MADRID — Mariano Puig, who helped transform his family-owned Spanish perfume maker into an international fashion house that encompasses the brands Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci, Carolina Herrera and Jean Paul Gaultier, died on April 13 in Barcelona. He was 93.
Puig, the company that bears the family name, confirmed the death.
As a member of the second generation to run the company, Mr. Puig significantly expanded its presence overseas, particularly in the 1960s, when Puig opened offices in the United States and struck an alliance with Mr. Rabanne, a Spanish fashion designer whose celebrity status in Paris gave Puig better access to the French market.
Puig eventually took over Paco Rabanne and other major brands. One of Mr. Puig’s five children, Marc Puig, is the current chairman and chief executive of the company, which was founded by Mariano Puig’s father, Antonio, in 1914.
Puig had revenues of about €2 billion, or $2.4 billion, in 2019. It is one of the few major fashion businesses still under the ownership of its original family in a luxury goods sector dominated by conglomerates like Kering and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
United Nations building in New York. The drawing became the design for the bottle of their first successful perfume, called Calandre. Puig eventually took over Mr. Rabanne’s entire business, including his fashion house.
Mr. Puig followed a similar path in the 1980s with Carolina Herrera, the Venezuelan fashion designer, who had gained fame in New York. They launched a perfume brand together before Puig took over her fashion house as well, in 1995.
Mr. Puig was chief executive of the company until 1998 and then chairman of Exea, the holding company through which his family controls Puig, for another five years.
He was a supporter of family corporate ownership and helped found the Spanish Family Business Institute in Barcelona. José Luis Blanco, its director general, paid homage to Mr. Puig as a key player in the overhaul of Spanish industry, which had been left in tatters by the civil war and did not have the benefit of recovery funds from the Marshall Plan after World War II.