opening national markets to cross-border service providers would cut wages and undermine social protections. As a result, the directive was ultimately watered down.

Enrico Letta of the IE University in Madrid, author of the 2024 report on improving the single market, said that progress in harmonising rules for professional services had stalled because of “national protections” and the powerful trade associations linked to those professions, especially in Germany and France.

“This is a more complicated obstacle to overcome,” Letta told the FT.

Beyond regulated professions, say experts, many services are genuinely highly complex to integrate across borders.

“Services are incredibly differentiated,” said Jacques Pelkmans of the Brussels-based think-tank CEPS, pointing to different levels of integration in services such as transport, energy and financial markets. 

Services can be less mobile and more local than goods, he says, and language differences also play a greater role.

Amid Trump’s tariff threats and the bloc’s push to become more competitive, Brussels is again eyeing the possibility of overcoming national interests to reap the fruits of more economic integration. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen last month set out plans to implement a new single market strategy by 2028, including efforts to harmonise authorisation and certification schemes across the bloc.

The commission wants to make it easier to provide services in a different country on a temporary basis, for example to facilitate cross-border car rentals and installation, maintenance and repair services. 

But translating political momentum into concrete measures will not be easy.

“European leaders are happy to agree on the need for more competitiveness,” said one EU diplomat. “But when it comes to actually giving their own national sensitivities, they all want the others around the table to move first.” 

For Gerboin, the French baker in Bavaria, the cross-border hurdles in his own profession reflect the “pride of bakers” — but are overdone.

“No matter if you have a master certificate or not, the best baker stays in business,” he said. “If your bread is not good, you will not be successful in the long run.” 

Total merger value hit $543 billion, the highest total since 2021 and more than the last two years combined.

U.S. tech mergers rebounded to their highest levels since 2021 this year, driven by big bets on AI and more tie-ups under a deal-friendly presidential administration.

Total tech merger value reached $543 billion, more than the combined value of the past two years, according to data provider LSEG. Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst topped the charts for the year, both earning more than $400 million in fees.

“We’re at one of these junctures where everybody wants to be the winner, but we don’t know things will play out,” said Amr Razzak, a partner at law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. “Companies are investing very large sums of money, trying to hire people, buy companies. They’re moving fast, spending a lot and testing things, so inevitably there’s going to be some trial and error.”

CEOs are also taking advantage of the Trump administration’s more favorable view of mergers to pursue deals they might not have considered in the past, according to bankers and lawyers who work on these deals.

Several major acquisitions were easily cleared, such as Google’s $32 billion deal for cybersecurity startup Wiz. Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion proposed acquisition of CyberArk in July received early antitrust clearance in September.

The environment has paved the way for rivals to merge. These included a $22 billion tie-up between Apple chip suppliers Skyworks and Qorvo announced in October.

Even if regulators look to block a merger, deals can be cleared if companies settle by selling parts of the business to a competitor. For example, the Department of Justice sued to block HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks in January. HPE later agreed to sell off a small piece of its business to settle the suit and the deal closed this July.

The comeback in tech M&A has been good news for investment banks. Goldman Sachs is emerging as one of the big winners from the rebound. The bank has advised on roughly 58% of the deals by value, up from 32% in 2024.

Its work advising videogame maker Electronic Arts on its $55 billion take-private scored the most lucrative M&A transaction in the bank’s history, for a fee of $110 million, according to securities filings. (It will only receive the full fee when the deal successfully closes.) It also advised cybersecurity startup Wiz on its $32 billion sale to Google, and Informatica’s $8 billion sale to Salesforce this year.

With less than three weeks of the year remaining, that performance puts Goldman Sachs well ahead of rival Wall Street banks JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, based on the share of deals it advised on. Goldman has claimed the top spot every year since 2021.

However, one boutique shop with less than 80 bankers is almost tied with Goldman Sachs when it comes to another measure, the share of fees. Tech-focused Qatalyst Partners notched its best year in a decade on that metric, taking in 8.6% of total M&A fee revenue. Goldman took in 8.9%. The investment banks’ market share of revenue may not include total fees for deals that haven’t closed.

