Rebecca Schmitt - Omni-Personal Luxury: How to Transform Your Luxury Business for the Digital Age

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Dear Reader,

Written by passionate authors for an industry of passion, this book is an educated reflection based on our experiences in top management roles and consulting the leading companies in the luxury industry, combining our shared views on the upcoming challenges and opportunities.

Omni-personal luxury is purposely not an academic or a scientific exercise. We diligently scouted the market for the latest global challenges and trends. More precisely, we gathered knowledge as part of our respective professional life and openly exchanged it with a number of c-level executives, IT and digital experts, as well as with a number of technology companies, to compile a broad view of the luxury industrys market trends. We think success is based on collaboration and knowledge, which is why we decided to share our insights, examples and references to open the eyes of the curious while centralising useful information for the knowledgeable.

In the past 20 years, the world has contemplated the impact of digitalisation that is happening at various speeds in all industries and accelerated by new players attacking the market globally and/or locally. The rise of these new business models through online whether it is about ordering, delivering or crowdsourcing/funding, or about converting buy into rent, lease or subscription, has been disruptive for the historical players. The codes behind what makes a business successful or the way companies should address their customers have been changing like never. The lines between traditional and technological companies are blurring (arent all companies digital nowadays?), and the result is that yesterdays leaders and pillars of our economies are not todays and for sure will not be tomorrows. Why would it be different for the luxury industry?

Alongside the massive digital transformation happening across industries and markets, the luxury vessel has been keeping its course, leveraging century-old emotional and know-how codes entrenched in the success of the generated business. In the past ten years, we have experienced a number of online initiatives, but selling online, whether it was B2B or B2C, was not the prime strategy, and most companies invested in expanding the reach of professional fairs for their B2B business or in developing their proprietary retail network and footprint for those convinced that owning the relationship with the customer was the best way to generate growthand it worked!

Although the luxury leaders had started their digital transformation, COVID-19 has created a digital necessity and has put the church back in the centre of the village, as we say in French. Online presence and online customer engagement were the lifesavers in keeping the relationship with customers and compensating sales (with online sales) while stores were closed or while people could not travel. If you take a step back, this is just an acceleration of an unavoidable evolution given the changes we have seen in other industries, the expectations of the Asian customers (strategic area for growth) and, finally, the expectations of the new generations.

This new reality growth and success will be based on a variety of ingredients, including relevant personal engagement across channels (online and offline), continuous customer lifecycle management, interacting with the new generations where they spend their time (i.e., gaming, virtual reality, social networks) and building cross-channel or industry experiences while committing and acting on sustainability. The biggest opportunity will be to orchestrate these channels and build the most relevant experiences for each individual customer. This is what we call Omni-personal luxury.

We hope you enjoy this ride with us.

We would like to acknowledge those persons who gave us the energy and constructive feedback to make this book happen.

First, we would like to thank the brilliant team at Palgrave Macmillanin particular, Liz Barlow and Srishti Gupta.

Moreover, we would like to thank all our interview partners, namely Cyrille Vigneron, Franois-Henry Bennahmias, Georges Kern, Antonio Carriero and Kristian Tear. We thank Olivier Emery and Franois Delage for their valuable review.