PARIS — Marking its fifth acquisition this year, global marketing and communications group The Independents said Friday it has added Lucien Pagès to its collective of leading agencies.
The umbrella entity, founded in 2017 through the merger of Asia-based events organizer K2 and public relations agency Karla Otto, has acquired Lucien Pagès Communication, a PR and communications agency with offices in Paris and New York, for an undisclosed sum.
It turns out Pagès is a friend of The Independents cofounders Isabelle and Olivier Chouvet, who have a holiday home not far from his native village in the secluded Cévennes mountains in the south of France. They first met in 2016.
“We have a tradition of going to visit each other’s village every summer,” he told WWD in a joint interview with Isabelle Chouvet, chief executive officer of The Independents.
She has childhood memories of visiting the restaurant run by Pagès’ late father. “I had never been back since going there with my parents. It was very emotional for me to return there and meet Lucien and his mother,” she said.
When Pagès saw his friend, fashion show producer Alexandre de Betak, sell his company to The Independents in 2021, the idea of joining forces took root.
After 18 years of building his agency without external financing, and having weathered the coronavirus pandemic solo, he relishes becoming part of a wider network while remaining at the helm of his company.
“In a world that is changing and permanently evolving, I felt the need to lean on strong partners. By freeing me from certain pressures, I feel it will allow me to do my job even better,” said the PR, whose clients range from luxury brands like Saint Laurent, Loewe and Schiaparelli to emerging designers such as Ludovic de Saint Sernin.
Flush from a $400 million investment last year led by private equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners and entertainment giant Banijay Group, The Independents has been on an acquisition spree, betting on scale and geographical reach to counter a luxury downturn.
The group expects to log revenues of more than $750 million in 2024, up from $600 million in 2023, Chouvet said.
Earlier this year, it swallowed brand consultancy and entertainment company Sunshine, in addition to Kennedy, the strategic consultancy behind initiatives such as traveling social club Prada Mode.
In September, it bought creative production agency Kitten Production and Dubai-based luxury tech firm Bureau Béatrice. With Pagès, it now groups 17 partner firms employing 1,200 people in 16 cities, Chouvet said.
Isabelle Chouvet
Benoît Peverelli/Courtesy of The Independents
“It’s an extraordinary network for our clients who all gravitate around fashion, luxury, lifestyle, art and culture. These are experts who speak the same language and come from different backgrounds,” she said, describing the collective as “an orchestra of specialists.”
They will be joined by the Pagès team, which includes more than 50 people in Paris and 10 in New York, where he opened an office in 2019.
“He will fit in very naturally within the other agencies. We share a lot of the same values, and I think that for his clients, there will be a lot of potential synergies,” Chouvet said.
She said the serial mergers happened naturally, likening it to putting together the pieces of a puzzle.
“Between Japan, China and South Korea, we had set up our agencies from scratch. We saw that our clients loved the fact that we could meet their needs in three completely different countries, but with a real local setup, and these clients have become increasingly global,” she recalled.
“They needed support in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and we couldn’t open an agency from scratch each time,” Chouvet said. “We had to be up to speed to respond to that, so being alone locally no longer makes sense today.”
She described the group as an ecosystem for entrepreneurs who share best practices, but each maintains its own culture.
“What we like about Lucien, like all the other partners in the group, is precisely this entrepreneurial spirit and we want him to keep that. That’s why it’s called The Independents. Everyone keeps their way of working, their DNA, their values, their way of testing things,” she explained.
Pagès credited them with shaking up the system.
“I felt like service providers were not valued in the same way as other fashion and luxury professions,” he said. “By creating this group, they showed that they could be a real force: a financial force, a strike force.”
The high-profile PR, who cultivates a personal following through his Instagram account, which has 111,000 followers, said he fielded six acquisition offers last year. “That had never happened before, and I linked it to the fact that everyone saw The Independents growing in scale,” he said.
The group’s expansion comes at a time when luxury brands are morphing into entertainment providers, with the Pinault family’s holding company Artémis buying a majority stake in powerhouse talent firm Creative Artists Agency and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton launching a new entertainment division named 22 Montaigne.
“Things are evolving and in light of that, we could potentially continue to make other acquisitions. We did five this year and we have more planned in the coming months,” Chouvet said.