Qatalyst mostly focused on selling tech companies for at least $1 billion. It advised on some of the largest deals this year, such as CyberArk on its pending $25 billion sale to Palo Alto Networks and Skyworks’ merger with rival Qorvo.

A surprising name emerged among the top five banks based on the fees it received. After falling out of the ranks of the top 10 banks for the past three years, Citi is staging a comeback of sorts in the tech M&A business. It most recently advised Marvell Technology on its acquisition of Celestial AI for up to $5.5 billion.

Bankers, as always, are confident that M&A will be robust in 2026.

Nadir Shaikh, a partner at Qatalyst, said a healthy equity market could set the stage for more tech M&A deals ahead as it creates a viable option for attractive private company targets, which could opt to go public instead of selling. (Qatalyst doesn’t underwrite IPOs.) Companies that eventually go public could also grow to formidable market capitalizations and become “acquirers in their own right.”

More than 50 tech companies went public this year, raising about $16.8 billion. That was an improvement compared to the average of 29 companies a year over the past three years, but it’s still well below the 2021 peak where 127 companies raised $74.4 billion on the public market, according to Dealogic.

Shaikh is hopeful about the possibility of a $100 billion tech M&A deal.

“Now just as there are more trillion-dollar market cap companies than five years ago, I think M&A deal sizes will also expand consistent with market caps and there’s going to be a $100 billion deal that gets done somewhere.”

A new report from WPP Media says global ad revenue will reach $1.14 trillion this year

Advertising spending will grow more than predicted in 2025 because tariffs didn’t take as big a bite as expected and AI provided a boost, according to a new forecast from media investment group WPP Media.

Global ad revenue excluding U.S. political advertising will grow 8.8% in 2025 to $1.14 trillion, WPP Media said, raising its forecast from the 6% it predicted in June. Next year will see worldwide advertising grow 7.1%, it said, revising its June forecast of 6.1%.

Marketers softened the impact from tariffs by moving up imports to beat their implementation, carefully managing their inventories and absorbing some of their costs.

“In June, we were reacting to more recent tariff announcements,” said Kate Scott-Dawkins, president of business intelligence at WPP Media and lead author of the report. “The summer gave us a chance to see how those played out, to see how resilient consumer spending was off the back of those announcements in markets around the world, to see what sort of negotiations and arrangements were made that lessened the impact of some of those tariffs.”

Some of the sting from tariffs was only delayed, however, and will finally be felt in 2026, the report said.

The surge of AI investment also created more ad spending than originally expected, WPP Media said. Some businesses are using the technology to make processes, including marketing and product development, more efficient and directing the savings into new ad buys, Scott-Dawkins said. New companies are also forming in the AI sector itself and in turn becoming advertisers of their own.

The forecast also said that global retail media, in which businesses such as grocery and big-box chains offer advertisers ways to reach consumers using customer data, will surpass television advertising revenue in 2025 for the first time with an increase of 11.3% to $174.2 billion.

TV ad spending across both traditional and streaming viewing will rise 0.6%, WPP Media said.

Sephora continues to outperform in a slowing luxury environment, with revenues reaching €16bn and management guiding toward €20bn “in the near future.” The retailer remains LVMH’s strongest engine of growth, benefiting from record foot traffic, aggressive store refreshes, exclusive brand launches (e.g., Rhode), and rising demand across fragrance, Gen Z, men’s grooming, and emerging Gen Alpha segments.

Despite intensifying competition from Amazon, Ulta and TikTok Shop, Sephora is expanding logistics capacity (new automated U.S. warehouse), deepening its influencer ecosystem, and rolling out new monetisation tools such as My Sephora Storefront. Stores still represent ~2/3 of sales, with management highlighting younger consumers’ renewed appetite for experiential retail.

In the $450 billion global beauty market, there is no business with as much cultural impact as the LVMH-owned retailer. Executives have a plan to make sure it stays on top.

Of all the Sephora stores that have gone through the beauty retailer’s new redesign, the Champs-Élysées flagship in Paris is probably the most glam. There’s a long red carpet, high ceilings and a giant table for everything that’s trending on social media.

