After 37 years building Elemis, co-founder Sean Harrington has joined global investment bank Lempriere Wells as Partner, with the firm rebranding to Lempriere Wells Harrington (LWH) and pivoting its beauty and wellness advisory practice toward the US market.

The move takes one of British skincare's best-known founders out of brand operations and into dealmaking. LWH advises founder-led consumer and beauty businesses, and its record already includes exits for Grown Alchemist and Coco & Eve — two of Australia and Asia's most prominent consumer brand transactions.

"After 37 years of building Elemis, it is great to have an exciting partnership opportunity like this," Harrington told Cosmetics Business.

Who is behind Lempriere Wells Harrington?

Alice Wells founded the firm and has built a global network advising both brands and buyers. Will Lempriere serves as Partner alongside her. The business grew out of the M&A function of Lempriere Group, an investment house whose lineage traces to 1823 and the founding of The Bank of Van Diemen's Land — Australia's second bank.

LWH operates from three offices: Melbourne, Dubai and Paris. Harrington's arrival adds a London-rooted, US-facing beauty operator to that footprint. His stated ambition is to reshape how brands across beauty, wellness and longevity are advised.

What does this mean for the beauty deal pipeline?

Harrington co-founded Elemis in 1988 alongside entrepreneur Linda Steiner, Noella Gabriel and Oriele Frank. He steered the brand through growth years and harder cycles before L'Occitane took ownership, turning Elemis into a UK icon for its anti-ageing and sensorial product lines.

That CV matters for founders weighing an exit. An adviser who has personally scaled a luxury spa and skincare brand through a change of ownership can price, position and prepare a business in ways purely financial intermediaries cannot. Expect LWH to compete for mandates from founder-led beauty and wellness companies — the segment most active in current M&A — and to push harder into US transactions, the largest single prize.

For buyers, the signal is equally concrete. A firm with Grown Alchemist and Coco & Eve on its exit list, now staffed with an operator of a L'Occitane-owned brand, will likely bring more sell-side mandates to market across the US, EMEA and Asia-Pacific.

The takeaway: one of Elemis' founding names has moved to the other side of the table. Watch LWH's first announced US beauty mandate as the next data point on whether this partnership converts heritage into dealflow.