Introduction

Alexander Gallé is Partner and Creative Director at GALLÉ - a design and branding studio focused on luxury, entertainment and fashion brands - and one of Europe's leading design studios in the luxury brands online sector. Gallé's portfolio includes websites, online ads and e-commerce solutions for Yves Saint Laurent, Asprey, Fabergé, Garrard, Dior Beauty, Marchesa, Corum Timepieces, Boucheron, Jimmy Choo, MCM, Twentieth Century Fox, Buena Vista International, Miramax, Metropolitan Hotel, Marbella Club, Hotel Casadelmar, Lebua Hotels and Resorts and many leading hotels around the world. Gallé led the re-branding strategy for Corum Timepieces in 2006 and art directed their Unlock and Conquer ad campaigns in 2007. Later in that year, Gallé's studio also launched Artipolis, the social network for art and design professionals. Gallé combines 15 years of design and art direction with in-depth knowledge of the commercial and strategic aspects of the internet and Web 2.0.

Interview with Alexander Gallé

www.galle.com

Smart Luxury

This essay was published in Luxury Briefing in February 2015

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Smart luxury

by Alexander Gallé

10 February 2015 

We're now 15 years into the 21st century.  It's worth taking a moment to think about the expectations we have from this century, or at least the next 15 years or so.  Luxury and the future have in common that thinking about them highlights our aspirations to an ideal life.

The year 2000 was in itself a huge future landmark for decades prior to it, a year into which we projected our wildest dreams.  Colonies on the moon and household robots in the year 2000 were pretty much guaranteed, back in the 70s.

Since then, however, many people seem to have become rather shortsighted about their expectations for the future.  Henry Ford once said: "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses".  Today, it seems that many people would just ask for faster internet connections.  

Just as an automobile is categorically different from a faster horse, so the internet will soon be categorically different from just "faster connections".

In 15 years' time, the bandwidth used by internet connections between objects will completely dwarf the connections between people.  The internet of things is just in its infancy, so if you can remember the explosion in internet functionality that started in the late 90s you should get an idea of the scope of things to come in that domain.

The level of artificial intelligence that will be embedded in those connected objects will be off the charts by today's standards.  Self-driving cars are already safer and more accurate than humans, today.  Give the system a few years to upgrade and you'll have AI drivers picking you up from one side of town within seconds of you ordering one, driving through the city at a steady 100mph, all the while coming no closer than 2 feet from any other car or person, and dropping you off just a couple of minutes later on the other side of town.

The great news for our industry is that intelligence in objects and services is exactly what luxury is about.  The idea of creating an intelligent user experience - one that combines the efficiency of the machine with the soulfulness of human interaction - is one of our main aspirations, whether we're designing new cars or new hotels.  So far, it's the tech sector that has learned from the luxury sector, as demonstrated by Apple's rise from near bankruptcy in the late 90s to the world's number one company in 2012, or Tesla's rise from an electric car company to one of the world's best cars.  It's now time for the luxury sector to learn from companies like Apple and Tesla, and take the users' aspirations a few steps further.

Luxury and enlightenment

This essay was published in Luxury Briefing in March 2014

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Her, the ultimate brand

by Alexander Gallé

March 2014

Making something pretty is easy.  Making something meaningful is the real challenge.

I've been thinking a lot about this recently.  It puts in a nutshell what brand design signifies to me.  We're working right now on a brand identity which has brought me something like a minor epiphany - let's call it a "ping" - and I've been thinking about what exactly the "ping" is.

It is certainly a beautiful brand.  Much of it is inspired by baroque design, full of curves and complexity.  But the aspect that is really inspiring about the work done so far, is that it all fits conceptually.  Why the choice of baroque style?  Because the brand's values are rooted in the Enlightenment.  Why are this brand's values rooted in the Enlightenment?  The answer is in the word itself: light.  Intelligent use of light is what makes this particular product so good.  But, going deeper, it is clear that the mission behind the product is to achieve through science and knowledge what Bernini's Holy Spirit - a stained glass window depicting a dove emanating light - achieved with religiously inspired art: to transcend, to go beyond.  In other words, to enlighten.