“They say that this store gets more visits than the Eiffel Tower,” Deborah Yeh, Sephora’s global chief marketing officer, says as we walk through the crowded boutique on a fall afternoon. We stroll past a fragrance section where perfume bottles stand proudly on their own tables, begging to be spritzed. Hair care has moved to the front of the store; makeover chairs, once near the front, now sit in the middle of the floor.

Outside, the city is locked in a state of unrest. The French government has collapsed, with protesters shutting down streets over budget cuts and workers threatening to strike. Inside, women are dabbing moisturizers, sampling eye shadows and swabbing lipsticks.

“When things are bad, we turn to things that actually give us small comforts and joy,” Yeh says. It’s why lipstick and perfume reliably sell in times of economic turmoil. The day before, I’d heard something similar from Catherine Spindler, president of Sephora Europe and the Middle East, who was gearing up for SEPHORiA, the company’s multicity event for beauty fanatics.

“We provide that taste of something positive, something colorful in difficult times,” Spindler says, sitting in a Paris convention center that was being transformed into a Coachella-style festival, with carnival games, photo booths, matcha drinks and samples upon samples of cosmetics meant to make attendees look, feel and smell amazing. “It’s a destination of happiness.”

Owned by the French conglomerate LVMH, 56-year-old Sephora is the world’s largest “prestige” retailer of cosmetics, skin care, hair products and perfume. It’s a place of discovery for beauty fans who are constantly on the hunt for the next great thing, encouraging customers to test before they buy.

In a luxury downturn that’s lasted more than a year, Sephora remains a bright spot in the LVMH portfolio. The company saw record earnings in 2024, with LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault boasting to analysts this past January that he couldn’t share the full profits LVMH has reaped from the beauty retailer over the decades “because you would not believe them.”

The $450 billion global beauty industry is now at a crossroads. Titans like Estée Lauder and L’Oréal are contending with shifting consumer tastes. Buzzy new beauty brands are arriving faster than ever, reshaping the map of influence. Just two years after launching its beauty division, LVMH rival Kering sold it to L’Oréal in mid-October. In the fall, Reuters reported LVMH was looking to sell its stake in Fenty Beauty, the cosmetics label it created in 2017 with the singer Rihanna. LVMH declined to comment on the matter.

Sephora faces steep competition: Amazon has been pulling in shoppers with discounts, and the more-accessible Ulta Beauty has been gaining market share. The arrival of TikTok Shop and affiliate companies like ShopMy are also chipping away at Sephora’s profits.

But in the global beauty arms race, Sephora intends to stay on top by focusing on its customer experience.

Sephora’s new stores resemble nothing so much as Sephora’s old stores. This is true even of the Champs-Élysées location. The lighting is bright, the space is bathed in the company’s signature black-and-white, and the line is as long as ever. “We feel that our focus on creating a sense of uniformity in our stores has proven worthwhile,” a Sephora spokeswoman later writes in an email.

I watch a trio of girls laugh at horny Tom Ford fragrance names and a woman with a gray bob hum to herself as she tests blushes. A mom waiting in the checkout line is so locked into browsing the minis section, she doesn’t notice her baby is missing a sock.

“Every square inch of this place has to be productive,” Yeh says. “Everything is a little jewel.”

GUILLAUME MOTTE, Sephora’s global president and CEO, appears triumphant when we meet at Sephora’s San Francisco headquarters in September.

Hailey Bieber’s Rhode brand had just debuted at Sephora, drawing crowds eager to take selfies and try on lip gloss. Sephora North America CEO Artemis Patrick, who is sitting next to Motte at a conference table, says it’s the biggest launch in her region to date.

“We’re not naive about competition,” Motte says. “But Sephora is winning.”

Sephora experienced “exceptional” growth in 2023 and 2024, he says. Revenue hit €16 billion, or about $18.5 billion, he says, referring to figures Arnault shared in April. The market is slowing, Motte says, but he predicts Sephora will reach €20 billion (approximately $23 billion) in annual sales “in the near future.”

