La Perla’s Chiara Scaglia gears up for deeper China push with new HK store
Outside of Silicon Valley, it’s rare to find senior executives in their twenties but Chiara Scaglia, who runs Italian lingerie brand La Perla’s Asia-Pacific business, is younger than some of the models that grace the company’s advertising campaigns.
The 25-year-old is the daughter of telecoms tycoon Silvio Scaglia, one of Italy’s richest men, who also controls Pacific Global Management, the holding company for La Perla and modelling agencies Elite and Women. As a fresh university graduate, she took over as chief executive of Gold Typhoon, a music label that was under the same group before it was sold to Warner Music in April. After that, she joined La Perla as Asia-Pacific managing director. Based in Hong Kong, she oversaw the “verticalisation” of regional operations and is spearheading the launch of La Perla’s largest store, in Causeway Bay.
Although the label has always been well regarded among the fashion set, the brand will gain a significantly higher profile next January when it takes up residence in an 8,000 square foot store in Russell Street, opposite Times Square. It will be four storeys of underwear, swimwear and loungewear that start at about HK$4,000 but can run into the hundreds of thousands for the made to measure line.
Scaglia said there was a steep learning curve when she first started working for the family business.
“I graduated and a week later I was working at Gold Typhoon in Beijing,” she said. “It was a very quick move. At the time, I thought the business was in the family but it was still far away. I had studied Chinese, so going back to China was a very natural progression so it kind of happened so quickly without really understanding what was happening. It was a good adventure.”
Heading up a company at such a young age, she said she used to have a “kind of insecurity” when running Gold Typhoon.
“That was very challenging. Then you grow up and you get over it. You have to get over it – as long as you work hard and your results prove it.”
After three years, she said the record label had turned profitable and it was sold as Pacific Global Management consolidated its focus on fashion.
“It was a combination of many factors but at the end of the day our group was focusing more on fashion rather than music so it was a natural progression basically,” Scaglia said of the sale. “It was time to move on.”
Asia is the place with the highest room for growth but it is the place that will take the longest
Now her efforts are channelled into transforming La Perla’s Asia-Pacific operations, which had been outsourced to third parties before Pacific Global Management bought it in June 2013, and fine-tuning its image of “sensuality, not sexuality”.
“[The Causeway Bay store site] is a hole in the ground now,” she said. “It’s owned by Emperor Group so we’re working very closely with them and we’re very happy with the partnership we created. That will be a lot of our focus [in 2015] — that and a couple more locations on the mainland. I think that will be enough hard work for a while.
“When you invest so much time and money and resources into a location like that, it’s important that all other locations you open are coherent with that message. You can’t go and downgrade after. You have to make sure everything you do is as good as that.”
It’s a bold move given the mainland luxury goods market experienced significant softening of demand last year due to the government’s austerity drive and a decelerating economy.
But La Perla’s advantages are that it sells a discreet brand of luxury and it is aimed mostly at women. Much of the mainland luxury sales drop off was male-focused — officials giving Rolexes and bottles of baijiu.
“For Asia, we are 36 per cent up in the past 10 months but that’s while making changes,” Scaglia said. “Considering we closed a bunch of stores, refurbished and reopened so I think we are doing pretty well compared to other regions and other brands. The reason is simple. We were so small. The challenge will be to maintain that level of growth in the next few years.
“Asia is the place with the highest room for growth but it is the place that will take the longest. It’s been in Asia since 2007 but in a sporadic, uncontrolled manner, whereas in the US it’s always been controlled by a fantastic team.”
La Perla was being managed out of Singapore, which was too far from the mainland market to oversee operations properly, she sais. Under her direction it’s set up teams in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong and the business is now managed A to Z in-house.
“It was franchisers, wholesalers and now we took everything back to do ourselves,” Scaglia said. “The results prove that it works. It’s luxury in the end. You must pay attention to all the details.”
