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 file 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 govt Pietro Beccari. It has been simply over a 12 months 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 reworking it right into a cultural juggernaut.
“There is no such thing as a family on this planet that doesn’t have [contact with] Louis Vuitton merchandise,” Beccari tells the FT in a video interview from Paris. “There should not a number 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 vogue — although these greater than doubled between 2018 and 2022, in line with estimates from HSBC. Now, underneath 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 succeed in 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 masking a spectrum of life that pursuits folks. It is sort of a magnet for them to develop into interested in the model.”
Beccari’s in style method to the luxurious model was epitomised by his appointment final 12 months 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 reveals into leisure occasions that includes elaborate stagings and musical visitors corresponding 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 internet of overlaps between in style tradition, leisure and model identification is strategic and key to the megabrand’s future: “For each present Pharrell has completed thus far, we’ve 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.
Throughout 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.”
Nevertheless, 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 value 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, to be able to create shortage. This has seen “unbelievable success”, he notes. “Usually a profitable fragrance can 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 prospects to deliver 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,” 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 stage is being made more difficult as a consequence of a sector-wide slowdown in luxurious gross sales following a multi-year growth throughout the pandemic. Manufacturers with a broader, extra aspirational shopper base corresponding to Louis Vuitton have been hit tougher by the slowdown than rivals 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 reasonably tough time as a result of the trade goes by means of fairly a little bit of a slowdown, and notably the rebound in Chinese language consumption shouldn’t be on the stage most trade managers would have hoped for just a few months in the past,” says Erwan Rambourg, world head of client 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. Underneath his management, Dior’s gross sales quadrupled, in line 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 related 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 present underneath development, is broadly 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 lively in life-style and imagine that we must 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 reveals 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 fashion and Nadal in a monogram Eclipse model).
Was it tough getting the 2 superstars collectively? “By no means,” insists Beccari. “They’re good pals 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 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 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 must be.”
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