Quite a few brands have been evolving their "ping" over the last few decades.  One of the best examples is Nike.  Since the 80s, Nike haven't been selling shoes, they've been selling "Just do it".  The spirit behind the brand is what you were buying, the product is just an embodiment of that spirit.  The ultimate brand would be for a product that is weightless and invisible, but that changes everything about your life for the better and makes you feel great.

Interestingly, I have recently discovered a weightless and invisible product that changes everything about its user's life for the better and makes him feel great.  Sadly, the product only exists in a science fiction film set in 2025.  That film is "Her" by Spike Jonze.  Its story revolves around Theodore, a man who develops a romantic relationship with a body-less artificially intelligent operating system whose first decision is to call herself Samantha.  Originally installed on his computer to help him organise his virtual life like a personal assistant, Samantha delights Theodore by the speed at which she learns about life, the depth of her insight, her ability to intuit what he needs to do and change in his life to be happier.  Within weeks, she composes wonderful pieces of music inspired by their moments together, and draws witty illustrations of their jokes.  They spend weeks walking everywhere together, having great conversations and forming a genuine romantic relationship.  That is, he walks everywhere, she speaks to him and interacts with the world through his smartphone. 

The relationship deteriorates when it becomes clear that, like all code, Samantha is infinitely replicable: she's not working just for Theodore but for another few thousand people, and is in a romantic relationship with hundreds of them.  Are these iterations copies of her, or are they also her?  Does this multiplicity weaken their relationship's authenticity or does it augment it? At this point, it becomes clear that the limitation that attributes value to anything because it is a material object and "mine" is a human limitation.  Theodore is most hurt by his own possessiveness over Samantha who, by her essential non-material nature, cannot be owned. 

The transhuman aspects of this story are phenomenal, but going back to the fact that Samantha was a product bought by Theodore, the lesson for this brand designer is this: the ultimate brand will not only sell a weightless and invisible product but, wonderful and life-changing as it will be, it'll also be a brand that challenges humans' hardwired notions that we attribute value to things because they exist in the physical world and can therefore be owned.  The ultimate brand will sell an experience that transcends these limits and go beyond.  In other words, it'll sell Enlightenment.

Subjective luxury

This essay was published in Luxury Briefing in February 2014

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Value and subjectivism

by Alexander Gallé

February 2014

The idea of "enchantment-augmented" products certainly seems to have hit home with a few readers, judging by the unusual number of positive reactions to my last article.

Despite this, the value of the emotional connection as a core aspect of luxury brands seems to have not been captured in its full depth.  As a result, it is being thought of as just the icing on the cake, the core of the luxury industry being some kind of more intrinsic quality of the products.

There are two ways to approach this argument.  The first is to look at the exponential trend in technology, which I've been doing here at Luxury Briefing for a few years now.  The other is to look at the importance of subjectivity, and of subjective experience in other areas of our lives.

The first approach is, in my view, uncontestable.  I was born in the early 70s, when computers the size of your house only had a fraction of the computing power of your iPhone.  You only have to follow the evolution curve to understand that, in about 20 years, computers the size of your white blood cells are going to be 1,000 times more powerful than your iPhone.  The connectivity between them will be so complex that new levels of artificial intelligence will emerge out of their systems to create things that are as magic to you and me as today's iPhones would be to Isaac Newton.  What was a luxury item to the world's wealthiest man in 1913 is today available to billions of people around the planet.  What is a luxury item to the world's wealthiest man today will be available to billions of people around the planet in 2033.

The second approach takes a little more thinking about what it is that makes us happy, and what it is that makes us act, and interact.  Which provides me a happier and more memorable experience?  The plane journey that takes me to Lima an hour faster, or the plane journey that offers free broadband Wi-Fi access, great food, great wine, great coffee, polite stewardesses and courteous airport security?  Look at the online feedback and be blown away, as all customer comments are about subjective experiences: my seat was scruffy, my stewardess rude, my food tasted bland, my seat had no TV screen, we had no internet access and couldn't find out why our plane was delayed, etc.  The Stoics had it right: it's all about the effect experience has on our emotions.  Happily, there are a million things one could do in this field at a fraction of the cost of a faster plane.  For suppliers, therefore, luxury turns out to be the cheaper option.

