By Chinedu Nsofor
In the world of international business, experience matters, but experience combined with measurable results matters even more. For more than twenty five years, Dr. Franco Lucà has built a career around that distinction. His professional journey has taken him through the beauty, cosmetics, luxury, packaging, and consumer goods industries, placing him in some of the most demanding executive environments across Europe and Asia. At every stage, he has brought the same fundamental objective to the table: transform potential into measurable performance.
Now, with his professional horizon increasingly extending toward the United States, Dr. Lucà brings with him something that is difficult to replicate. He brings a genuinely international leadership perspective developed through decades of working across cultures, markets, industries, and business models. His story is not simply that of an executive who has occupied senior positions. It is the story of a leader who has repeatedly been trusted with complex challenges and has turned those challenges into opportunities for growth.
Born in Milan and holding both Italian and German citizenship, Dr. Lucà represents a powerful meeting point between two business cultures. From Italy comes an appreciation for creativity, design, relationships, entrepreneurship, and the emotional dimensions of brands. From Germany comes a strong orientation toward precision, structure, operational discipline, engineering, and execution. Throughout his career, these influences have combined to create a leadership philosophy that is both commercially ambitious and operationally grounded.
His professional experience has been particularly significant within beauty and cosmetics, industries where innovation must constantly meet consumer expectations, speed, quality, and commercial reality. In these markets, a great product alone is never enough. Companies must understand customers, anticipate trends, develop reliable operations, build international distribution, manage costs, and continually reinvent themselves. Dr. Lucà’s career demonstrates an ability to operate across precisely these dimensions.
His most recent chapter at Faber Castell Cosmetics illustrates this approach. As CEO from October 2025 through August 2026, he led an extensive growth and performance acceleration program involving Europe and North America. During FY 2026/27, the business delivered 12.5 percent year over year revenue growth and performed 8.3 percent above budget through May. Even more significantly, order intake increased by 35.8 percent year over year, creating momentum for continued development.
Behind these figures was a broader transformation agenda. Dr. Lucà focused on commercial acceleration, key account development, customer retention, new business generation, sales planning, forecasting, operational discipline, and organizational performance. His approach was not limited to increasing sales. It involved strengthening the foundations required to make growth sustainable.
That philosophy has been visible throughout his career.
At Intercos, one of the world’s major strategic partners and manufacturers for beauty and cosmetics brands, Dr. Lucà served as CEO Asia Pacific between 2016 and 2019. There, he confronted the extraordinary opportunity presented by the rapidly developing Asian beauty market.
The results were remarkable.
Between 2016 and 2018, revenue in China achieved a 47 percent compound annual growth rate. EBITDA margin increased from 4 percent to 24 percent. The regional organization also established powerful positions across WeChat and ecommerce channels, producing an 86 percent three year compound annual growth rate.
Yet the significance of this chapter extends beyond the numbers.
Dr. Lucà understood that succeeding in Asia required more than exporting an established European business model. It required understanding local consumers, digital ecosystems, relationships, cultural expectations, and the rapidly changing architecture of beauty commerce. His work included developing relationships with major international and local beauty retailers, advancing sustainability initiatives, supporting the development of a research and innovation center in Shanghai’s Oriental Beauty Valley, and advising the Shanghai Fengxian Government on sustainability practices for cosmetics companies.
This combination of commercial growth and forward thinking reflects an important characteristic of his leadership. Dr. Lucà has consistently treated transformation as more than a financial exercise. For him, transformation involves people, processes, technology, customers, innovation, and culture.
The same philosophy can be seen in his earlier leadership at GEKA, a specialist in mascara packaging and an important player within the beauty supply chain. As CEO and Chairman of the Board between 2008 and 2013, he helped increase revenue by 25 percent and EBITDA by 34 percent. He established production operations in North America, reduced production setup times by approximately 30 percent, improved working capital by 50 percent, and transformed free cash flow from negative to positive.
These achievements reveal another dimension of his experience: an understanding of the relationship between commercial ambition and operational excellence.
Growth without operational discipline can quickly become fragile. Similarly, operational efficiency without commercial ambition can limit an organization’s potential. Dr. Lucà’s career has been defined by bringing these two forces together.
His tenure at Bottega Manifatturiera Borse provides another example. As CEO and Board Member of the Italian luxury leather goods company, he increased EBITDA margin from 7 percent to 15 percent while developing a global business to consumer and department store distribution strategy. He helped establish a new brand identity and market positioning, expanded into major luxury markets across Asia and the Middle East, reduced dependency on the largest customer from 100 percent to 65 percent, and achieved significant production and procurement savings.
For an executive operating in luxury, this balance is especially important. Luxury businesses depend heavily on brand perception, craftsmanship, customer relationships, and emotional connection, but behind those visible elements must be a highly disciplined commercial and operational engine.
Dr. Lucà’s career has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to build that engine.
His experience at DEF Group adds another major dimension to his profile. Serving as CEO from 2019 to 2025, he led a comprehensive corporate turnaround, improving EBITDA by more than 20 million euros and moving the business from a significant loss position to positive EBITDA. He also transformed the company’s cash position from significantly negative to positive cash generation, while leading strategic repositioning, organizational transformation, digital modernization, and the preparation and execution of the company’s strategic exit.
