We spoke to 2025 Body Heath & Beauty Platinum Winner, Centdegrés on what it feels like to win a Pentawards trophy, what keeps them inspired on a daily basis and what's next for the Paris-based agency.

Can you tell us a bit about Centdegrés?

Founded in Paris in 1988, Centdegrés is an international brand intelligence and creative agency. We create value by building brands from scratch and transforming existing ones to make them more desirable and culturally relevant.

From brand platforms and visual identities to product design and retail environments, we shape complete brand worlds that connect emotionally with audiences. While deeply rooted in beauty and fragrance, we collaborate with global groups, independent brands and emerging talents across industries where creativity drives value. At Centdegrés, we design for impact, culture and boldness. Together with our clients, we turn ideas into icons.

Recently, joining Innovative Beauty Group (IBG) opened a new chapter of international growth. As part of IBG, we now operate within an all-in-one brand development ecosystem dedicated to beauty, supporting brands from strategy and design to product innovation and shelf execution.

How would you describe your core area of expertise, and how has it evolved over time?

At our core, we shape meaning before we shape form. Since 1988, strategy and creation have combined disciplines at Centdegrés, they are two expressions of the same ambition: making brands desirable, coherent and culturally alive.

Over time, our expertise has expanded from strong creative direction into a holistic vision, from insight and positioning to identity, packaging, product and spatial design. We design not just objects, but experiences and narratives that endure. Our international presence has strengthened our cultural sensitivity, allowing us to craft brands that resonate across borders.

Joining IBG further expanded our capabilities, connecting brand thinking with product innovation and development. Today, we not only imagine iconic brands, we help bring them to life from concept to shelf.

You have won the 2025 Pentawards Body, Health and Beauty Platinum Award. How does it feel to receive such recognition?

Receiving this award is a tremendous honour and a proud moment for our agency. It validates the bold creativity, strategic thinking and attention to detail that our teams pour into every project.

Such recognition strengthens the credibility of both the brand and our agency, opening doors to new opportunities. More than an accolade, it confirms that our creative voice remains relevant today. After more than 35 years, being recognized at this level reflects our ability to continually renew our vision, stay culturally attuned, and craft ideas that genuinely connect with contemporary audiences.

Awards like this inspire us to keep pushing boundaries, designing experiences that are not only beautiful, but meaningful and impactful on a global scale.

Tell us about your Platinum winning project L’ENTROPISTE – MASTER OF DISORDER - the story behind it, inspiration, challenges…

L’ENTROPISTE – Master of Disorder is a radical perfume house we created around the visionary perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour.

Our goal was to deconstruct traditional perfumery codes, transforming chaos into art. Every step, from concept development and brand platform to visual identity, bottle, and packaging design, was guided by this philosophy of disruption. The bottles, designed as totemic objects, embody asymmetry and sculptural lines, reflecting tension, contrast, and uncompromising beauty.

The brand itself acts as a manifesto, celebrating creative rebellion and the harmony that emerges from disorder.

This project challenged us to translate chaos into both a visual and olfactory language, ultimately opening new sensory and artistic horizons.

What part of the project did you enjoy working on the most?

To tell you the truth, the whole project was a great joy from A to Z, thanks to the great teams involved and thanks to the context. We departed from a blank page, a great chance and a big responsibility. We worked with audacious entrepreneurs, who believed in our vision.

We cooperated with an incredibly talented perfumer, Bertrand Duchaufour, who was the artistic soul of the future brand. From intense and passionate discussion with him, we came up with the idea of « master of disorder », this capacity to break the rules and invent something radically new thanks to an immense know-how. Then the whole design project was on tracks. The name “l’entropiste” followed the vision of disorder. The bottle is some sort of an “archetype in disorder” with high quality standards. The pack is using codes of shipping protection, turned into a disruptive luxury box. The identity codes are both crazy and chic.

In a very saturated environment, the brand is remarkable. How could we not enjoy?

What would you say to a brand or agency thinking of entering the Pentawards for the first time?

We would say: be bold and be authentic. The Pentawards celebrate strong ideas, not just beautiful execution. It’s about vision, strategy, and the courage to push boundaries. Don’t try to anticipate the results; simply submit the work that truly represents your creative ambition and what you genuinely believe in.

Just entering is already a statement. Winning is incredible, but participating positions your brand or agency within a global community that values innovation and excellence.

It’s the Pentawards 20th Anniversary this year, do you have a stand-out moment of design or standout design project that’s stuck with you from the past 20 years?

As a creative agency, our greatest pleasure in life is the realize how collective intelligence is powerful compare to our individual minds. The perfume bottle "La Panthère", designed for Cartier, is the best illustration of that.

We had this sort of obsession of finding a way to design the inside of a fragrance bottle, to enlarge our creative field. We went to see Pochet, the famous french 300 years old glassmaker. We signed an innovation agreement, and we begun to work together, on the base of the ideas of our design team. We worked with passion, as an hybrid team with them.

A few months later, we were invited on the pitch for the creation of "La Panthère". We presented this crazy glass object, sculpting inside the glass the beautiful fragrance created by Mathilde Laurent in the form of a panther face.

We won the project. It became this incredible Bottle, and a great success. The project went to life thanks to very audacious people, at Cartier, of course, but also at Pochet and in our team. Sincerely, it was a magic project!

Can you tell us what you are currently working on? Anything exciting that you can share with us?

As you can imagine we cannot talk precisely about the projects we are working on. What we can tell you is that our work has radically changed in the last 10 years, and it is still evolving fast with our merging with the Innovative Beauty group.

Indeed, our work is no longer a classical design consultancy, creating great products or beautiful packaging. It has become an extremely strategic work, building a sustainable brand equity. It can be, like we did for l'Entropiste, creating a desirable brand from zero that stands up in a saturated market.

It can also be the transformation of the whole brands, boosting its assets so it comes back to success. It is a almost a new profession, using our creativity for long term strategic purposes. It comes with high responsibilities, and high satisfactions…

How do you manage to stay creative and find inspiration?

One of the main thing to stay creative and find inspiration is to be open-minded and curious daily. It is not only about seeing an exhibition but, in a way larger spectrum questioning and trying to understand not only the context that surrounds us but also the all world beyond that.

It also implies accepting the blank page syndrome as an usual step in the process and embracing ideas that we could consider as silly, because creation often comes from unexpected meetings.

To you, what is the power of design?

Design is a creative discipline that aims to improve our daily lives by solving problems and exploring new possibilities. It lies at the frontier between arts, science, industry and therefore is nourished by these various domains and creates bridges between them. This interdisciplinary makes it very powerful in terms of resources, offering unlimited possibilities of outcome.

We could also define its strength through its role of shaping the way people will perceive and receive a primary initiative, it not only participates to the story but also draws its silhouette, being able to influence it.

You can find out more about  Centdegrés and their work here.

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