Sephora has 3,400 stores around the world, with over 600 in the U.S. alone. It sells around 300 upscale beauty brands in the U.S., half of which you can’t find in other stores. Its little black-and-white shopping bags are inescapable.

Landing inside Sephora remains a beauty founder’s dream. “They are the best at getting people excited,” says Dianna Cohen, founder of the hair-care brand Crown Affair.

Still, there are plenty of other places to buy ridiculously overpriced moisturizers. And lately, it feels as though everyone is getting into the beauty business—even Old Navy.

In 2024, Sephora had 9% of American beauty and personal-care market share online, per market research firm Euromonitor, a slight dip from 2023. Amazon, by contrast, nabbed 47% of online market share last year.

So Sephora has stepped up its defense—and its offense. It wrote checks in 2025 for major marketing moments with Hulu and the WNBA; basketball fans visiting the Chase Center in San Francisco can now shop for Tatcha lip masks and Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum cream at Sephora kiosks in the arena between quarters. It’s currently building a new warehouse in Avon, Indiana, set to open in the spring, that is fully automated, Patrick says. “A lot of robots.”

This fall, Sephora introduced a new platform, My Sephora Storefront, in the U.S., which allows the retailer to make money directly from influencer recommendations and cuts out affiliate companies.

It’s refreshing its stores, where about two-thirds of the company’s sales still come from, and adding smaller shops to meet demand in areas where it already has a presence, like Brooklyn, Queens and Toronto. “Gen Z loves stores, they love the experience,” Motte says. “Boring retail is dead, attractive retail is alive, and that’s our business.”

Sephora is also doubling down on booming categories like fragrance, which has helped the retailer score points with teen boys.

“There are men coming to our stores, and they aren’t falling asleep by the beauty studio,” says Carolyn Bojanowski, executive vice president of merchandising for North America. “I never thought I’d see that happen.”

WHEN LVMH BOUGHT a chain of French beauty boutiques in 1997, dominating the fragrance market was top of mind. The luxury giant had been snapping up brands with in-house perfumes, like Givenchy and Kenzo.

It bought the French fragrance house Guerlain and had already absorbed the Parfums Christian Dior business, previously owned by Arnault’s company Financière Agache, when Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy merged in 1987. By adding Sephora to its arsenal, the group boasted in a statement at the time, LVMH became “the world’s leading distributor of perfumes and beauty products.”

Sephora arrived in the U.S. the following year. “The big guys at the time—Clinique, Lauder and Lancôme—wouldn’t sell to us,” Bojanowski says. “But we found little niche and cool brands,” like Stila and Urban Decay.

Department stores used to be the front line of high-end makeup; sales associates would open glass cases and supervise the browsing experience. Sephora gave shoppers free rein to schmear on lipstick and play with eye shadow. Starting in 1999, they could also order beauty products online and try them at home.

Sephora was savvy about building a relationship with the beauty enthusiast and developed a cult following. But what set the company apart was its selection of beauty products, which it secures through exclusivity deals. According to brand founders who have worked with Sephora, the retailer typically asks new brands for a two-year agreement; Sephora declined to comment on this. Motte won’t say how its deals are structured, but founders say they typically split revenue 40/60 with Sephora. Some say they have negotiated better rates.

The retailer holds the power to accelerate a brand’s profile with catchy social content and store events. Its army of Sephora Squad influencers helps products take off on TikTok, and its LVMH real estate budget means its storefronts, often in high-end malls and in elite cities, are right next to luxury boutiques.

Alicia Scott, the founder and CEO of Range Beauty, a makeup brand for ultrasensitive skin, joined the U.S. Sephora Accelerate program for founders of color in 2023. She said she felt Sephora understood the best ways to market niche products like hers. “There’s intention and learnings that you don’t see at other retailers.”

It takes significant investment for brands to succeed at Sephora. There’s the cost of covering inventory and store displays, but there are also “hidden fees,” says Camille Moore, a brand strategist. Brands pay for field teams to work the Sephora floor on their behalf, since competition inside stores is fierce. Founders say seasonal “animation” ads that promote their labels cost extra, too. Moore says the charges are hard on indie labels, estimating brands must make over $9 million in order to not lose money on a Sephora partnership. She recalled one client telling her they were spending about $4 million just on Sephora samples.

