Sustainability Strategy

Material Topics

DOUGLAS has embarked on the journey to becoming an ESG leader in the beauty retail sector. As part of this mission, we have identified seven key topics that are organised around our four ESG pillars Beautiful People, Beautiful Products, Beautiful Planet and Beautiful Governance:

  1. Customer satisfaction and experience
  2. Diversity, equity and inclusion
  3. Employee engagement
  4. Sustainable assortment and own brands
  5. Reducing CO2 emissions
  6. Material efficiency
  7. Executive board ownership

Along these seven topics we will drive our efforts to develop robust practices, enrich the lives of our customers and employees, and keep our planet beautiful.

Our commitments

We view sustainability issues as an integral part of our operations. We aim to comply with the highest standards across our organisation and commit to actively mitigating ESG risks and helping reach global ambitions. In keeping with our promise of ‘Let’s do beautiful’ we have defined our sustainability activities as follows:

Beautiful People: To create a world where everyone feels seen, heard and valued, DOUGLAS is committed to diversity and inclusion. Our share of women in leadership positions ​has already reached around 50%; our aim is to keep this ratio at least close to this level.

DOUGLAS’ success is founded on the dedication of our employees.

We strive to become THE customer-focused premium beauty retailer. To achieve this, we rely on our omnichannel strategy: we are constantly expanding our digital solutions and online shopping, and in combination with our excellent offers in our stores, we create an outstanding shopping experience and thus a high level of customer satisfaction.

Beautiful Products: For us, beauty goes hand-in-hand with clean products that are free from certain criticised ingredients. We aim to increase the share of vegan and organic content in our product portfolio​.

We are making our suppliers more accountable and ensure that our products are sourced based on ethical terms. We support local products made in the EU​.

We believe in the circular economy and will increase the share of recycled and recyclable materials in our products.

Beautiful Planet: We want all of our sites (offices and stores) to be carbon-neutral by 2025. We aim to lower Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and compensate for all remaining emissions.

We will define targets and create a roadmap for Scope 3 emissions ​in FY2022/2023. We support our strategic suppliers ​in setting targets by 2025.

We will set up an emissions and waste management system to create transparency and improve our ability to track our progress towards these goals.

Beautiful Governance: We operate based on a clear code of conduct for our employees and business partners and ensure ethical business practices and adherence to applicable laws and internal policies to prevent any violations of law​.

Becoming a more digital company requires sophisticated IT security and data privacy mechanisms that we are continuously improving.​

ESG is an issue for senior management. Therefore, we aim to plan to explicitly embed responsibility for ESG issues at the highest management level and create additional incentives in the coming financial year 2022/23 to ensure successful implementation of our goals.