Company history

KOSÉ began in March 1946 as Kobayashi Gomei, set up by Kobayashi Kozaburo in Oji, north Tokyo, on the belief that cosmetics could lift the spirits of a country living in the ruins of defeat. He had no capital behind him, so he invented one: a contract-sales system under which retailers paid in before goods were distributed, funding the working capital from the selling side. He then went round the country signing shops up, packing even tiny consignments and paying the freight himself to reach provincial retailers who had nothing to sell. The habit of putting the retailer’s trust first became the company’s standing idea of trade. The firm was reorganized as Kobayashi Kosé in June 1948, and its sales arm split off as a separate company in 1951.

That year’s Pearl-lite Skin, a lotion formulated not to crystallize, sold for years. It was a market in which anything would sell and shoddy goods circulated freely; Kozaburo, disturbed by products priced above their worth, insisted on the best raw materials and fragrances he could buy. When voices inside the company argued for mass production and scale, he said plainly that KOSÉ would seek quality, not volume — a small company able to compete on the excellence of what it made. La Bonne (1957) and Aurique (1962) followed, and a reputation for product development dates from these years.

Two structural choices from the same period still shape the group. In March 1956 KOSÉ established Albion as a separate maker of prestige cosmetics — a parallel product world under separate management, seven years before any foreign tie-up. And in May 1963 it signed a technical alliance with L’Oréal of France, a relationship it would hold for thirty-eight years, until the joint venture was dissolved in 2001. A Sayama factory and a Tokyo research laboratory both opened in 1964, the head office moved to Nihonbashi in 1965 — where it remains — and a Hong Kong company in 1968 began selling abroad.

Capital liberalization had opened the industry to foreign houses, and department-store counters were the first thing they took. KOSÉ answered in 1970 with Cosme Decorté, the prestige line Kozaburo had long wanted to make, and defended its position by refusing to fight only where the foreigners were strongest: it secured space in independent cosmetics specialty shops as well as department stores and began posting trained beauty consultants into them. Kobayashi Yasukiyo later called that the survival move. Powder foundation Fit-on followed in 1976, and in 1985 came Sekkisei, a lotion of Japanese and Chinese botanical extracts that is still one of the group’s pillar brands worldwide.

Manufacturing earned its own reputation. In 1980 KOSÉ became the first Japanese cosmetics maker to win a Deming Prize for a plant — recognition that later brought OEM work from foreign brands and ISO 9002 certification across every factory. A Gunma plant opened in 1979, and in 1981 Kobayashi Reijiro, the founder’s son, took over as president. Local companies went up across Asia in sequence: Singapore (1971), Malaysia (1972), Thailand and Taiwan (1984, with manufacturing), China (1988).

The most consequential decision of the period was organizational. In 1988 KOSÉ split its domestic selling in two — a sales company for its own counselling-sales products in April, and KOSÉ Cosmeport for the general-goods route in July, charged with reaching a wider public at accessible prices. High-priced lines sold face to face in department stores and specialty shops; low-priced lines were picked off a shelf in mass retailers; different companies, different products. A decade later the two still accounted for 76% and 20% of sales, and separating the selling organizations first is what made it possible to separate the brands in 1991.

In August 1991 Kobayashi Kosé became simply KOSÉ, part of a corporate-identity programme adopted as domestic brands came under pressure from foreign rivals. The research done for it pointed to brand marketing, and KOSÉ acted on the conclusion: it developed a different brand for each distribution channel — department stores, specialty shops, mass retailers, drugstores — where Japanese practice had been to put the same goods everywhere. Internally it was called the selective distribution system; it was also what L’Oréal did, and the alliance supplied the example. Asked what distinguished KOSÉ from Shiseido, president Kobayashi Yasukiyo named this system and the group structure behind it.

The method was strong against price erosion and weak against churn in the channels themselves. Resale price maintenance for cosmetics was abolished in 1997, the year Yasukiyo became president, and discounting broke out; the winners of the shake-out were drugstores, whose head offices bought centrally and could not be served by dispatching beauty consultants store by store. Yasukiyo later admitted the company was slow to retrain its sales force for that model. By 1999 specialty shops were still 28.8% of sales and drugstores 20.5%, and in the year to March 2006 the drugstores’ shift to profitability caught KOSÉ out again, in falling sales and profit.

KOSÉ registered its shares over the counter in December 1999 — consolidated revenue of $1.2B (¥138bn), an 8.4% share of the industry, third in Japan behind Shiseido and Kanebo, with only 5.9% of sales from abroad — and moved to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2000. In August 2001 the L’Oréal joint venture was dissolved after thirty-eight years. The years that followed added brands with distinct worlds of their own, Stephen Knoll in 2003 and JILL STUART beauty in 2005, and pushed further into China with a sales company in 2005.

Kobayashi Kazutoshi, the founder’s grandson, became president in June 2007 and began with a defensive reform aimed at efficiency. It did not work: consolidated revenue fell from ¥177.8 billion in the year to March 2006 to ¥166.5 billion six years later, and recurring profit from ¥20.6 billion to ¥11.8 billion. In 2011 he switched to an offensive reform — widening both the fields and the geography of the business, opening a direct-sales company that year and placing subsidiaries in India (2013) and Indonesia (2014).

Its clearest expression came in April 2014, when KOSÉ bought the American make-up brand tarte. Founded in 1999 by Maureen Kelly, tarte had no factory and no laboratory — it competed on concept and idea, which is precisely the value Kazutoshi said his own company lacked. Inside Sephora and Ulta, it reached 2,300 doors by 2017, and in three years its revenue rose 3.6-fold to ¥28.2 billion and operating profit 5.6-fold to ¥8.4 billion. At home, prestige lines and Albion drove recurring profit to ¥39.6 billion in the year to March 2017, passing Shiseido’s figure for the first time; inbound tourist demand then carried revenue from ¥190.0 billion in the year to March 2014 to $3.1B (¥333bn) five years later, with record recurring profit of ¥54.0 billion. As Japanese-made gained prestige, Chinese-made lost it, and KOSÉ sold its Chinese plant in 2017.

Then the reversal. COVID-19 cut demand for lipstick and its neighbours; revenue fell to ¥279.4 billion in the year to March 2021 and recurring profit to ¥18.7 billion, roughly a third of the peak. The fiscal year-end moved from March to December in 2021, the listing moved to the Prime Market in 2022, and China turned into a burden — inventory clearance and store and headcount cuts produced a ¥4.4 billion extraordinary loss in 2024. Revenue recovered to $2.2B (¥330bn) in 2025, back at the 2019 level, but recurring profit reached only ¥21.5 billion. On 1 January 2026 the company reorganized into a holding structure as KOSÉ Holdings, and at the March 2026 general meeting the holding company’s presidency passed to Shibusawa Koichi — the first president from outside the founding family — with Kazutoshi remaining as chairman and group CEO.