It was the picture that launched a social media sensation: soccer superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi hunched over a chess sport 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 greatest 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 greatest 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 govt Pietro Beccari. It has been simply over a yr since he took on one of many luxurious sector’s greatest jobs with a mandate to additional develop the LVMH-owned model — which had its origins as a Nineteenth-century luggage-maker — by reworking it right into a cultural juggernaut.
“There isn’t a family on the planet that doesn’t have [contact with] Louis Vuitton merchandise,” Beccari tells the FT in a video interview from Paris. “There are usually not quite a lot of manufacturers that may say they enter the lives of individuals like we do.”
Beccari is not only speaking about gross sales of purses and ready-to-wear trend — although these greater than doubled between 2018 and 2022, in line with estimates from HSBC. Now, below the steering of LVMH chief govt 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 govt 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 change into interested in the model.”
Beccari’s in style 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, reworking catwalk exhibits into leisure occasions that includes elaborate stagings and musical friends corresponding to Jay-Z. The appointment has divided the style world, nonetheless, with critics lamenting what they noticed because the triumph of spectacle over craft at LVMH’s flagship model.
For Beccari, nonetheless, weaving a deepening internet of overlaps between in style tradition, leisure and model id is strategic and key to the megabrand’s future: “For each present Pharrell has finished to date, we’ve got at all times had new songs popping out” — the most recent 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 baggage, 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 in opposition to shedding 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 a few years . . . however that is an everlasting dilemma,” says Beccari.
One in all his bets is on creating restricted distribution of entry-level merchandise, corresponding to sun shades and perfume, as a way 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 way bigger than luxurious friends corresponding 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 line 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 we’ve got,” Beccari says. “We’re ensuring that the levers we put in place will repay in the long run, and I imagine 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 following degree is being made tougher attributable to a sector-wide slowdown in luxurious gross sales following a multi-year increase through the pandemic. Manufacturers with a broader, extra aspirational consumer base corresponding to Louis Vuitton have been hit tougher by the slowdown than opponents like Hermès, which cater to the highest tier of rich purchasers.
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 a complete. “Beccari comes at a fairly troublesome time as a result of the business goes by way of fairly a little bit of a slowdown, and notably the rebound in Chinese language consumption will not be on the degree most business managers would have hoped for a couple of months in the past,” says Erwan Rambourg, international head of client and retail analysis at HSBC.
Beccari, nonetheless, has a naturally aggressive nature, having beforehand been knowledgeable 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 way of the ranks on the luxurious group, first main trend model Fendi earlier than being appointed CEO of Dior, the group’s second-biggest model by gross sales, in 2018. Underneath his management, Dior’s gross sales quadrupled, in line with HSBC estimates, by increasing its market share throughout ladies’s and males’s trend, 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 challenge on Paris’s Champs Elysées, nonetheless at the moment below development, is broadly anticipated to incorporate a Louis Vuitton-branded lodge.
“We’ve plans within the Champs-Elysées — it isn’t a secret,” says Beccari. “We’re already energetic in life-style and imagine that we have to be about far more than simply shopping for baggage.”
With Federer and Nadal, Beccari is making good on a challenge he first conceived again in 2007, when he was govt 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 way of the jagged peaks of Italy’s Dolomites mountain vary, each sporting branded backpacks (Federer in a basic monogram Christopher type and Nadal in a monogram Eclipse model).
Was it troublesome getting the 2 superstars collectively? “By no means,” insists Beccari. “They’re good buddies and see one another privately. It was a rivalry that turned a friendship. They’re happy with it and I believe they set an unbelievable instance.”
“We promote excellence, high quality, success and optimism. In a means, the notion of journey and journey in life is a mirror of that,” Beccari continues, and the driving power behind LVMH’s sponsorship of this summer season’s Paris Olympics.
For the manager, Nadal and Federer epitomise the Olympic spirit. “I believe no person greater than them represents this excessive, ferocious competitors that turns into friendship, which is precisely what sports activities ought to be.”
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