GPA Global (“GPA”) today announced the acquisition of Cosfibel Group (“Cosfibel”), one of the leading players in luxury promotional packaging, luxury gifting and merchandising solutions.

Cosfibel and its founder Alain Chevassus are renowned for their work with premium and high-luxury brands. From L’Oréal to Chanel, LVMH to Rémy Martin, and Ladurée to Damman, Cosfibel has established itself as one of the world’s most acclaimed luxury packaging and merchandising providers. Based in France, with global service centres in 16 locations, and working across verticals such as beauty and personal care, wine and spirits, and fine foods, Cosfibel boasts an impressive client list of over 70 global brands.

This latest acquisition sees GPA further establish itself as a global leader in luxury packaging and advances GPA’s goal of growing nearshore and onshore manufacturing capabilities. It creates a strong European foothold for GPA through Cosfibel’s key manufacturing facilities in Spain, Portugal and Belgium. This growth in presence is key to GPA’s strategy of helping clients shorten supply chains to increase speed-to-market, de-risk the supply of materials, and reduce carbon emissions.

Adam Melton, CEO of GPA, said: “I’m excited to welcome the Cosfibel team to the GPA family. Cosfibel’s CEO, Marie Sermadiras, is a serial entrepreneur and she has joined GPA’s executive leadership to help further GPA’s expansion in Europe. Our global supply chain and manufacturing capabilities will enable us to better support Cosfibel’s customers and increases our prominence in the beauty and food sector, while furthering our leadership in wine and spirits. Cosfibel has a talented global team and its founder Alain Chevassus will work with us in a senior advisory role.”

Alain Chevassus, Cosfibel’s founder and Chairman, added: “GPA is a great match for Cosfibel. I strongly believe this alliance will create a bright future for both our clients and teams.”

Marie Sermadiras, Cosfibel’s CEO, explained: “I am delighted to join forces with GPA. This alliance is a clear recognition of the fantastic work our teams have put in to grow and transform our business in a successful and sustainable way despite the challenges posed by a global pandemic. GPA and Cosfibel’s complementary capabilities, creativity, and excellence in execution will enable us to grow even quicker, accelerate our diversification, and foster the transformation of the pack and gift industry.”

The acquisition of Cosfibel is the second major acquisition by GPA with Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (“Ontario Teachers’”) as a shareholder, building on the recent acquisition of California-based Jenco Productions, which established a Teachers’ acquired a co-control stake in GPA in September 2022.

Raju Ruparelia, Senior Managing Director, Private Capital, Asia-Pacific at Ontario Teachers’ said: “We are impressed by Cosfibel’s superior design capabilities and strong reputation in its core markets and industry segments. The combination with GPA will further develop Cosfibel’s well-established European customer network as part of GPA’s strong global platform. Ontario Teachers’ is excited to see GPA continue to execute on its growth strategy by acquiring high-quality assets and partnering with strong management teams.”

About GPA Global

GPA Global supports growth by thinking big. Beyond packaging. From design and pack engineering, to supply chain, automation and more, we invest in the capabilities needed to deliver seamless packaging solutions without limits. Across three continents, 38 sites that are strategically positioned to put leading design & material innovation into the hands of our customers. With a strong commitment to protecting people and planet we have been focused on the future since day one adding sustainable materials without increasing costs or using automation to improve production whilst reducing waste, caring for the environment is an investment in the future, and lives at the heart of our business. Co-founded by Tom Wang and Adam Melton in 2007, the company is headquartered in North America and employs 3000+ people globally.

www.gpaglobal.net

About Ontario Teachers’

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’) is a global investor with net assets of $242.5 billion as at June 30, 2022. We invest in more than 50 countries in a broad array of assets including public and private equities, fixed income, credit, commodities, natural resources, infrastructure, real estate, and venture growth to deliver retirement income for 333,000 working members and pensioners.
With offices in Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, San Francisco, Singapore, and Toronto, our more than 400 investment professionals bring deep expertise in industries ranging from agriculture to artificial intelligence. We are a fully funded defined benefit pension plan and have earned an annual total-fund net return of 9.6% since the plan’s founding in 1990. At Ontario Teachers’, we don’t just invest to make a return, we invest to shape a better future for the teachers we serve, the businesses we back, and the world we live in.