This is the kind of experience that becomes particularly valuable in uncertain economic environments. Markets change. Consumer behavior changes. Technology changes. Ownership structures change. Companies sometimes discover that the strategy that worked five years ago is no longer sufficient today.
The executives who create lasting value are those who can recognize that reality early and act decisively.
Dr. Lucà has built his reputation around doing exactly that.
His earlier years with Aptar and Ing. Erich Pfeiffer further established his expertise in cosmetics, packaging, international sales, marketing, and business development. During this period, he progressed through increasingly senior responsibilities, eventually serving as President of the Cosmetic Division Worldwide and Board Member, as well as Cross Company Executive Director of the Viscose Division.
His achievements included increasing cosmetics division revenue by 23 percent and improving EBIT margin by 13 percentage points, moving the division from loss making to profitable. He also established a dedicated beauty division and production facility, developed investment governance across six legal entities, coordinated the merger of six business divisions, and led a company wide change program across multiple cultures and geographies.
Taken together, these experiences explain why Dr. Lucà’s profile extends far beyond the conventional definition of a beauty executive.
He is a transformation leader.
He is a commercial strategist.
He is a global operator.
He is a CEO experienced in both growth environments and turnaround situations.
And he is an executive who understands the entire value chain, from manufacturing and packaging to branding, customer development, digital commerce, international expansion, and organizational performance.
His academic background complements this practical experience. He completed a Doctorate in Business Administration at Business School Lausanne, where his dissertation focused on change management processes to achieve business sustainability. Earlier, he earned an MBA from the University of Wales, with research focused on ensuring innovation through process management and creating sustainable growth for brands in developing markets.
These academic interests closely mirror the themes that have defined his professional life.
Change. Innovation. Sustainability. Growth. Transformation. Execution.
For Dr. Lucà, these concepts are not simply subjects for academic discussion. They have repeatedly appeared as practical challenges in the organizations he has led.
His approach to leadership is equally distinctive. He emphasizes accountability without losing empowerment, commercial ambition without sacrificing operational discipline, and transformation without losing sight of people. In international environments, he recognizes that successful leadership cannot simply be copied from one country to another. Organizations operating in Milan, Munich, Shanghai, New York, or any other major commercial center may share common business principles while requiring different approaches to customers, employees, partners, and markets.
That international sensitivity could become particularly valuable in the United States.
America represents one of the world’s most sophisticated and competitive consumer markets. Beauty companies operating there face powerful consumers, sophisticated retailers, rapidly evolving digital channels, aggressive competition, demanding investors, and continuous pressure to innovate. Success requires leaders who can combine speed with discipline and creativity with commercial execution.
Dr. Lucà’s international background gives him an unusual perspective on these demands.
He has already operated across Europe, Asia, and North America. He has managed multicultural teams, built international customer relationships, expanded production capabilities, transformed organizations, and navigated both mature and emerging markets.
His experience also places him at an interesting intersection between European heritage and global commercial thinking.
The beauty industry is becoming increasingly international. European formulation expertise, Asian consumer innovation, American commercial scale, digital platforms, luxury positioning, sustainability, and advanced manufacturing are increasingly interconnected. The most successful companies will require leaders capable of understanding these different ecosystems simultaneously.
Dr. Lucà’s career has prepared him for precisely that environment.
There is also a strong entrepreneurial dimension to his leadership. Despite his extensive corporate experience, his career has never been limited to maintaining existing structures. Again and again, he has entered organizations during moments when something needed to change. Sometimes the objective was rapid growth. Sometimes it was profitability. Sometimes international expansion. Sometimes organizational transformation. Sometimes a complete turnaround.
The common thread has been action.
He has demonstrated that strategy has little value unless it translates into execution. A market opportunity must become a customer. A customer relationship must become sustainable revenue. Revenue must become profitable growth. Growth must ultimately create lasting value.
This practical philosophy has become one of the defining characteristics of his career.
It is also why his next professional chapter could be significant.
As he looks toward opportunities in the United States, Dr. Franco Lucà is not arriving as an executive searching for his first international challenge. He arrives with decades of experience already tested in complex markets. He has managed businesses in Europe and Asia, developed international operations, worked with private equity and family owned companies, built customer relationships, led transformations, and delivered measurable financial results.
His career has been built across borders, and his next chapter has the potential to extend that story further.
From Milan to Munich. From Europe to Asia. From luxury and packaging to cosmetics and consumer goods. From turnaround situations to high growth environments.
And now toward America. For Dr. Franco Lucà, the American chapter is not a departure from his career. It is a natural continuation of it.
It represents an opportunity to bring Italian creativity, German discipline, European beauty expertise, Asian market experience, and global executive leadership into one of the world’s most influential commercial environments.
After more than twenty five years of transforming businesses and building international growth platforms, the next question is not whether Dr. Lucà has experience.
It is what he will do with it next.
And if his career to date offers any indication, his next chapter will be defined by the same principles that have guided him throughout his professional journey: ambitious growth, measurable performance, international perspective, organizational transformation, innovation, and sustainable value creation.
America may be his next destination. But global leadership has been his journey all along.