It was the picture that launched a social media sensation: soccer superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi hunched over a chess recreation set atop Louis Vuitton’s signature baggage.
That 2022 marketing campaign picture broke the report on the time for many likes on Instagram. Now the world’s largest luxurious home, with greater than €20bn in annual gross sales, is seeking to capitalise as soon as once more on one of many sporting world’s largest duos in a brand new marketing campaign that includes rival tennis virtuosos Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.
The pairing is a coup for Vuitton chief government Pietro Beccari. It has been simply over a yr since he took on one of many luxurious sector’s largest jobs with a mandate to additional develop the LVMH-owned model — which had its origins as a Nineteenth-century luggage-maker — by remodeling it right into a cultural juggernaut.
“There is no such thing as a family on the earth that doesn’t have [contact with] Louis Vuitton merchandise,” Beccari tells the FT in a video interview from Paris. “There aren’t lots of manufacturers that may say they enter the lives of individuals like we do.”
Beccari isn’t just speaking about gross sales of purses and ready-to-wear vogue — although these greater than doubled between 2018 and 2022, in keeping with estimates from HSBC. Now, underneath the steering of LVMH chief government Bernard Arnault and Beccari’s management, Louis Vuitton is additional pushing again luxurious’s boundaries in a bid to achieve an ever-wider viewers.
“We’re in books, in writing, in modifying. We’re in music,” the 56-year-old Italian government says. “We’re very a lot in sports activities . . . so we’re very a lot protecting a spectrum of life that pursuits individuals. It is sort of a magnet for them to turn into drawn to the model.”
Beccari’s well-liked strategy to the luxurious model was epitomised by his appointment final yr of musician and producer Pharrell Williams to design menswear. What Williams lacked in technical design data he made up for in cultural cachet, remodeling catwalk exhibits into leisure occasions that includes elaborate stagings and musical company comparable to Jay-Z. The appointment has divided the style world, nevertheless, with critics lamenting what they noticed because the triumph of spectacle over craft at LVMH’s flagship model.
For Beccari, nevertheless, weaving a deepening net of overlaps between well-liked tradition, leisure and model identification is strategic and key to the megabrand’s future: “For each present Pharrell has executed thus far, now we have at all times had new songs popping out” — the newest of which was produced for Miley Cyrus and performed for the primary time at Louis Vuitton’s newest autumn/winter 2024 menswear present.
Inside the identical season, “Pharrell additionally launched the cowboy hat and now you’re seeing that within the US nearly in every single place. Even Beyoncé has an album supporting cowboy tradition [for which Pharrell has also written a few songs]”, says Beccari. “These are examples of our model in luxurious, not simply in promoting luggage, however having an affect on tradition.”
Nonetheless, the growing ubiquity of Louis Vuitton presents its personal problem because the model makes an attempt to steadiness accessibility towards dropping the veneer of exclusivity that’s important to commanding the status and worth factors of luxurious. “We’ll see if I’m good at it or not in two to 3 years . . . however that is an everlasting dilemma,” says Beccari.
One in every of his bets is on creating restricted distribution of entry-level merchandise, comparable to sun shades and perfume, to be able to create shortage. This has seen “unbelievable success”, he notes. “Usually a profitable fragrance could be in 80,000 or 90,000 shops. We restrict it to round 400.” (Louis Vuitton’s retailer community is far bigger than luxurious friends comparable to Hermès and Chanel).
Louis Vuitton’s management of its distribution community and coverage of by no means discounting its merchandise are one other benefit, in keeping with Beccari. He additionally factors to its care system, which permits clients to carry again merchandise bought from the model to be repaired.
“We have to protect our desirability regardless of our visibility and that’s the largest problem that now we have,” Beccari says. “We’re ensuring that the levers we put in place will repay in the long run, and I consider that this marketing campaign [with Nadal and Federer] will assist improve the desirability of the model in the long term.”
Nonetheless, taking Louis Vuitton to the subsequent degree is being made more difficult resulting from a sector-wide slowdown in luxurious gross sales following a multi-year growth throughout the pandemic. Manufacturers with a broader, extra aspirational shopper base comparable to Louis Vuitton have been hit more durable by the slowdown than opponents like Hermès, which cater to the highest tier of rich shoppers.
The darkening outlook in the important thing Chinese language market, which fuelled progress for a lot of the previous decade, additionally presents a problem to the sector as an entire. “Beccari comes at a fairly tough time as a result of the business goes by means of fairly a little bit of a slowdown, and notably the rebound in Chinese language consumption isn’t on the degree most business managers would have hoped for a number of months in the past,” says Erwan Rambourg, international head of shopper and retail analysis at HSBC.
Beccari, nevertheless, has a naturally aggressive nature, having beforehand been an expert footballer in Italy’s second division in his formative years, in addition to a coach. Born in a small city in Italy’s Parma area, Beccari was recruited to LVMH from mass market shampoo-maker Henkel in 2006.
He shortly rose by means of the ranks on the luxurious group, first main vogue model Fendi earlier than being appointed CEO of Dior, the group’s second-biggest model by gross sales, in 2018. Below his management, Dior’s gross sales quadrupled, in keeping with HSBC estimates, by increasing its market share throughout girls’s and males’s vogue, leather-based items, jewelry and homewares. He additionally oversaw the renovation of Dior’s flagship at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, which features a museum, restaurant and personal suite.
Beccari has comparable ambitions to leverage Louis Vuitton’s pedigree to broaden its providing in hospitality. It already operates an airport lounge in Doha and eating places in Osaka, Chengdu and Seoul. A big-scale venture on Paris’s Champs Elysées, nonetheless at the moment underneath development, is extensively anticipated to incorporate a Louis Vuitton-branded lodge.
“We’ve got plans within the Champs-Elysées — it’s not a secret,” says Beccari. “We’re already energetic in life-style and consider that we must be about rather more than simply shopping for luggage.”
With Federer and Nadal, Beccari is making good on a venture he first conceived again in 2007, when he was government vice-president of promoting and communications at Louis Vuitton, with Antoine Arnault, Bernard Arnault’s eldest son and then-director of communications at Louis Vuitton.
It’s a revival of the Core Values marketing campaign that first started in 2007 and bumped into the 2010s. The most recent iteration exhibits Federer and Nadal, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, trekking by means of the jagged peaks of Italy’s Dolomites mountain vary, each sporting branded backpacks (Federer in a traditional monogram Christopher type and Nadal in a monogram Eclipse model).
Was it tough getting the 2 superstars collectively? “Under no circumstances,” insists Beccari. “They’re good pals and see one another privately. It was a rivalry that grew to become a friendship. They’re pleased with it and I feel they set an unbelievable instance.”
“We promote excellence, high quality, success and optimism. In a approach, the notion of journey and journey in life is a mirror of that,” Beccari continues, and the driving drive behind LVMH’s sponsorship of this summer season’s Paris Olympics.
For the chief, Nadal and Federer epitomise the Olympic spirit. “I feel no one greater than them represents this excessive, ferocious competitors that turns into friendship, which is strictly what sports activities ought to be.”
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