For more information, visit otpp.com and follow us on Twitter @OtppInfo.

Between mono-material creations and eco-responsibility, Cosfibel Premium’s new Spring/Summer 2023 Boxes collection is composed of 4 singular themes, declined in as many boxes, adaptable to your tastes. Zoom on this collection.

Monomaterial wood box, made of plywood wrapped with wood veneer

Clarity :

One piece, one color, one concept.
This theme was inspired by the great names of 1960s couture : Courrèges and Cardin, who emphasized pure and refined lines.

Here, we seek a balance between abstraction and elegance, but also between technology and well-being. This theme evokes sobriety, relevance and purity. The Venice box, made of wood only, plays with volume, construction and graphics. Its closing system is patented, without any additional material.

Monomaterial & plastic free box, made of paper greyboard & molded paper

Harmony :

This is the theme of dreamers, romantics and lucid, rural 2.0 who want to reenchant their daily life.

The key words of this theme are craftsmanship, charm and eco-positive creations. Harmony is a palette of calm and neutral colors, inspired by plants, fresh and soft.

Monomaterial & plastic free box, made of paper

Illusion :

Illusion is the fusion of the real and the artificial, where the world is reconfigured. A sort of third world, halfway between the metaverse and the real. We enter a new reality, a waking dream, filtered by fluorescent colors and bright clouds.

The Helsinki box set plays with colors, shapes, and reliefs to offer a condensed lightness and creativity. Moreover, its closing system does not use any magnets.

Monomaterial & plastic free box, made of paper

Celebration :

Authenticity and balance guide Celebration. This theme is informed by primal sensory, cultural treasures and Creole cultures.

The Praïa box fits perfectly into this theme with its jungle motif, colors and earthy, bright and festive tones. Its little extra ? A hidden QR code to add a personalized message or discover information about the product.

Contact us to find out more about Cosfibel Premium collections: contact@cosfibelgroup.com

After two years of pandemics that have undermined industrial activity and while sustainable development is at the heart of the issues, the pack & gift industry has to reinvent itself. In this context, Cosfibel Group relies on two strong values to respond with finesse to the demands of its customers and to assert itself as a leader in the transition of its industry: intimacy and creativity, the keystones of an efficient customer relationship and sustainable packaging innovation.

Through its various entities, Cosfibel listens to its customers and the needs they express in order to adapt its organisation and methods to meet their expectations with precision. A positioning that reveals a strong trend: the customer is at the initiative of the market transformation. We are moving away from the historical pattern of the passive consumer who undergoes trends to enter the era of the “customer 2.0” who dictates tomorrow’s trends through the expectations he or she claims. To sum up, the end consumer has new requirements (quality, materials, durability, lightness, etc.), which are passed on to our customers (the brands), who in turn pass them on to us so that we can finally implement them. This situation creates a virtuous circle of research and innovation, fed by the growing demand for sustainable packaging innovation.

Monomaterial, magnet-free, recyclable box by our design studio.

To respond to this new situation, Cosfibel is positioning itself as a leader in the consolidation and transformation of its market. This transformation must be designed to continue to fulfil our primary mission in a sustainable way: to help our customers create memorable consumer experiences. Secondary packaging, gifts, bags and accessories are all ways to bring magic to the discovery of the product and the brand. The strong demand for eco-responsible approaches is not intended to conflict with this mission, but rather to reinforce and perpetuate it.

In order to carry out this mission and respond to the necessary market transformations that our clients are expressing, every project begins with two key points:

• Intimacy with the client allows us to be tailor-made: each packaging and each gift must tell its own story: the history of the brand, its identity, its values, its commitments.
• Creativity allows us to surprise and make people dream: materials, design, closing systems (…): all these elements are a good opportunity to surprise, innovate, stimulate changes and create magic…

In addition to these two fundamental pillars, there is also security, which guarantees the successful completion of projects. We source the best materials and factories to support our customers by being as faithful as possible to their demands. To do this, we work with a hundred or so factories around the world, which have been audited beforehand to meet our quality criteria and those of our customers.