A Sephora spokesperson said the company “is laser-focused on helping all of our brands succeed and provides customized tools, teams and resources to help our brands continue to grow and prosper.” Founders say that the company is especially helpful “in the kitchen,” their term for working with Sephora on product development.

“We sit for hours, discussing category launch ideas, product launch ideas,” says Kimberley Ho, co-founder of the tween skin-care brand Evereden.

Sephora sits on a treasure trove of consumer insights that it shares with its beauty brands, Ho says. She recalls seeking Sephora’s guidance on a vanilla fragrance mist. Was it a scent customers would want? The company confirmed that “vanilla” was a popular search and sent other trending suggestions, too.

Ho says she puts her faith in Sephora because it identifies “future trends of consumers faster than any other retailer.” Sephora was planning for the current explosion of body mists as early as 2021, she says.

A decade ago, working with Sephora usually meant getting a step closer to a billion-dollar exit. But the glut of new brands has made it harder to compete, especially on Sephora shelves, says Moj Mahdara, a beauty entrepreneur who runs the venture-capital firm Kinship Ventures with Gwyneth Paltrow.

“Beauty is going through a renaissance right now, and it’s a little bit of a s— show,” says Mahdara. For brands to rise to the top of Sephora’s charts, Mahdara says, “you gotta shake hands and kiss babies.”

AT THE COMPANY’S IMMERSIVE SEPHORiA event in Paris, attendees in their 20s and 30s are bedazzling tubs of cream from Kiehl’s, dousing themselves in setting spray from Patrick Starrr’s One Size and globbing on lip gloss from Fenty Beauty. A woman with the prettiest eyelashes I’ve ever seen shows me a triple-layer strawberry lip mask from Laneige that she thinks I will “looove.” It smells like it could give me diabetes.

“I just saw Mona! Mona is here!” Maam Essan, a 23-year-old Parisian, gushes at the sight of Mona Kattan, the sister of beauty mogul Huda Kattan. Mona is taking selfies near a claw machine dispensing products from her fragrance line, Kayali.

Sephora is constantly courting rising beauty stars to get their products on its shelves. It prides itself on being first to the next big thing in beauty, says Bojanowski. It’s a strategy that involves her team combing social media and sliding into founders’ DMs.

The company has bet on the wrong horse before, like hair extensions and supplements. Now Sephora sees a new opportunity in Korean skin care, Bojanowski says, and is selling a slew of products from the country, like collagen sheet masks and ceramide face creams. It’s also bullish on color cosmetics fronted by celebrity makeup artists like Hung Vanngo (who works with Selena Gomez) and Mary Phillips (who does Kendall Jenner’s makeup). Yes, the contour palette is back, though Patrick says “no-makeup makeup” is still very much here.

Rihanna created her cosmetics brand Fenty Beauty in 2017 with LVMH, the French conglomerate that owns Sephora. GHOST/Shutterstock

Sephora also sees Gen X—women 45 to 60—as the “next big wave,” says Bojanowski.

“The Golden Girls and the Sex and the City ladies are allegedly the same age,” she says, laughing. “The definitions of beauty standards and aging gracefully have really evolved. It’s a big opportunity.”

Then there’s the teens and tweens, a cohort that makes Motte and Patrick noticeably cautious. Young shoppers have swarmed Sephora stores in pursuit of skin-care products, including antiaging creams. “We haven’t targeted the teens; they came to us,” Motte says.

Those Sephora tween birthday parties I’ve seen on TikTok are actually “not sanctioned,” Patrick says. When I ask if Sephora will launch an official birthday program, like the one Ulta Beauty debuted over the summer, Motte says, “No. No, no, no.”

The company is concerned that teens might buy products that are unsafe for them, he explains. Still, there has been a “business discussion” to make sure Sephora’s sales associates can steer clients in the right direction and “advise the best products that are suitable for their skin,” he says.

