Will Chloé's bohemian girl dry up in the Chinese market?

At 7 pm on June 5th, Chloé made a half-hour show in advance at the West Coast Long Art Museum's 2020 early spring vacation series.

It’s important for Chloé to start the day at the time of the day, and it’s also crucial to choose the pre-collection site that is traditionally suitable for sale in Shanghai. “It will be a long and exciting day,” Chloé CEO Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye said in an interview with BoF, while the Chinese team is eager to take the big show to enter the creative director of the fashion house in 2017, Natacha Ramsay- Levi is introduced to local consumers. “In fact, the Paris headquarters initially wanted to do a media event in Shanghai for Natacha, and the showcase of the holiday series overseas was the idea put forward by the Chinese team.”

The tough clear water concrete skin exudes the original wild charm, and the light and sense space created by the architect Liu Yichun is enough to become the “net red punching point” for the topic. This catwalk is a tribute to China and its fifth-generation filmmakers. It is also a courtesy of Chinese consumers. On the night of the show, the brand opened 48 hours on the WeChat applet. The flash shop launched the exclusive mini Chloé “C” handbags worth 12,200 RMB released on the T-stage, and opened the “buy-and-see” sales model in China. The brand side was unable to comment on the traffic and sales generated during the “Chloé Limited Time Release” flash store. As of press time, #CHLOESHANGHAI#'s "Beyond Hearts" activity has reached 83.82 million on Weibo and discussed 50,000.

The Parisian fashion company, founded by women and dominated by women designers, is part of the Swiss luxury goods company Richemont Group and is the most successful “soft luxury” brand. Since Stella McCartney joined Chloé in the late 1990s, the brand has been inspired by a number of powerful women designers, including Phobe Philo, Clare Waight Keller and now Ramsay-Levi. “More than 80% of our employees are women. As a feminine fashion house, we know that women have more power than social giving and recognition,” said Ramsay-Levi in ​​the eyes of De La Bourdonnaye. The natural femininity pursued by the founder of the brand, Gabrielle Aghion, gives the Chloé girl a rebellious personality. “We are not a trademark brand and do not need to attract all women. As we said in France, I love it. Chloé's women are very confident in themselves and have a certain voice. They are active in their communities and try to create a better life for themselves and others."

The “Other” category of the Richemont Group lost nearly €100 million in 2018. Although the group did not separately publish Chloé's sales results, according to analysts, Chloé hit about 500 million euros in 2018. In the FY 2019 report released by Richemont in May, the total sales of the “Other” categories including Chloé, Ala?a and Dunhill were approximately 1.88 billion Euros, a year-on-year growth of 1.8%, accounting for only total sales. 13%.

Chloé is not among the core competencies of the Richemont Group and is no bigger than the “hard luxury” of watches and jewellery collections. Investors and analysts in the industry have made speculations about brand transfer, and De La Bourdonnaye, head of the fashion house, said that “Lifeng Group has been supporting everything we do.”

Chloé will also develop a retail network. The brand opened four stores in the last fiscal year; currently, Chloé has a total of 18 direct-operated boutiques in China. The new brand boutiques recently opened in IC Pudong, as well as retail stores in Shanghai K11 and Galeries Lafayette. The 2019 Global Fashion Business Report jointly released by McKinsey and the BoF Fashion Business Review also pointed out that China will surpass the United States for the first time in 2019 and become the world's largest fashion market. Obviously, Chinese consumers are already the main force in the consumption of global fashion products. In the interview, De La Bourdonnaye did not disclose how much sales Chinese consumers contributed to Chloé, but he said that the Chinese market does account for a very large proportion.

Bags have been a priority for Chloé since the first batch of “it bag” Paddington was launched in 2004. In recent years, Drew and Faye have been favored by the Chinese market for their highly recognizable simplicity. The brand launched an exclusive version of Faye in August 2017 through the WeChat applet. In the regional sales announced by Richemont in March this year, sales in the Asia Pacific region reached 5.243 billion euros, a year-on-year increase of 20% and 40% of total sales.

Although Chloé increased sales through its leather products, and C bag also achieved “encouraging early results,” Johann Rupert, chairman of the Richemont Group, still said the challenge was daunting. In June 2018, Chloé launched the sneaker collection for the first time with Sonnie, expanding its business to the most active and youngest segment in the market today, and trying to take a slice of the relatively crowded sports shoe market. “Handbags first, perfume second, followed by our quarterly ready-to-wear collections, and finally shoes.” De La Bourdonnaye predicts that the current weaker footwear business will be the fastest growing category for the brand in the future.