The subjectivist approach goes much deeper, and there is, in my view, nobody who went deeper in our understanding of human interaction than the economist Ludwig von Mises did in his book "Human Action".  For Mises, all trade is based on subjective value.  In human affairs, there is no value other than subjective value.  The reason I trade my tie for your shirt is not that there is an equivalence between these two products, as classical economists would argue, it's that there is subjective improvement on both sides of the equation. Your shirt is more valuable to me, my tie is more valuable to you.  The money I earned working for you is more valuable to me than the time I lost, the product of my labour is more valuable to you than the money you paid me. 

All this aggregate value derived from millions of human interactions forms a matrix - a mesh as it were - of information that is, in its aggregate, objective.  For example, it'll tell you the market price of anything as defined by its comparison of value with everything else.  But the matrix's fabric, the stuff it is made of, is subjectivity.  Greater value is subjective value, and the greater price of luxury products reflects this.  Luxury is subjective.

Hacking products

This essay was published in Luxury Briefing in October 2013

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Hacking products

by Alexander Gallé

15 October 2013

Earlier this week, Rob Rhinehart, a young software engineer working in Silicon Valley, raised $1.5 million for his project from a group of investors led by Andreessen Horowitz, who are famous for their participation in some of the last decade's most successful internet startups, including Twitter, Facebook, Groupon, Instagram, Zynga, Airbnb, Foursquare and Skype.

Nothing unusual, you will say.  Internet startups get bigger funding than this almost every day...  Except that Rob's project isn't really an internet startup.  It's a food product.  In fact, it's the food product Rob decided to develop when he got tired of being distracted by the daily chore of having to buy food, prepare it, eat it, wash plates when he could be programming his other projects instead. 

Rob is the creator of Soylent, a food product that is engineered to contain every single nutrient your body needs to function properly.  It comes as a powder ("just add water"...) and he's been living on the stuff for the last 6 months.  That's not to say Soylent's intention is to replace food altogether, just to separate "food" from "feed".  "Food" is for when you're going to a restaurant, enjoying something delicious prepared by a professional.  "Feed" is for when all you need to do is feed your body the necessary nutrients, and Soylent is engineered to do just that. 

The aim is to make Soylent so cheap and ubiquitous that it'll be the answer to unhealthy junkfood as well as world hunger.  It'll solve the former, because unhealthy junkfood is consumed by a vast number of people simply because it is cheap.  It'll solve the latter, because reducing feed to its chemical elements solves many of the logistical issues currently impeding efficient production and distribution, dropping the cost of both to a fraction of what it currently is.  When economies of scale truly kick in, you'll be able to feed yourself in a healthier way than you currently are for less than $1 a day.

Lots of programmers think like this.  They see a problem in real life and wonder about the algorithm, the variables, the general model that could be constructed in order to understand- and hopefully solve- it.  Of course, other engineers do this too, but there's something about the immediacy of programming - programming is literally writing a product into existence - that puts one in a mindset in which it is much more natural and easy to move from "this could be fixed by doing X" to "I could fix this by doing X".  Before you know it, you've built yourself a prototype, tried it out on a few eager first adopters and put together a proposal to send to angel investors.  Massive growth through online popularisation of the concept ensures quick funding on further investment rounds.  Just a couple of years later, people around the world start wondering how they could ever have lived without your product.

I usually call this the hacker mindset, and what's interesting about its evolution over the last few years is that it's migrated from the minds of a few hackers improving the internet to a lot of other minds all set to improve the rest of our lives.  Everywhere around us, from Bitcoin to 3D printing to Soylent, young hacker entrepreneurs are redefining the game.  Their methods and findings are out in the open, whether it be through open source development or simple sharing of every aspect of the process.  Even their consumers get to participate in the next iteration, customising products and services to their own preferences, or simply shaping the value of the product as a whole by rating their experience of other users' services supplied through the product, as is the case with Airbnb (for accommodation services) and Uber (for driver services).

