French luxury shoe brand Berluti opened the doors to its first store in Lebanon last month. Olga Berluti, creative director and lead designer for Berluti, said Lebanese clients shopping in Paris, whom she described as “always cheerful and courteous,” persuaded her to open a store in downtown Beirut.
Pierre Bouissou, general director of Berluti, told Executive that he too had his eye on Beirut since he joined the company in 2008. “For me it was strategy to develop in Beirut,” he said at the store’s opening on October 8. “In Paris, we have a lot of Arab clients, and Arab clients love watches and shoes.”
The Berluti’s Beirut establishment is the company’s second in the region, after Dubai, which opened in 2006. Berluti currently has 36 stores worldwide and according to Bouissou, will be concentrating on developing in the Middle East and China in the coming year.
“For us it’s really important to be here because in Beirut we have local clientele and we need to have a relationship with the client,” said Bouissou. “In Dubai you have a lot of tourists. For us, it is more important to be in a city where we have local clientele because we need to have a relationship with the client to understand what he needs.”
Berluti’s top two markets continue to be France and the United Kingdom, with the third slot belonging to Japan, where Berluti already has 10 stores.
Bouissou said that although each store and each client base is different, the process of opening a new location stays the same.
“We need to understand the market before we open a store because Berluti is not a product, it is a philosophy and we need to help the client,” he explained. “We want to develop a Beirut market and we would want to maybe open stores in Kuwait and Qatar.”
Despite the high price tag, which ranges from $500 to $2,500 for a pair of shoes, Bouissou insisted that Berluti has not felt the effects of the economic slowdown.
“The crisis has not impacted [us] because when you buy the Berluti product it is not for one year, it is for your whole life,” he continued. “During a crisis, people want a quality product. With Berluti, they find that product.”
The numbers confirm the success of this philosophy according to the records of Berluti’s mothership, luxury brand giant Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH), which bought the bottier in 1993. LVMH posted $25.67 billion in revenue for 2008, which constitutes 7 percent organic growth compared to the previous year. The global conglomerate also reported a 7 percent loss of organic growth for the first half of 2009, but a 0.2 percent bump in revenue based on the same period last year, totaling $11.64 billion in revenue.
The fashion and leather goods sector of the group, which includes Berluti as well as Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs and Fendi, saw 10 percent organic revenue growth in 2008. That number dropped to 1 percent in the first half of 2009, with $4.46 million in revenue, making fashion and leather goods LVMH’s only sector showing growth in 2009.
Many luxury analysts credit this sector, and the Louis Vuitton brand specifically, for LVMH’s relatively smooth ride through the global economic downturn.
Since Berluti shoes are not available anywhere other than Berluti stores, the brand did not feel the overall slowdown in department store sales. In fact, Bouissou claims that Berluti avoids the traditional behavior of what he calls “fashion brands.”
“We want to protect the philosophy of the brand, not create a fashion image,” Bouissou said.