In the era of traffic stars, many luxury brands are trying to better harvest the Chinese market, and are trying to change the marketing strategy to reach a wider range of female consumers. The most common practice is to hire Chinese local stars as brand ambassadors, and Prada, who has always been restrained, also welcomed the first traffic star from China, Cai Xukun. Stars are often media satellites with their own traffic, but Chloé has not signed a specific cooperation contract with anyone. Instead of being tied to the image of the brand ambassador, the brand said it would be more willing to form a “Chloé Girl” (#chloeGIRLS) community where you can easily find the innate feminine charm.

The practice of sharing the "#chloeGIRLS" label without the difference between consumers and stars has undoubtedly brought the consumer closer. In other words, the visitors are all guests. In this #chloeGIRLS community, there are not only Chinese superstars such as Gao Yuanyuan and Li Wei, but consumers can find value recognition and emotional resonance through the consumption of stars. The topic about #chloeGirl generated 290 million readings and 1.374 million discussions on Weibo, and there were 128,000 mentions on Instagram.

In June 2016, Chloé began to operate e-commerce with the luxury online retailer YOOX Net-a-Porter Group (hereafter referred to as YNAP), whose online business is mainly concentrated in Europe, the United States, Japan and China. Two years later, Richemont acquired YNAP by purchasing 95% of the available equity. Burkhart Grund, chief financial officer of Richemont Group, told financial analysts in May that before the acquisition, the e-commerce business accounted for only 1% of the total revenue of the Richemont Group, and with the integration of the YNAP Group, this number will jump to 17%. The luxury e-commerce platform will add more than 2 billion euros to Richemont's integrated top line, which will greatly deepen the partnership and strategic deployment of its brand and e-commerce platform.

But in this emerging luxury online ecosystem, Chloé, the same door, will usher in unprecedented opportunities and challenges. The brand side also confirmed the rumors of landing the small red book, the specific time has not been made public.

Chloé, with the mission of building a cultural community, successfully incorporated the cultural needs of young consumers into its business model. This time, the brand teamed up with the famous fashion blogger gogoboi Yeh, bringing Chloé Radio to Shanghai, starting in September 2018. Since then, the content has been mostly about talking about facts and literature. Chloé also funded the Festival D'Hyères for eight consecutive years. At the 34th Annual Yell International Festival, which ended in May, Austrian designer Christoph Rumpf stood out from the ten new designers and won a prize of €20,000 for the technology and sustainability of recycled clothing. The Swiss designer Tina Schwizgebel-Wang received the Chloé Award of 20,000 Euros from the jury led by President Ramsay-Levi.

Magalie Guérin, executive director of the Yell Art Festival, believes that one of the important reasons why these forward-looking luxury companies are willing to fund the festival is to explore new talents in the fashion world and build close relationships with them in the process of observation and support. Relationships lay a good foundation for the possibility of future cooperation. When asked if there were any plans to win the winning designer, De La Bourdonnaye commented, “There is no string attached to the winner, but it does not rule out any possibility”.

In the "2018 China Luxury Market Research" published by Bain, the Chinese luxury goods market is mainly benefited by millennials and female consumers; while the market's main force is younger, the brand is also paying close attention. The needs of the millennial generation of consumers to convey social information and social positions. “(Diversity) is not only crucial for Chloé. The crux of the matter is how to get people from different backgrounds to work together, and diversity is just a big move in the world – if we all grow the same, then there should be More boring."

In a business environment where global trade, politics and ecological environment are turbulent, managing a fashion company has ushered in new challenges, and De La Bourdonnaye, who is the head of the brand, is good at controlling employee sentiment and financial bottom line. trade off. He mentioned that people working in Disney always say that business success lies in two lines of parallel: the creative line and the bottom line. In a fashion philosophy where creativity is the primary productivity, the creative director responsible for making purchases and flows is equally important to the store manager who turns desire into a shopping experience.

At the same time, the sustainable development derived from the topic of global warming has become a proposition of business love discussion and practice in recent years. In this vigorous “Save the Earth” environmental movement, we can hardly see the fashion of Chloé girls. Although the brand promises not to use fur, and the suppliers of its fragrance series guarantee that all products will not be tested on animals, in the 2018 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, the brand has almost no specific strategies for environmental protection and carbon emissions. And data, and there is no policy to guarantee labor conditions in low-wage countries.

“This is not the message we will actively convey, and we will not make any declarations on this.” De La Bourdonnaye added that as part of the brand's mission, the brand will launch a funded international children's organization in a few months. plan. “I think that our work is not only about creating beauty, but also encouraging women to be brave and to be independent in a community way.”