Bargains out of the basement The queen of buying luxury at a discount
As discounted luxury buys become the ultimate humble brag, Desirée Bollier tells Bethan Holt how it’s done
‘I’ll have superfood salad… for a super woman,” says Desirée Bollier, with a twinkle in her eye, as we order lunch one Monday. She’s teasing slightly about the super woman bit, although considering she is fresh off a flight from a trip that took her first to China for business meetings and then on to India where she has spent the past six days on a rally from Jaipur to Jodhpur to raise funds for the charity Elephant Family and is now immaculately coiffed, ready for a packed afternoon of meetings, the moniker is probably justified.
Elephant salvation is a mere side project for Bollier who, as Value Retail’s chairman and chief merchant, has been responsible for redefining the concept of a discount outlet (banish all preconceptions of sad rails filled with factory reject T-shirts) and making a shopping centre in a small Oxfordshire town into a tourist destination with visitor numbers to rival the British Museum, Tate Modern and Buckingham Palace.
Welcome to Bicester Village. Visited by 6.4 million last year and the second most popular place on the itineraries of Chinese tourists, Bicester – or “the laboratory” as Bollier likes to call it – is the jewel in the crown of Value Retail, which operates 11 villages across Europe and China. In these you’ll find most of the world’s biggest luxury labels – Burberry, Prada, Gucci, Saint Laurent – in stores that may not have the gloss of Mayfair, but still retain a sense of special-ness and, most importantly, sell genuinely brilliant products rather than the space-filling surplus once associated with such places.
Fashion editors swear by pilgrimages to Bicester’s branch of Celine to stock up on minimalist classics or to Marni for accessories.
Historically, labels have been reluctant to discuss which pieces they will send to outlets like Bicester, and Bollier, who worked at Ralph Lauren before joining Value Retail in 2001, admits it was “impossible” at the beginning to get them on board. Now, though, she’s confident even the most discerning shoppers will find pieces they’ve been coveting at discounts of up to 60 per cent, sometimes more.
“We’re in a unique position with the brands now when they are looking to allocate stock,” she confirms. “We get the crème de la crème because we have the spending figures to prove it’s worth it. A lot of iconic or runway pieces
– those things that you fell in love with but couldn’t get at full price – guess what, you’re stumbling on them with us, be it Valentino or Alexander Mcqueen.”
Value Retail has two Shanghai outlets
– one of them is rather appropriately beside Disneyland. One trend Bollier and her team have noticed is how their villages are introducing some shoppers to the less famous labels and converting them into full-price customers: “Twentyfive per cent of guests who have shopped with us at our Loewe store in Shanghai have gone on to visit its other shops because they discovered it with us. It had never occurred to them to go to a boutique first. They’re not just looking for a discount, it’s a sense of discovery, too.” Last month, Bicester opened the doors to 30 new boutiques, bringing the total to 160 and creating a shopping avenue as long as the Champs Elysées (but infinitely chicer). Escada, Joseph, See by Chloé and Acne joined the line-up of established designer names but two other additions suggested a particularly clever direction from Bollier. Roksanda and Christopher Kane are both much-feted London Fashion Week alumni who have taken the next step to big business by opening their own shops in the past few years, but they’re likely to be new discoveries for many Bicester-goers. “Global thinking with local execution,” is how Bollier labels such partnerships but it’s clearly an area she’s passionate about, having devised the British Design Collective in the late 2000s to help young designers through the worst of the financial crisis: “The sell-through was good so they could use the money for new collections … Roksanda might be superniche but a lot of the Chinese will go in there through curiosity because they’ve never heard of her, or because they just saw her on We Chat but haven’t seen her collections in ‘real life’”. Bollier, 60, was born in Lebanon and raised in Paris, where she studied corporate law. But it’s not just her business prowess that has steered her to deliver doubledigit growth every year since she joined Value Retail; she’s also a tastemaker in her own right. For one, she knows her fashion and despite proclaiming to be “a terrible shopper” she wears a YSL tailored jacket with lacing and a white ruffled blouse from Gucci. She is also on the board of the Royal Academy and an avid collector of black and white photography.
I’m not sure that she has time to wander through Bicester on one of the experiential visits she imagines for her guests, but nevertheless, she has had a hand in creating a pop-up Christmas boutique in collaboration with artist Luke Edward Hall, designed to feel like an English country house apartment.
“I don’t see work and life as separate things, I’m quite passionate. While art was a scary thing, now it’s democratised itself completely. I thought we could make art part of our landscape, our customers are used to seeing it every day anyway.”
To think we used to screw our noses up at outlet villages.