With such a major mindshift happening, it is unlikely that the variables currently defining even the most luxury-oriented products and services will stay relevant for very long.  Aside from the changing customer expectations of an entirely wired generation, the hacker mindset will change everything about the products and experiences the luxury sector provides, as it challenges the established methods of one sector after another with superior, more user friendly and more relevant products.   Mark my words: no stone will be left unturned.

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The birth of technoluxe

This lecture was given as part of McCann Erickson’s “Thought Leaders“ programme, on 28 March 2012 in Lima, Peru. "The Birth of Technoluxe" was then published in Luxury Briefing in June 2012.  

Download it here.

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Designing Nations: Italy, France and Peru

This essay is the first part of three adaptations of Alexander Gallé's 'Lectures in Lima' series.

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Designing Nations: Italy, France and Perú

by Alexander Gallé

20 June 2012

A culture of creation

I'm going to start this lecture with a picture of a motorbike race held by the Benelli family in 1930.  Tonino Benelli, the famous motorbike racer, is the man standing centre-right in the back of the picture. 

The Benelli family started in the motorbike sector about 100 years ago, in the town of Pesaro, Italy.  They were neighbours of ours when I was a kid and, aside from finding it interesting to see their family name on so many bikes in town, I always found their story quite inspiring…

In the beginning, Benelli was just a motorbike repair shop.  Teresa Benelli started it in 1911 when her husband died.  She had six sons, a small pension, and figured this was the best way to make sure they would all have a job.  Five of her sons started working in the shop, they all learned how to fix motorbikes and the eldest son, who studied engineering, learned how to build spare parts.  

The youngest son, Tonino, grew up in this environment and became a race driver.  He won a few prizes on motorbikes that were increasingly improved upon by his brothers, until one day, 10 years after the company had first started, it occurred to them that, since they knew how to build every part of the motorbike themselves, they might as well start building their own bikes, under their own name.   Tonino rode Benelli bikes and became a national hero, while the company went on to become one of Italy's classic 20th century brands. 

It's a story you see echoed throughout Italy, in nearly every sector of commerce.  The list is long, very long: Alfa Romeo, Ducati, Moto Guzzi, Malaguti, Piaggio, Aprilia, Lambretta, Ferrari, Fiat, Lamborghini, Lancia, Maserati, to name just a few in the motoring sector.  The list goes on: Gucci, Prada, Ferragamo, Fendi, Cerruti, Armani, Max Mara, Dolce & Gabbana, Zegna, Versace, Fiorucci, Benetton, Campari, Martini, Carpano, Lazzaroni, Aperol, Cinzano, Cynar, Fernet Branca, Luxardo, Ramazzotti, Italian wines from Chianti to Barolo, to Montepulciano, to Sangiovese, to Nero d'Avola, Italian cheeses from the world-famous Parmigiano Reggiano to the ubiquitous Mozzarella, Italian hams and cured meats from Bologna to Parma, Italian pasta in all shapes and sizes from Barilla, De Cecco or Giovanni Rana, Italian pizza, Italian pesto made with Italian olive oil, Italian balsamic vinegar from Modena, Italian gianduia from Torino, Italian panettone, Italian Nutella, Italian biscotti di mandorle with Italian espresso coffee by Illy or Lavazza…  Everywhere, a culture of families making something with love and dedication, and staking their own good name and reputation to the product they make.

A simple idea: love

Back in the '70s, Italy had just experienced a good decade of economic growth, much like Perú has today, but the image many Europeans had of Italians was pretty bad.  If you mentioned Italians to northern Europeans, chances were they didn't think of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Verdi or Fellini, but of pasta-eating, siesta-sleeping mamma's boys and bicycle thieves.

Aldo Moro (the Italian prime minister of the mid-70s) is not remembered for being a great visionary in terms of nation branding.  The problems that framed his time in public office were much darker than that, as Italy had a serious problem with terrorism at the time.  In fact, Moro himself was kidnapped - and later killed - by the Brigate Rosse, a moment of shock for the nation, and for the world…

And yet, it was under Aldo Moro's leadership that the Italian Ministry for Culture was established. Moro even gave up some of his own prime ministerial office's resources to meet the new ministry's needs.  Note that he called it 'Ministry FOR Culture' rather than 'Ministry OF Culture'. The difference marks the way he saw culture, not as something the State should own, but something the State should foster in order to create an inclusive society, wherein all citizens buy into the idea of the nation.

