Kiko Milano

KIKO Milano, is an Italian cosmetics company, founded in 1997.

History
It was born in 1997 from an idea by Stefano Percassi, one of the six children of Antonio Percassi, the founder of the family group. The first point of sale of the new cosmetics line consists of an 8 square meter corner inside the historic Fiorucci store in piazza San Babila, in Milan. The initial choice places the products in a high range, sales do not take off, the products are recalled and put on sale in one of the Percassi family's shopping centres. With low prices, sales soar and the products sell out in just a few days. A new business model is then studied based on low prices and quality products suitable for all age groups. In 2001 the joint venture was signed with Inditex, the Spanish company that owns Zara and for Kiko, still a small brand which at the time recorded around 2 million euros in revenues, it is the beginning of a period of success.

The range of products is expanded which not only includes the make up line but also skincare, beauty accessories, nail polishes (more than 1400 products will be developed over the years), points of sale are opened initially in Europe, in 2009 the e-commerce channel also becomes active, in 2012 the high-end brand Madina is acquired. The company's revenues and profitability are growing, banks are opening their stock market strings, the expansion of sales points abroad continues, from United Arab Emirates to Qatar, from Russia to Turkey, from Hong Kong to India. And then also in the United States, the first opened in March 2014. In 2015 there will be 900 points of sale, at the beginning of 2017 around a thousand of which only a third in Italy.

But starting from 2015, the company's profitability also began to decline, the stores in the United States pose some problems, and the company is in a complex phase. In July 2017 Antonio Percassi entrusted the leadership of the company to Cristina Scocchia, former L'Oréal. In April 2018, the Luxembourg fund Peninsula entered the company with a 30% stake, having just been released from the capital of Italy. The recovery plan includes strong investments in e-commerce, the shift of the international center of gravity from the West to the East, and the use of franchising formulas for the first time.

Marketing
Kiko products are promoted through a chain of stores for a total of approximately 900 points of sale, all of proprietà as well as an online sales point, also managed by the owner group.

The sales points present a strong characterization of the brand, a peculiar layout of the sales spaces which sees the positioning of the products in the displays in the name of order, combined with their implementation through relatively simple solutions. The type of cosmetics offered, which is aimed at the low-cost market, has allowed the brand to make its way into a market normally reserved for more expensive products from better-known brands.

The furnishing elements of the points of sale strongly characterize the Kiko brand to the point that, with sentence no. 11416/15 filed on 13 October 2015, the specialized business section of the Court of Milan prohibited the competing brand Wycon from using in its sales points the set of furnishing elements characterizing the Kiko and condemned the company to pay damages, quantified at 716,250 euros, and to eliminate the furnishings copied from Kiko from its more than one hundred sales points. The Court, in particular, considered that the furnishing concept that characterizes Kiko stores has an "original and creative character" and therefore deserves protection under the Copyright Law, sentence confirmed in April 2018 by the Court of Appeal which spoke of "parasitic competition". The final word to the Supreme Court.

Following the pandemic, the company had to relaunch its stores and thus launched a summer discount campaign thanks to the Waze navigation app, through which the closest points of sale where the customer could go were indicated.

Dati economici
In 2012, the annual research by the consultancy firm Pambianco on the Italian fashion companies most profitably listed on the stock exchange ranked Kiko sixth among the 50 companies taken into consideration by the study. That year the company's revenues reached 351 million. In 2013, a consortium of banks guaranteed 150 million in funds and in September the company announced investments and a further expansion of the number of sales points, again in Europe. In 2013 revenues reached 418 million euros.

In 2014 the company recorded approximately 70 million EBITDA (gross operating margin). Then profitability begins to rapidly decline (from 65 million to minus 30) also due to strong foreign expansion, particularly in the United States. In 2017, with revenues of 610 million and heavy bank debt, debt reorganization and heavy restructuring are initiated. In 2018 the turnover held up (596 million with a drop of 2.5%), Ebitda grew by 37% to 41.5 million, the loss doubled, reaching 64.4 million.