🔒Big Names, New Products: Manufacturing giant BIC branches out from lighters, shavers and pens

Think of manufacturer BIC, and products like lighters, shavers and pens immediately come to mind. But the Shelton-based company has been diversifying in recent years.

It has its new BodyMark by BIC line of body markers, launched in 2018, for people to create temporary tattoos. In 2021, it introduced a special BIC Pride Pack of markers featuring rainbow colors for tattoos to support the LGBTQ+ communities. Another line of markers has been marketed to sports fans who want to support their favorite teams on game day.

To expand its lighter line, BIC in 2020 launched its EZ Reach lighter, which has an extended wand to make it easier to light candles and grills, while keeping hands away from flames.

Ahead of Earth Day this year, BIC introduced a new line of eco-friendly stationery products, with pens and markers made from at least 50% recycled plastic.

Last year, the company, which recorded $2 billion in sales in 2020, expanded its product offerings to include BIC Kids, coloring supplies for children in the United States, products it had already been selling globally. It also acquired Boston-based digital notebook company Rocketbook, paying $40 million upfront for the startup, which makes cloud-connected, smart and reusable notebooks and accessories.

Also last year, BIC acquired Djeep, a French manufacturer of high-end decorated lighters, for $45.4 million.

BIC also has been recruiting big names to market its products. It recently teamed with supermodel Chanel Iman, best known for her work as a Victoria’s Secret Angel, to introduce its BodyMark by BIC NFL series.

Entertainer Snoop Dogg and businesswoman Martha Stewart are marketing the EZ Reach lighter. Actress Tia Mowry, famous for shows such as “Sister, Sister” and a mother herself, is marketing BIC Kids products.

Gonzalve Bich has been the company’s CEO since 2018, and he is the third generation from his family to serve in the role.

His grandfather, Marcel Bich, founded the company in 1944. New Haven Biz recently chatted with Gonzalve Bich about the company, its recent diversification and its future.

Tell us about your background at BIC?

I have been at the company my whole life. It is my family. I was very close to my grandfather, the company’s founder.

My dad [Bruno Bich] ran it for a number of decades. I joined the company officially in 2003 after a short stint as a consultant in New York with Deloitte, and I have been with the organization ever since.

What has been your focus since you took over as CEO?

As a long-term company, we have to be focused on growth. There is growth in each of our core divisions. I like the word diversification.

Doing that can come through internal innovation, either at the product level or the technology level. But acquisition work is also important.

A startup like Rocketbook is a great example. It’s a small, less than 50-person company that caught on to a really interesting segment. We bring to them global reach, and we are able to scale the business.

It harkens back to the roots of BIC. My grandfather bought the original ball pen patent and then he scaled that to the most-known pen in the world. We bought a small lighter company in Brittany, France, and we turned it into the largest global-branded lighter business.

We bought a small shave business in Greece that we have turned into a global powerhouse in shave that BIC has become.

My goal is to step up these efforts. We will be bringing more capital to the table and becoming a little bit more aggressive and ambitious in where we want to take the organization over the very long term.

The company has been recruiting a lot of celebrities. How successful has this strategy been?

We are very happy with the results of each of those different partnerships. Some of them are very large partnerships at a global level, some are hyperlocal. We have done them all over the world.

I love when we find brand ambassadors who can connect in an organic and authentic way with our products, and the purpose of those products. It is harkening back to the legacy of the organization.

You’ll remember the [shaving] campaigns we did with [tennis star] John McEnroe for years in the U.S., and then we had ‘Flick My BIC.’

We are just being a little bit more visible and more ambitious.

Last year, BIC acquired Rocketbook. Do you anticipate digital writing products will be a growth area?

It is already a source of growth. Consumers have more and more ability to communicate, it is exponential every year.

Rocketbook is the market leader in digital notebooks.

It has been incredible how we have been able to scale that this year. They are having an incredible year in the U.S. market, and we look forward to some international expansion.

There is a ton of research that will tell you that handwriting is still extremely important. The physical act of writing, especially at the youngest of ages, has cognitive benefits that can’t be replicated on a screen. So that is definitely going to stay.

There is a desire to digital detox. We offer creative outlets, so you can do some adult coloring, you can do bullet journaling, you can just doodle like I do sometimes. You can write your wife a love letter like I did last night.

But digital writing is here to stay, and that is one of the reasons we love Rocketbook so much. We allow people the experience of still physically writing on a surface, and then they can digitize whatever they have written, drawn, made a list of and deal with it digitally. So it has character recognition. You can email it, text it, or load it into the cloud.

That is just the beginning of our digital writing journey. I am really excited about how we can continue to build out in this growth sector.

BIC launched a line of products made from at least 50 percent recycled plastics. How is the company focused on environmental issues?

From the sustainability perspective, the tone at the top is extremely important. Sustainability is very important to me. When I took over in my leadership capacity, one of the things I did was I added sustainability as an organization value.

We made some ambitious commitments to ourselves and our stakeholders. Our sustainability commitments are for 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025, and 50% non-virgin [recycled] petroleum plastics in products by 2030.

That is going to require quite a bit of adaptation internally and working with our suppliers to make sure we can meet that ambition, but I am confident. It involves a ton of research and development, working with new vendors, changing how we do things, while never, ever sacrificing the quality, value and safety of our products.

How successful have BIC’s new product launches been?

We also have a temporary tattoo business called BodyMark that we are very proud of and we think has great legs for the future. BodyMark is probably one of the key highlights of this year. It is driving a substantial amount of our growth both in the U.S. and globally.

We launched a couple of creativity lines, with the biggest brand name being Intensity [coloring and marker] products. They are designed to allow people to express their greatest creativity, either through drawing, bullet journaling or other uses.

We have added brand support and partnerships and digital campaigns behind that, to really connect those new products with the consumer in a way that is more augmented than we might have done in years past.

We launched a product about a year ago called EZ Reach, with a campaign with Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. It has gone viral and done pretty well and has connected with youth in a very special way.

Has the pandemic had any impact on the company?

It has definitely taught us that we need to be agile and inventive and very determined in the face of challenges.

Our team members didn’t miss a beat. We pivoted to full online. It has allowed us to really challenge ourselves, on how we work and how we share information. I know we are never going back to what it was.

I am thrilled with the hybrid working models we have instituted all over the world. It has actually allowed us to be more nimble.

In the last two years, the lighter business has been, forgive the pun, completely on fire, linked to cocooning. People have been barbecuing more, they have candles at home and they are outdoors.

How many employees/locations do you have in Connecticut now, and what’s their focus?

We have two locations, the Milford facility and our corporate headquarters in Shelton.

As of September 2021, BIC has 409 employees in Connecticut. The Connecticut employees form three different groups.

The first is the Milford manufacturing facility. They make lighters.

In our Shelton headquarters facility, you have two groups of people. One group is BIC North America, so they are focused on the commercial operations, the marketing, the sales and the supply chain of the U.S. business. And then you have our global team that runs the global business.

About half of them are based here in the U.S. Our [international] corporate headquarters is in Clichy, France.

To what extent is BIC committed to maintaining its Connecticut presence?

We have been here 50 years, we have roots so deep I can’t see them in the ground. I have four kids who go to Connecticut schools. My wife was born in Connecticut. I was born in Connecticut. We love this state.

Many manufacturers have had trouble finding enough employees. What about BIC?

In general, labor markets have been very tough in the last two years for a variety of reasons. We offer a very compelling reason to join the organization.

In our manufacturing locations, we have some very tenured people. You are talking about highly automated machinery that requires months, if not years, to be very skilled at running. So we have a lot of training and development.

We are always on the lookout for team members who want to join the organization.