Barcelona, 2 April 2022. The Beauty Cluster family is mourning the passing of Gloria Prats Castillo on 31 March. Gloria, who has received a last farewell from her family and friends today, contributed strongly to the creation of the Beauty Cluster initiative in its origins as well as the promotion of other projects and clusters through her work in the cluster support unit of ACCIÓ.
A dynamic, honest, family-oriented person, a tireless worker and capable of establishing deep professional and personal bonds, she was commissioned to analyse the feasibility and sense of creating a cluster of companies in the beauty sector in 2012. Between 2012 and 2014 she worked intensively on analysing the value chain of the beauty sector in Catalonia (which brings together 60% of the Spanish industry) and on disseminating the benefits that a cluster could have for the sector if it were properly created and dynamised. It developed all kinds of initiatives that were the seed of the successes that the Beauty Cluster has later achieved. One of these initiatives was the organisation of a trip so that the sector could discover the working model of Cosmetic Valley in France for inspiration and to understand the importance of having an entity of this type to improve business competitiveness.
From 2014 onwards, he continued to assist and advise the Board of Directors once it was formally constituted as a private entity.
In the words of Ivan Borrego, manager of the Beauty Cluster: ‘Gloria is the mother and the leader who not only created the Beauty Cluster, but also allowed it to breathe the values that have driven us for the last eight years. For me she has been a friend, but she has also been an inspiration, a source of learning and a person to fight side by side with in those complicated moments that all projects have in their beginnings. She never lost her smile, her energy and her desire to make everything work better. Without her, Beauty Cluster would not exist and in her memory we will continue to make the values she instilled in us our own. Everything in Beauty Cluster will always remind us of her“.
An institutional representation of the cluster as well as her family, friends and ACCIÓ colleagues accompanied her today in an emotional ceremony held in Barcelona. It was a final farewell to a person whose personality and energy left an indelible mark on our sector.
