Caudalie Group Buys Majority Stake in Talm, Its First Acquisition Ever

Caudalie Group has acquired a majority stake in Talm, marking the first time in its 30-year history that the company has bought a brand rather than built one, according to Premium Beauty News. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move formalizes a relationship that began in 2022, when Mathilde and Bertrand Thomas took a minority position in Talm before increasing their investment during the brand's 2023 fundraising round. Talm founder Kenza Keller, a former international marketing director at Byredo, told WWD that the Thomases approached her directly about taking majority control.

Keller founded Talm in 2021 as a body care line for pregnancy and postpartum, with the name standing for "To All the Mamas." The brand has since broadened into roughly a dozen products and expanded into around 60 doors across a dozen countries, including a recent entry into the French pharmacy channel, per WWD. Premium Beauty News reports the brand is posting double-digit revenue growth.

Keller said the deal responds to a specific bottleneck in her own growth plan. "I was in a phase where I wanted to accelerate in terms of distribution," she told Yahoo Finance, pointing especially to pharmacy retail in France. For Caudalie, whose pharmacy network and sales infrastructure are core assets, the acquisition gives it a second brand to push through channels it already controls.

Mathilde Thomas and Keller first crossed paths in 2022 at the Forbes Women 40 awards, according to Premium Beauty News, a meeting the Caudalie co-founder has described as revealing a complementary positioning between the two brands rather than a competitive one. Talm will keep operating as its own label under Keller, with Caudalie providing its sales force, pharmacy relationships and global infrastructure to push into new markets, while Keller said she intends to stay focused on strengthening Talm's position in Europe before expanding elsewhere.

The integration is already visible internally: Mathilde Thomas told WWD that Caudalie sales representatives received a Talm lip gloss at a company meeting two weeks before the announcement. "So you're going to see Talm all over," she said, describing how the brand will now travel through Caudalie's existing sales channels.