Among the other pillars that make up our core values, we have been investing in CSR since 2012. Since then, we have never stopped growing our commitment in this area: we are committed to reference labels, in particular as a partner of the Global Compact United Nations program, by being certified GRS (Global Recycled Standard), GOTS (Global ORGANIC Textile Standard) and FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) or through our Fairtrade Max Havelaar cotton licence since 2019. In 2002, we received the highest recognition of this commitment with the award of the Platinum status of the Ecovadis label.

A caramel cardboard and metal box produced in our factory in Belgium

Finally, we also rely heavily on innovation. Today, large groups are looking for impactful innovations to revitalise the pack & gift sector. Our vocation is to be at the forefront of this innovation in order to provide real added value in terms of advice and creative inspiration to our clients.

These key points (intimacy, creativity, safety, CSR, innovation) are at the heart of what the major cosmetics & fragrance groups expect from us. By focusing our strategy around these pillars, we are able to support ultra-luxury brands as well as brands present in parapharmacies, institutes or in the premium departments of perfume stores. In parallel to this multiple expertise, our international presence allows us to adapt our creations to all markets, from China to the USA, via the Middle East.

To ensure optimal control of the know-how specific to Europe, we have strengthened our offer thanks to our factories, which are the perfect illustration of the adaptation of manufacturing methods to the needs and desires of customers.

A range of recyclable cardboard boxes produces in our spanish factory

Thanks to our Cartec factory based in Belgium, we manage a 100% European RPET production, able to respond with unparalleled reactivity to various orders from the cosmetics and food industries. In this market segment, the observation is the same: customers’ expectations are evolving towards new, more eco-designed materials. This has led to a premiumisation of packaging: we are seeing a rise in orders from mass-market brands, which we are able to meet thanks to Cartec’s know-how and production capacity. Here again, the market is evolving hand in hand with our customers and in a “bottom-up” manner: from the customer to the brands and their production partners.

Grumbe, the group’s historic Spanish subsidiary, is another striking example of this market transformation that is as rapid as it is demanding: a specialist in plastics for decades, the brand-plant has reinvented itself around cardboard and multi-material creation, to meet the demands of the cosmetics, pharmaceutical and perfume industries.

Marie-Claire Figadère, Grumbe’s Sales Director, talks about these market transformations:

Marie-Claire Figadere, Commercial Director at Grumbe

“Born in the 1960s, Grumbe has succeeded in positioning itself as a leader in the plastic packaging sector at the height of the golden age of this material. Since 2019, at the instigation of our customers, we have been undergoing a strategic readjustment by positioning ourselves on multi-material expertise, in particular around cardboard, whose environmental impact is controlled and on which the sector is banking heavily. While cardboard represented 15% of our orders in 2019, we have made heavy investments in machines to accelerate this transition, with an immediate result that perfectly illustrates the demand for change on the part of our customers: in 2021, the share of cardboard will already exceed 50% of the total production carried out by Grumbe! Our order books are growing again as a result of this transition. This transformation has therefore been implemented to meet a strong demand, but has only been possible thanks to the close support of our customers who have taken up this challenge with us.”

Faced with the various crisis that have been sowing turmoil in the world economy for more than two years, Cosfibel Group is working together to ensure its customers an unchanged quality of service in terms of cost, supply chain and logistics, while always remaining committed to limiting risks. Port or factory closures, confinements, raw material shortages, soaring costs and lead times (…) the health crisis and, more recently, the war in Ukraine are imposing major constraints on a pack & gift industry that is by nature based on international exchanges and permanent reactivity. To meet this major challenge, the group is implementing security plans orchestrated by purchasing and logistics teams who have redoubled their efforts to maintain the quality of service at the heart of Cosfibel’s DNA.

