Luxury maisons are branching out into different products with their signature styles
Luxury brands are addressing consumers' wholistic needs by bravely diversifying their products
The boundaries are blurring these days. Gone are the days when luxury maisons were known for a single product category. Fashion houses are expanding into watches and fine jewellery, and high jewellers are opening resorts and launching furniture collections.
Montblanc's creative director Zaim Kamal, responsible for four different product offerings of the maison from watches to leather goods, writing instruments and jewellery, set up a whatsapp group for all members from his core design teams five months ago in order to communicate inspirations and ideas across the board. "The danger we face is we could end up with four different expressions within the maison," Kamal says. "We always try to align our work as much as we can. Our teams are used to the way of working via whatsapp, emails, texts and more. So if I send an inspiration to the group for the watch team, everyone else can also be a part of it."
As luxury brands evolve into lifestyle houses, the synergy among different departments becomes increasingly important to ensure consistency and sustainability as well as avoiding brand dilution. Fashion collections come out at least four times a year, the development of watches and jewellery, however, can take years. To tackle the challenges, brands have come up with separate approaches to bring together their different departments for collaboration.
While Montblanc brings together collective team work by opening a communication channel directly with the design principal, Hermès, for example, develops yearly themes which inspire the creative direction for its fashion collections and accessories as well as watches and jewellery.
"Hermès' creations are guided by an annual theme to give rhythm to the collections," says Philippe Delhotal, creative director of La Montre Hermès. The art of flaneur - Hermès' theme for 2015 - sets the foundation for the luxury maison's different collections that ooze effortless city wanderer cool.
Other luxury brands revolve their many collections around the core business that closely embraces the identity and origins of the house heritage. Cartier and Bulgari, for example, cite their high-jewellery department as inspirations for accessories and leather goods.
"Our high-jewellery studio is the most important one in terms of number of people," says Pierre Rainero, Cartier's director of image, style and heritage. "We have regular meetings together with all the studio heads to share the creativity and style. Each collection from one studio is shared with all the others. Sometimes they work together on the same inspiration."
Bulgari's CEO Jean-Christophe Babin agrees that high-jewellery creations are the source of inspiration for watches and leather goods.