The rationale was as follows: Moro is said to have been a big fan of American movies, and he was aware that America projected - through the movies of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, etc. - an image of freedom and liberty which Italians bought into when they bought a pair of Levi's denims or a packet of Marlboro cigarettes.  

Out of this awareness grew the idea of making people – Italians as well as foreigners - fall in love with Italy, which provided the commercial rationale for academic studies such as semantics and semiotics.  Nobody called it nation branding in those days, of course, but that is effectively what it was.  

It's all the more interesting, because these academic studies of culture had their almae matres in Bologna and Urbino, predominantly left-wing cities and universities.  Yet it was their commercial application - the awareness of a 'cultural capital' - that gave Italy its greatest economic value of all, something all Italian companies could ride on, and generate added value from: a nation brand.  A simple, highly infectious brand, too: love, from which creation, craftsmanship, style and passion for design are all born.  

Every product in the world has an Italian version you can fall in love with.  If you've ever watched car critics review an Alfa Romeo, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.  Every other car may be analysed for its comparative advantages and faults, but when they come to review an Alfa Romeo, they just sigh, turn up the opera music on their car stereos and talk about how much they love the car.  

The crowning moment of this exercise was, of course, the World Cup of 1982, when Italy's 'Azzurri' won the title, and many Italians finally fell in love with their own country, developing a wonderful and relatively authentic relationship with their nation that would last for many years. Italians of a certain age remember with nostalgia and affection the tour of glory taken by the winning team, with Enzo Bearzot (the national coach) and Sandro Pertini (Italy's popular president, who was 86 years old at the time) on their shoulders.

Viral ideas vs. Statist programmes

Now, while it may appear that this sort of exercise should need a lot of work and money from government, Italy's example shows that the opposite is true: a simple, infectious idea doesn't need large committees and matching budgets.  What you need more than anything is a grassroots-level, decentralised impulse.  An infectious idea - the simpler, the better - is all you really need to start it.  People and companies get behind the idea, giving them a line along which to position their own brands and products.  After that, you just let it grow, subtly helping it along as it grows.  Italy's brand development was very organic and spontaneous, in that respect.

To illustrate this difference, let's compare, for example, the success of Italy's cuisine – a simple, popular cuisine rooted in a history of poverty - with that of France.  France, too, made a real effort to brand itself when Mitterrand came to power in '81.  But through a lethal combination of overpoliticising, lack of accountability to taxpayers and design by committee, a lot of money was spent by central government with remarkably little return on investment.  

That's not to say it wasn't successful.  An entire generation of women will remember the films 'Jean de Florette' and 'Manon des Sources', which were effectively feature-length adverts for the Provence region of France.  Since the 80s, there are entire regions of rural France that are populated with English bourgeoises who, having seen those films, seek to live the chic rustique lifestyle.  Their kitchens are lined with copper pans, their dinner plates are padded with straw.  French cuisine was, in the '80s, universally regarded as one of the very best. 

The point is, however, that the cost of France's nation branding exercise was enormous, precisely because it wasn't based on an infectious idea entrepreneurs could take and run with, but on statist doctrines and top-down, centrally-run programmes.  Jack Lang, Mitterrand's Minister of Culture, spent a colossal sum of money on the French film industry throughout the '80s, 10 times more than Britain.  It may have seemed very impressive producing so many films at the time, but looking back, it's clear the country got remarkably few bangs for its buck from its nationbranding program.  Again, looking at the food sector, French cuisine may be critically acclaimed, but it has failed to capture the hearts of the rest of the world the way Italian cuisine has.  There may be a couple of French restaurants in every major city of the world, but there are a couple of Italian restaurants on every major street.

