In just over a year, Sander van der Laan managed to get the Douglas perfumery chain ready for the stock market. There is no question that Tina Müller, his predecessor at the top of Douglas, has done good groundwork. However, the Dutch trading manager has managed to visibly increase profitability. After several years of losses in the three-digit million range, the bottom line was finally in the black again in the financial year that ended in September. The rigid cost management that the Dutchman prescribed to the perfumery chain contributed to this.

Van der Laan, whose first name is actually Alexander, was brought in by CVC Capital at the end of 2022 to pave the way for the financial investor to exit by taking the company public. After all, the private equity house has had an 85% stake in the perfumery chain since 2015. The exit is, therefore, long overdue. However, the pandemic intervened and forced the online business to expand quickly. Müller mastered this task brilliantly, even though the move from offline to online was not entirely inexpensive. At the same time, Müller radically trimmed the branch network, which had expanded rapidly through acquisitions.

However, profitability fell by the wayside. Müller did not want to support the owner's new course setting and resigned from the supervisory board in autumn 2022 to save face. Shortly after taking up his post in Düsseldorf, van der Laan made it clear that he did not want to completely turn the company around. Instead, it is essential to recalibrate the priorities. The focus is “strongly on cash and cost management and thus the earnings situation,” said the 55-year-old, giving the general direction – less than nine weeks after starting his job.

Three months later, the Dutchman presented his new strategy, which has the flowery name “Let it bloom”. In addition to promises of growth, the strategy, which extends to 2026, primarily contains efficiency goals, which van der Laan also wants to achieve through greater standardization and automation. Of course, not all managers agreed with the new approach. Shortly after the strategy was presented, fluctuation began in the upper management levels. But van der Laan, who values direct words, does not allow himself to be dissuaded from his course.

While Müller gave the perfumery chain a face, van der Laan is a trade manager through and through. He is on the move a lot, visits branches all over Europe and is close to the operational business. For him, online and stationary businesses are not opposites but rather two closely linked sales channels.

The fact that van der Laan is a great advocate of the stationary branch business is undoubtedly also due to his CV: he worked for the Dutch retail group Ahold (today: Ahold Delhaize) for a good 16 years, most recently as managing director of the supermarket chain Albert Heijn, and then for more than six years as CEO for the non-food retailer Action, a kind of Dutch version of the 1-euro store.

His time at Action may have made him particularly interesting for CVC, as the chain is backed by the financial investor 3i, who raved about the discounter as “one of the most successful private equity investments in the world”. Van der Laan significantly expanded the branch network there. An approach that he is now repeating at Douglas - albeit with the handbrake on. In 2023, he dared to enter the market in Slovenia and Belgium, so Douglas is currently active in 22 countries.

The manager, who has an MBA from the University of Breukelen, quickly rewrites the equity story of his predecessor, in which Douglas wanted to expand from a beauty company to a healthcare company. Van der Laan declares the foray into the pharmacy business initiated by Müller to be over. “Various strategic options” are being examined for the online pharmacy Disapo.

How quickly van der Laan manages to return the heavily indebted perfumery chain to the stock market also depends on how the Christmas business went. The prospects were not bad at the end of December. Because even though the overall economic situation, including inflation, was dampening consumer sentiment, people reward themselves with small luxuries in these times. Van der Laan consistently focuses Douglas on this. If the market environment is right, CVC will be able to enter the exit phase - possibly faster than many people think.