Au Départ’s CEO on Focusing on Positioning, Color
The luxury trunk maker has been enhancing its brand awareness with a series of collaborations and stretching its positioning.
PARIS — In September 2019, Au Départ hosted a presentation here to mark its relaunch, after the French historical brand, which had been dormant since the 1970s, had new backers and tapped Gianfranco Maccarrone as chief executive officer.
The revamp initiated with a series of itinerant retail experiences across Europe and the U.S., but COVID-19 soon led Maccarrone to tweak the strategy he had in mind for the luxury trunk maker.
“We focused more on product and on working on positioning,” said the CEO on Saturday, when the brand returned to the physical presentation format with a showcase in the majestic halls of the Hôtel de Crillon.
Product-wise, Maccarrone underscored that “our mission is not to create new styles, but rather let our collections evolve and mature, with the goal to have pieces that can stay in the assortment forever.…We want to make our archives live but little by little, and with an extremely contemporary approach, which for us is conveyed through color.”
Hence the series of collaborations the luxury luggage maker inked in these months, each resulting in a new shade enriching the brand’s palette of classic hues. A tie-up with the Byblos luxury hotel in Saint-Tropez offered a tangerine version of the label’s monogrammed accessories while the one with the legendary train Orient Express resulted in a midnight blue capsule collection. Additional operations, such as developing a pet collection for the Hôtel de Crillon, further helped increase brand awareness, which eventually benefited the overall sales performance.
“And now we’re readying a new journey, with our next collaboration and a new color,” teased Maccarrone, without disclosing further details.
Meanwhile, red has been already ticked off the brand’s list via the fall 2022 collection, which was rendered in this shade to “telegraph a message of love and passion,” said Maccarrone.
Key styles in the range included tote bags in different sizes and crafted from the brand’s signature coated cotton canvas. “Travel has been halted but movement hasn’t. There’s always this frenetic life and our goal is to do products as light as possible. This is what women keep asking us,” said the executive.
Other signature models encompassed the Bercy functional and reversible shopping bag; mini clutches in rectangular and hexagonal shapes nodding to the trunk expertise of the brand and the Dauphine model, a bucket style now rendered in a smaller size winking to a younger consumer.
Reaching a new generation of customers and stretching the demographic of the audience has been a key priority for Maccarrone. In addition to product versatility, the CEO underscored the importance of having more competitive price points versus competitors in the market — which include the likes of Goyard, Moynat and Louis Vuitton — in attracting a wider community. For example, mini bags offer entry-level price points starting at 490 euros, while the most expensive handbag options retail at around 5,000 euros.
Yet Maccarrone sees great potential even on the other end of the spectrum, where big spenders can satisfy all their trunk fantasies with fancy projects that veer toward lifestyle and interior design concepts.
“We started with trunks, and that’s what we do. But we want to distinguish ourselves from what you can find elsewhere,” he said, explaining that these special pieces can carry classic products like wines, cigars and table games or more contemporary items, such as DJ decks and video game consoles.
A collaboration with Bang & Olufsen for a series of these luxe, tech-conscious products resulted in a trunk doubling as a high-end vinyl case and retailing at 110,000 euros, for instance. Other options included a “desert theater” trunk with a foldable screen and video projector or a more urban alternative, including a 43-inch Samsung TV, Apple TV, Sky TV and a Sonos speaker playbar, which is sold equipped at 28,000 euros or can be customized with or without the device upon a customer’s request.
Renderings of bespoke products are realized in just 48 hours, with final items delivered in 90 to 120 days, depending on the design. In addition to the original monogrammed coated cotton, which dates back to the 1920s, trunks can be crafted in a new jacquard fabric including reflective threads.
The bespoke part of the business — which attracts international customers, ranging from Dubai and Saudi Arabia to France and Hong Kong — is the one where Maccarrone pours all the skills he acquired throughout his career, especially in his previous role as CEO of Dsquared2.
“The attention to detail was maniacal at Dsquared2 and it is something that is definitely here, too. Overall, the approach I continue to use here is to work on quality at 360 degrees, so not just in terms of products and distribution, but focusing also on the quality of people and collaborations. Projects like these are conceived to improve customers’ quality of life, after all,” said Maccarrone.
Looking forward, the strategy of the company is to further enhance its business-to-consumer presence and resume the exploration of retail opportunities. Before the pandemic, the brand was looking to open a flagship in Paris, but Maccarrone said he is additionally eyeing stores in South Korea and Japan, markets that have been responding particularly well to the label’s offering. The executive also cited the U.S. as the first market for online sales, as well as the Middle East, Hong Kong and China as best-performing ones overall.