Léa Steyer has a good nose for it. The Grasse student, who is pursuing a dual degree in political science and engineering school, created Green Touch in 2022. “Like an enlightenment. I was with a friend, we were testing perfumes on classic mouillettes. He told me that in order not to waste, I could turn it over to test another scent and then, it clicked. We wondered what happened to these hundreds of little fingers (what we call in the industry, touch-to-feel) and…no one thought of recycling them. I got it right away. wanted to launch the project even though I had never thought of starting a business.”
Partnership with Clairefontaine
And she does it while studying. In one month, the company was created. It’s March 2022, Léa Steyer is setting out on her own. The technology to capture olfactory molecules already exists. She adapted it to her activity and quickly formed a partnership with the famous paper brand Clairefontaine. Notebooks and reams made from recycled felt pads, stamped Clairefontaine, soon leave the brand’s factories. 3.4 million touches have already been collected by Green Touch from its suppliers: Robertet, Firmenich, Parfex, Givaudan, IFF, Mane, the perfumers’ union, the International Perfume Museum, Dior, L’Oréal. The precious scented strips are then placed in barrels to capture their olfactory molecules and make them become simple pieces of paper again. Everything is then sent to Clairefontaine who will manufacture notebooks and reams of paper. This is the first Green Touch activity. Nothing to do with his studies? “If still, she says. At the INSA [Institut national des sciences appliquées, ndlr]I chose “Optimization of environmental processes” as my specialization. I have an appetite for environmental issues.”
Since 2022, the startup has come a long way. It is incubated at Villa Blu, the talent accelerator of the Robertet Group, one of the world leaders in the perfumes, flavorings and natural raw materials industry. “We are very well surrounded,” smiles Léa Steyer. “Here, in Grasse, we feel like we are part of a family.”
Scented paper workshop
She says “we” because since then, she has hired two apprentices who help her in the workshop. Which workshop? The one she opened to develop a second activity in order to meet the demand of certain customers who wanted to transform their scented touches into notebooks or greeting cards, invitations bearing their olfactory signature. “We had to train ourselves in this ancestral know-how from master French paper makers and we would like to further develop this segment.” So we don’t capture the olfactory molecules, on the contrary, we will work the “millefleur”. That is to say, recover bags of scented strips from manufacturers and recycle them as is with a whole odorous mixture. “The smells in our customers’ bags are never completely identical, it’s true, but in the end, I don’t know how to explain it, we know who owns each millefleur.”
Green Touch’s activity is a hit. Particularly on the environmental side where the impact is significant. “Since the start of the adventure, our activity has made it possible to avoid the cutting of nearly 30 trees, to save 39,100 liters of water, 8,500,000 Wh of energy, to reduce CO2 emissions of around of 2.55 tonnes (i.e. what a car almost half a trip around the world would have emitted).”
Triple turnover
Although she does not communicate on the turnover she was able to generate in the first year, she intends to multiply it by three by 2024. All this while starting a master’s degree at a business school in Paris to specialize in the luxury industry. Jack-of-all-trades Léa Steyer? Certainly! At 21 years old, the biggest names in the Luxury and Perfume sectors trust her, and she is already receiving requests from Brazil, Singapore and the United States, to recycle scented touches. A growth lever? “For the moment, we collect our customers in Grasse, Paris and Barcelona (a major hub of the perfume industry in Spain). And this, according to our personal travels. International development would require creating industries in these territories, otherwise, the environmental touch would be annihilated. For the moment, this is not the agenda.”
Perhaps approach retail distributors who use tens of millions of strips each month? “The positive environmental impact would be even greater!” Léa Steyer will wet the jersey and in the end, it should smell like success.
