The luxury of the luxury : II. perfumes

People are more familier with the perfumes created by the haute couture brands (Chanl, Dior, YSL, etc.) than the traditionnal perfumers which are not distributed in the perfumery chains like Séphora and Marionnaud. There are really some perfumers which have the place in the area as the haute couture for the fashion. They have a long tradition of perfume and propose personnalized fragrants.

Diptyque

34, boulevard Saint Germain, 75005 Paris

Diptyque began production of their lusciously fragrant candles in 1961. The company has expanded the line over the years to include personal fragrances as well as fragrant products for bath and home. Renowned for their unisex-y, always edgy and modern herbal takes on the classics as well as for the products “brilliant and singularly distinctive alphabet-soup graphics, this line will be just as of-the-moment in 40 years as it is today - and as it was 40 years ago.

  

Annick Goutal

Annick Goutal’s secret lies in its talent for transforming emotions into fragrances. Each unique creation represents a moment of happiness, a treasured emotion, or a powerful memory connected to a significant event or even a loved one. The Annick Goutal house has established itself over the years as the brand favoured by those who prefer the authentic to the ostentatious and craftsmanship to mass production.

  

 

The luxury of the luxury : I. leather goods

Paris is the capital of the luxury. But the luxury is not only the big brands that we can find on the Avenue Montaigne, or at le Bon Marché. Some traditionnel luxury brand do not never make advertising and so are not known by the pubic. Only those who have grown up in the luxury know these confidential addresses.

My four years in Paris and my attention to the luxury industy have led me to some of them. I really want to share these amazing experiences with you, my dear reader.

Let’s go first to the most leading makers of leather goods. Of course I will not tell you Louis Vuitton or Lancel or Hermès.

La Maison Goyard

The 150-year-old Maison is today the favourite luggage-maker of the international set. As proof of its prestige, aristocratic famillies would request their Goyard luggage be marked with their own coats of arms. Their clients included the Royal Court of England, the President of the United States and the Emperor of Russia. Now the Maison’s produts vary from trunks to animals articles. Clients can also make special orders like small tea kit trunk, polo equipement trunk or Baccarat glasses trunk, with personalisation.

Goyard: 223, rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 Paris

        

La Maison Massaro

Do you want to be one step ahead of the rest? Step out elegantly and walk tall with tailor-made shoes!” So says Karl Lagerfeld, who is a loyal customer of Massaro, the great bootmaker.

For the Countess of Bismark, the Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Taylor and others personnages, shoes were not merely another acccessory; they were an expression of their desire to set themselves apart - a mark of prestige and elegance.

Raymond Massaro designs and produces shoes for the Chanel Haute Couture fashion shows as well as working for famous names such as Christian Dior, Joan Galliano, Gianfranco Ferré, Olivier Lapidus, Thierry Mugler, Azzedine Alaïa… And above all, he deals with a great number of orders for tailor-made shoes.

Massaro : 2, rue de la Paix, 75002 Paris

     

Bamboo fashion

By necessity of responding to the trend of ecology, a new material is more and more used in home decoration : bamboo. Utilised for multiple purposes in Asia for more than 4000 years, bamboo eventually starts becoming known in Occident.  The fashion of Asia has accelarated the trend and the ecology movement is the determinative element.

New brands specailized in bamboo based products are created.

Like Bamboo Touch (http://touchofbamboo.com/), which “proposes an ecological alternative of wood in the field of building and interior decoration”. The products of Bamboo Touch vary from parquets to furniture accessories. the brand offers new unique solutions for floor-covering, wall-covering and joinery.

     

Or like Ekobo (www.ekobo.org/), which offers over 300 decoration, kitchen and crockery products in fruity colors and various finishes, all in bamboo.

    

 

These brands choose bamboo, for reasons of aesthetics, ecology and ethics. Bamboo is an exemplary plant. Because:

- Bamboo doesn’t only grow fast…it grows very fast. It is a natural renewable resource that grows twice as fast as a tree. Certain species can grow up to 1meter par day.

- Bamboo recycles a huge quantity of CO2 (12 tons/hectare) and produces 35% more oxygen than a tree in the same environment.

- Bamboo grows naturally without pesticides, fertilizer or herbicides. It is both rustic and resistant.

- Bamboo grows in all four corners of the world. It nourished, clothes, and is a source of income for more than 2 billion people worldwide.

 

3D shop of Hello Kitty

Now the clients of the brand Hello Kitty by Victoria Couture can “try” the clothes online, as if they go to a real shop. Yes, they need just to subscribe on the web site www.victoriacouture.com and give there dimensions. Like Second Life, a avatar will realize all they want in the shop of Hello Kitty : trying the pulls, sweaters, shirts, dresses, and very soon even watches and hats. They can also exchange their opinions and chat as in a shop.

Victoria Couture has understood the need of young people, its main clientele. The relational marketing online today has to be a game, or a buzz that is different from others. The traditionnal formes of advertissement can not attract them any more. As they spend more time with theire computer than the television, Internet is doubtlessly the new field of advertising and marketing that brands would like to occupy. I’m wondering what Internet cannont do in order to charm its clients. We have not yet seen all the possibilities that it can do.

