O Boticário

The Brazilian company "O Boticário" was founded in 1977 as a small pharmacy for prescription medicines in Curitiba, the capital of the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, and is now one of the giants of the perfumery and cosmetics industry.

The founder was the Bolivian-Brazilian Miguel Krigsner, who produced his first two care products, a moisturizing lotion and an algae-based shampoo, with a kitchen blender in 1977, thus heralding a success story. Acqua Fresca'' in an amphora-shaped bottle also dates back to the 1970s as the first perfume from the then still small manufactory. "O Boticário" reved up in 1982 with an initial 27 employees in its first production facility. As of 2024, the company now has over 4,200 stores in Brazil, Mexico, Guyana, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Colombia, the United States, Japan, France, Portugal, Angola and the United Arab Emirates and is currently said to be the world's largest perfumery and cosmetics franchising network, creating almost 12,000 jobs.

The product range of "O Boticário" includes body and hair care products, cosmetics, perfumes, sunscreens and soaps. The ingredients used include Amazonian plants such as açaí, cupuaçu, carnaúba, guaraná, cashew and passion flower, gum from algae extracts and plant extracts such as arnica and urucum. The industrial and administrative complex of "O Boticário" is located in São José dos Pinhais, Paraná. The parent company is Grupo Boticário.

"O Boticário" is breaking notable ground in the perfume sector: in 2004, the group launched "Malbec", the first fragrance to use a maturation process similar to that used for wines. In 2006, the women's perfume "Lily" was introduced, in which "O Boticário" used the artisanal technique of enfleurage for its perfumes for the first time as a method of extracting fragrance oils from flowers. With the fragrances "Egeo ON You" and "Egeo ON Me", the giant launched the world's first perfumes developed with AI in collaboration with Symrise in 2019, which were designed with the support of the artificial intelligence "Philyra" from the cooperation Symrise and IBM Research.

Beside, in 2022, "O Boticário" entered into a partnership with Netflix and developed series-inspired cosmetics.