That means new Gen Alpha brands at Sephora. It launched Ho’s kids’ brand, Evereden, in U.S. stores in October. A month earlier, it debuted the tween label Sincerely Yours, with the 16-year-old influencer Salish Matter.

“When we went to Fresno [California] to see one of my best friends, I used a hotel face wash and my skin got really irritated, and that’s kind of how it got started,” Salish says over Zoom. She tells me that when she hosted a meetup at a New Jersey mall in September, 87,000 screaming fans had mobbed the place.

“I was hoping for, like, 500 people,” Salish says. “I was mind-blown.”

Setting unrealistic EV regulations only to adjust them when consumers do not show up is a recipe for turmoil

Europe’s car industry is watching Brussels with concern — again. The European Commission plans to unveil new rules for the transition to electric vehicles, including the evolution of carbon emissions targets. The current rules dictate a rapid shift to EVs. The elephant in the room is that European customers — both individuals and businesses — simply are not buying EVs in big numbers. 

Brussels is not alone in issuing regulations that are out of step with market reality. The UK government recently announced a new tax to charge EV drivers 3p for every mile driven, while at the same time offering a discount of up to £3,750 on a new EV. One foot on the gas, one on the brake: these kinds of contradictions leave buyers confused and frustrated. 

European policymakers say they want a sustainable auto industry. But setting unrealistic regulations only to adjust them at the end of each year when consumers do not show up is a recipe for turmoil. This approach disrupts a complex cycle of product design, engineering and supply chains that require long lead times and billions in investment. We urgently need a regulatory framework for Europe that provides a realistic and reliable 10-year planning horizon. 

On one side, we face the world’s most aggressive carbon mandates, regulations that demand a pace of electrification that is decoupled from the reality of consumer demand. On the other, we face a flood of state-subsidised EV imports from China, structurally designed to undercut European labour and manufacturing.

China has more than enough manufacturing overcapacity to sell to every new vehicle customer in Europe. Chinese brands have doubled their market share in the region in just 12 months, reaching a record 5.5 per cent in August. Meanwhile, the market share of EVs in the EU has stagnated at about 16 per cent — well behind the 25 per cent required to meet Brussels’ 2025 targets. 

EU vehicle production is now 3mn units below pre-Covid levels. Plants are going dark. In 2024 alone, 90,000 jobs in the automotive industry evaporated. These are the kinds of jobs that sustain European social stability. This is not a transition. It’s more like a wind-down of Europe’s automotive industry.

To be clear, the industry is not asking for a bailout. We are not asking for protectionism to shield inefficiency. At Ford, we will continue to do the hard work of restructuring. We have closed legacy facilities, reduced our workforce and slimmed down costs to become more agile. We have invested billions in transforming our manufacturing operations in Europe and offer our customers greater choice in making the shift to an electric or hybrid vehicle.

But if Europe wants to avoid becoming a museum of 20th-century manufacturing, we need an urgent reset and a long-term plan.

The approach to regulation — mandate it and they will buy it — has failed. We must align carbon targets with actual market adoption and provide automakers with a realistic and reliable 10-year horizon. This includes giving consumers the option to drive hybrid vehicles for longer, bridging the gap rather than forcing a leap to EVs they aren’t ready to take.  

We need to incentivise this transition. European manufacturers have invested hundreds of billions in EVs. Governments must match that commitment with consistent incentives to buy them and a charging infrastructure that extends beyond wealthy urban centres into rural areas. 

The current approach to commercial vehicles is a tax on the backbone of Europe’s economy. Only 8 per cent of new vans are electric, yet regulations treat them like luxury sedans. These are tools for plumbers, florists and builders. Aggressive carbon targets on commercial vehicles unfairly penalise the small and medium-sized businesses that generate more than 50 per cent of Europe’s GDP. 

Ford has called Europe home for more than 100 years. We want to be part of its green future and we plan to keep investing. But Europe faces a binary choice. It can foster a thriving, competitive auto industry that leads the world in green technology. Or it can cling to unachievable targets and watch as its market is dominated by imports while its own factories rust.