Patti Smith

The Fondation Cartier is hosting a major solo exhibition of the visual work of American artist and  performer Patti Smith. Drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, it strives to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. Her expressive voice serves to magnify the installations created specifically for the exhibition: a synthesis of photographs, drawings and films.

While the name Patti Smith evokes an image of a founder of the New York punk-rock scene, she has explored the visual arts and poetry since the late 1960s. The exhibition at the Fondation Cartier embraces the various facets of her creative process. Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to photography using a vintage Polaroid Land 250: “The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of drawing, recording, or writing a poem.” Many of Smith’s photographs embody significant personal meaning: Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils. Others serve as a visual record of her well-traveled life. The exhibition also features a selection of the artist’s drawings, several of which are borrowed from prestigious institutions such as the MoMA and the Centre Pompidou or from private collections.

Halland & Holland

I don’t really want to write someting about the fashion brand Holland & Holland, but just want to talk about the 2 faced country that I like so much : the Nertherlands, in French Hollande. Two faced because the Netherlands for me, is a great marriage between the urban and country life. Where you are in Nertherland, there is an harmony between the humain, the nature and the creature of humain.

I’m going to the Nertherlands next week-end, the best season to see the flowers fields, especially tulips. I’ll visist first of all the biggest flower auction marcket in the world, “The world marketplace for flowers and plants”. Every day Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer sets the world price for flowers and plants.

Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer
Legmeerdijk 313
Postbus 1000
1430 BA Aalsmeer
www.aalsmeer.com

The Nertherlands is famous also for its diamonds and the technic to plish the diamonds and make jewellry. At the house of Gassan Diamonds, you can even experience the sensation of diamond cutting first-hand and view every stage of the process. Of course, after the diamond tour, you can purchase world-class diamonds for yourself or your loved ones. They offer a spectacular range and once you have carefully chosen your diamond their goldsmiths are waiting to set it in a stunning piece of jewellery. This will be a luxurious tour !

 

Gassan Diamonds B.V.

Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 173 - 175
1011 LN Amsterdam

Swedish Vague

The Swedish designer brand of jeans, ACNE, has opened recentely a new shop in New York city, one month after the openning of its Paris shop, in the galleries of the Palais Royal.

The simplist and a little masculine style of the brand will never be out of the fashion. I remind when I was in Stockholm, Acne was one of the designers that I noticed. The name of the brand was funny for me and I laughed at my self because I had pimples before. The style of Acne is very typical among the Swedish designers.

But Sweden is more famous for the interior and pratical design for home. One of the designer or a group of designers that I adored was “10 designers” which was a team of 10 professionals of textile designe, in the 70’s, but there are only 3 now. There unique store in Stockholm offers a rang of bags, curtains, socks, aprons and other accessoiries, all on a special waterproof meterial.

Acne : 124 Galerie Valois, 75001 Paris

10 Designers :  http://www.tiogruppen.com/

Pearls

I received a cultured perl necklace yesterday as present for my birthday. Il was my first jewelry of pearls. It is the timef to begin, may be, for a woman of 27 years old.

This made me think of the exhibition that I saw at the Musuem of Natural History in Paris, about the Pearls. The exhibition presented the pearls as a natural creation, a history of humain beauty and artworks.

I was certainly more interested by the jewelries than other articles exposed. One of the jewel was the famous ring of Mikimoto which matches the pearl and the diamond. Kokichi Mikimoto was the first person in the world, in 1893, to successfully culture a pearl. The brand is today the reference of the jewelries of pearl and has a shop at the place Vendôme, in Paris.

New Luxury

I’m reading the book “Trading up: why consumers want new luxury goods and how companies creat them”. This is the reflection of two consults about the phenomenon of the trading up of premium brands in certain categories.

What we call New luxury is the products and services that possess higher levels of quality, taste, and aspiration than other goods in the category but are not so expensive as to be out of reach. Around the world, people have been trading up — seeking to enrich their lives and engage their senses and emotions through wonderful goods — for centuries. What is different about trading up today is its availability to a much larger population, and there are vastly more premium goods and services to trade up to.

Consumption is a way of life and it can be done well or poorly, and trading up to premium goods is one way to do it well. This phenomenon is driven by middle-class consumers who are educated, discerning, and ready to engage in the goods and services they consume. They balance their budgets and trade down in more categories than they trade up in.

Pioneers of customer relation online

According to the 8th Prize Qualiweb/Stratégies, a prize rewarding the best quality of customer relation online from a barometer created by Cocedal Conseil ten years ago. The notation was based on the responses to puzzler emails sent to 250 web sites.

Among the 50 best web sites evaluated, more than 20% of them are from the sector of fashion and beauty, and the first 5 companies are luxury brands. The first one is Nespresso, premium brand of Nestlé Group, represented by Georges Clooney. Nespresson is a typical brand of New Luxury which are always based on emotions (see my later posts about the New Luxury). The second one of the hit parade is Guerlain, the bronze medal is le Printemps and the forth Chanel.

From two years, il seems that the customer relation and service is an issue of utmost importance for the luxury industry, which is very concerned about the total quality and image of its brands. The web site is the image of the brand so the customer relation by e-mail is the continuation of the looked-for service. The e-mail is today a way of contact natural and incontrovertible in the center of the customer service.