Guilherme Leal

Guilherme Peirão Leal (born in Santos on 22 February 1950) is a Brazilian businessman, social and environmental entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

He is the co-founder of Natura Cosméticos (currently Natura &Co), one of the biggest beauty groups in the world, and currently co-chairs the Board of Directors of the company in which he holds an 11% stake and is a member of the board of Instituto Natura, which aims to improve Brazil’s public education system.

Over the last decades, Leal has become an investor in high-impact businesses, dedicating his time to the creation of a series of social organizations, such as the Abrinq Foundation for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, Ethos Institute for Business and Social Responsibility, and Akatu Institute for Conscious Consumption.

Guilherme Leal was born in Santos (SP) in 1950.

He is the youngest of four siblings and father of two.

He holds a degree in Business Management from the University of São Paulo.

Leal worked in financial institutions and at Ferrovia Paulista S.A. (Fepasa).

In 1979, after leaving Fepasa, he became a partner at Natura, when it was a small cosmetics shop located at Rua Oscar Freire, in São Paulo.

Alongside his partners, Luiz Seabra and Pedro Passos, Leal turned Natura into one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world and a reference in sustainability.

From the trio of founders, Leal was the one at the head of the initiative to invest in nature preservation and sustainable development, making the company adopt Brazilian biodiversity as a tool for cosmetics innovation and awareness about the Amazon.

The businessman currently splits his time between philanthropic activities, other businesses, and investments, such as Dengo and Natura, where he has been co-chairman of the Board of Directors since 1998.

Due to his work on sustainability, Leal is featured in the book Conversas com Líderes Sustentáveis (“Conversations with Sustainable Leaders”), in which he shares experiences and social and environmental stories.

The company established itself in the country’s northern region in the early 2000s, when it introduced Ekos, a cosmetics line based on the use of ingredients from Brazilian biodiversity.

In 2006, when Leal was included on the Forbes list of billionaires, his net worth was estimated at USD 1.4 billion.

Four years later, he was part of the group of 18 Brazilians on the list with a net worth of USD 2.1 billion.

In addition to being the founder and former president of the Ethos Institute, created to help companies run their business in a socially responsible manner, Leal also participated in the creation and was a member of the board of the Abrinq Foundation, whose goal is to mobilize society for issues related to the defense of the rights of children and adolescents.

He was a member of the board of WWF-Brazil and the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (Funbio).

The businessman’s relationship with southern Bahia started in 2006, when he bought a plot of land in the region for moments of relaxation.

Leal got involved with the local community and started to develop there one of the biggest projects of revitalization of the region’s cocoa culture.

Carbon neutral since 2007, the company created a program to channel investments into the Amazon in 2011.

Natura has become a case study not just for using raw material extracted from the native forest, but also for doing so while valuing and rewarding forest communities.

For Leal, “companies must be agents that promote broad transformation in society and not mere means of wealth generation (...).

The value and longevity of any business are connected to their ability to contribute to the evolution of society and its sustainable development.”

In 2007, he co-founded the Our São Paulo Movement, whose objective is to organize several sectors of local society to create a better, fairer, more sustainable city.

Leal usually says that “the new generation of philanthropists wants to deal with problem causes, not just their consequences.”

In 2008, the businessman founded Institute Arapyaú, a non-profit organization focused on the sustainable development of the economy, the environment, politics, and society.

The institution identifies opportunities and voluntarily channels funds and strategic resources to organizations, networks, and projects engaged in promoting sustainable development.

Since its foundation, Arapyaú has helped to create other networks like the Brazilian Coalition on Climate, Forests and Agriculture, a multi-sector movement that aims to promote the harmonic use of the land, and, most recently, the initiative Amazon Concertation, which brings together leaders from the public and private sectors, indigenous peoples, civil society, and the media to propose solutions for the region’s sustainable development.

Another project supported by the Institute, Mapbiomas maps the coverage and soil use every year to make accessible information about transformations in the Brazilian territory.

One of the programs created by Arapyaú, called Territorial Development in the South of Bahia, aspires to make the Cocoa Coast region an example of sustainable economy by leveraging its potential.

The program, of which Leal is an enthusiast, fosters projects that strengthen the cocoa production chain and inclusive entrepreneurship, in addition to supporting local leaders to improve formal education and participative regional development.

In the village of Serra Grande, in the municipality of Uruçuca, Arapyaú was born in 2008, inspired by the possibility of helping to make the struggling region a concrete example of sustainable development.

Roughly 70% of the cocoa produced in Brazil comes from southern Bahia.

This culture is based on an agroforestry system known as cabruca, in which the crops are planted in the shade of native Atlantic Forest trees.

Strengthening the cocoa and chocolate chain is essential for local development.

With a brief career in politics, Leal was the vice president candidate running with Marina Silva in the 2010 presidential election, for the Green Party (PV).

They received over 20 million votes.

In 2015, Arapyaú was one of the idealizers of the Cocoa Innovation Center (CIC), the first initiative from the Science and Technology Park of Southern Bahia (PCTSul).

In 2017, he co-founded the chocolate brand Dengo, which uses high quality cocoa produced by small family farmers in southern Bahia.

He is also a member of the B Team, a group of global leaders who are driving better ways of doing business.