A solid network of partners to consolidate our supply chain and logistics

In a competitive and demanding pack & gift industry, the availability of resources, costs and deadlines are the key to optimal service quality. By mastering those variables, Cosfibel Group established itself as one of the European leaders in its market. To achieve this, the group has been building long-lasting relationships with reliable production partners around the world for more than twenty years.

Camille, the group’s Purchasing Manager, explains how this network guarantees maximum security: “We are able to offer ‘plan Bs’ at a single producer by relying on reliable partners located in different Chinese provinces. Our historical local partners offer different production sites, ensuring in-depth knowledge of the quality and expected know-how, as well as the ability to carry out an equivalent order in a different region than the one initially planned, while respecting the advertised prices, delivery times and quality. This major asset has enabled us to overcome the recent confinement of Shanghai.

This vast network of partners now allows the group to meet the same demand in different geographical areas with an equivalent quality of service. Cosfibel can thus rely on a network of local producers in Asia as well as in Europe or more recently in North and Central America. This is a major advantage for participating in the relocation of our industries and thus facing confinements, waiting times in ports or factories, or soaring raw material costs: in the event of a partner’s failure, complementary production can be carried out with agility at a factory elsewhere in the world.

Agility at the service of logistics

Karima, Logistics Director at Cosfibel, comes back on the importance of this logistical flexibility: “By relying on this agility, we can also respond favorably to an increase in quantity, even at the last minute, both for boxes and for gifts. In the middle of a pandemic, our teams managed to triple an initial order of one million pieces, while respecting the costs and deadlines.

To overcome supply problems, we can also send raw materials to a manufacturer who would not be able to obtain them on his own, thus enabling him to complete the expected order.

In support of these guarantees, Cosfibel’s logistics teams negotiate commitments on container prices and secure space via a double contract set up with their logistics partners (two options for each departure).

Diversification of our production partners, a key of our supply chain

“In parallel with this close relationship with our historical partners, we have been pursuing a policy of diversifying our sourcing as well as our production sites for several years. Our shortlist of

partners is expanding accordingly, in particular with new Asian countries that now have local know-how that was previously found only in China. This expansion policy further increases our capacity to carry out projects despite failures and unforeseen events,” explains Camille, Cosfibel’s Purchasing Director.

A local anchorage

Finally, Cosfibel also relies on technical and development teams around the world, notably in China, which allows it to overcome certain local constraints, whether they are temporary or long-lasting.

“Recently, the long delivery times to Hong Kong from China were the cause of delays in production. The presence of teams in Hong Kong and Shenzhen allowed us to get around these delays thanks to our local relays,” explains Camille, the group’s purchasing director.

In an industry that is seeking to reinvent itself, packaging innovation and research & development are at the heart of the issues. Cosfibel Group has created a dedicated innovation division (link to design and innovation), which works intelligently with all its departments to assert itself as a major player in the transition towards sustainable packaging.

“Green is the true chic”: the 4Rs, the golden rules of sustainable packaging innovation

Our designers, supported by the research and packaging innovation teams, aim to offer creations that meet the most modern eco-responsibility criteria. This ambition is based on 4 fundamental pillars:

– Reduce: less material, less transformation, less transport, less CO2(…): reduction is a key point of packaging innovation. Single-material creations are one of the best illustrations of this. Our teams are developing collections of top-of-the-range boxes made of 100% recycled cardboard.

– Recycling: Our engineers, R&D departments and designers work together to offer recyclable and/or recycled packaging solutions: Recycled PET, recycled polycotton, use of metal and long life cycle materials…

– Reuse: the reusability aspect is one of the main focuses of research in packaging innovation. The replacement of single-use objects and materials with reusable equivalents is at the heart of our creations.

– Rethink: packaging innovation is at the heart of our activity. Cosfibel Premium has filed numerous patents on sustainable packaging concepts: zipperless and magnetless closure systems, single-material boxes, etc. Our teams carry out constant research to avoid the use of fossil plastics and materials with a high impact on the environment (water, CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions…).

Discover all our actions in favor of the environment here and our environmental and social policy on our dedicated page.