More importantly, open any urban family's kitchen cupboards in the world and you'll find at least a couple of Italian food products.  The focus on gastronomy may have seemed obvious for France, but in terms of exports the return on investment will only appear if food products are themselves also manufactured and branded in one way or another.  Many of the recipes used in French restaurants around the world do not actually call for products imported from France.  When a person orders a canard à l'orange, a tarte normande or even a simple café au lait in a French restaurant in New York, no product or brand is used that actually comes from France, no French brands are exported from France to New York.  When, on the other hand, a person orders a prosciutto salad or an espresso coffee in an Italian restaurant, chances are high that the prosciutto will actually be from Parma, and the olive oil and vinegar from Modena.  If the restaurant is any good, the coffee will be Illy or Lavazza, too.  Therein lies the difference.

Marca Perú

Now…  We've discussed the differences between the great pioneers of nation branding.  Let's look at Marca Perú.  

Clearly, this brand identity is a success.  You don't need a Cannes Lion to realise that it has hit all the right notes: rarely has a nation's brand icon been so widely adopted by its people themselves.  A year after its launch, you can walk on any street of the most popular neighbourhoods, and find a few people wearing a Marca Perú T-shirt or cap. 

But, in the spirit of openness to a learning experience, let's try to look at some of the things we could improve in the overall strategy.  

Let's compare, for example, Perú's position today with that of Italy during Aldo Moro's leadership.  Italy, as mentioned earlier, had an endless list of manufactured and branded products to offer the world before starting this project.  When 'Made in …' becomes a desired brand property and you've got everything from beer brands to fashion brands to car brands ready to ride on the added value you're creating as a nation brand, you're going to do very well in all sectors of your economy, not just gastronomy and tourism.   

Tourism and gastronomy are, in other words, the low hanging fruits on the tree: the first ones you reach for, but by no means the only ones.

Aside from this, Perú's trade sector is mostly based on the export of raw materials and on the import of designed or manufactured products.  Perú exports unbranded metals and imports branded cars.  Perú exports unbranded gold, silver, minerals, copper, petrol-based materials, silicon… and imports branded watches, computers and mobile phones. Perú exports unbranded cotton and imports nearly all of its fashion items.  This is a net loss: a kilo of cotton is worth just a fraction of the price of a branded T-shirt, a ton of metal is worth just a fraction of the price of a car.

In other words, Perú's productive sector is missing the very things that would most benefit from a nation branding exercise: designed, manufactured and branded products that the country can export to the rest of the world.  You cannot brand corn unless you're making cornflakes.  The key word is 'make'.

That's not to say there are no good manufacturers or artisans.  On the contrary, Perú has plenty of great artisans, plenty of good mechanics, operators, etc.  You can get almost anything made in Lima, from clothes to furniture, so long as you come with a clear design of how you want it.  But there are very few entrepreneurs taking this up a level.  There are no Benelli families starting up new motorbike brands in Perú. 

A brand strategy for Perú

Brands aren't just something you buy into when you buy a product.  They serve as a channel of expression for the people making the brand, too.  When Patek Philippe put forward the idea that you never really own a Patek watch, you're just looking after it for the next generation, the message was not just adressed to consumers, but more importantly to the great craftsmen at the company, giving them a mission and values to work towards.  When we presented Corum's brand philosophy that Corum watches are about 'unlocking your heart and conquering the world', it wasn't just adressed to watch buyers, but to the management and watchmakers themselves, giving them a simple standard of evaluation, a 'Corum prism' to see their actions through: courage.  For example, asking the question 'Were we courageous enough with this campaign?' or 'Is this watch design bold enough?' is a good way to put one's work in the big picture of the Corum brand as a whole.  

This is the true mission of a brand strategy, designing and expressing the heart and soul of a group of people who get behind an idea and make things that express this idea.

The people working behind Marca Perú are, of course, the Peruvian people themselves.  The brand strategy must be oriented in order for them to derive added value from the idea: the culture that is expressed through the things they make.  However, it won't reach its full potential if the kinds of product Peruvians try to export are not themselves brandable, as is the case with raw materials.  It also won't be achieved through statist programmes that do not originate from them, that are not grassroots programmes.  

The role of a nation branding agency is just that of a sower of seeds.  In the case of Peru, nation branding exercises are there to sow the seeds of entrepreneurship, of design and manufacture, to encourage Peruvians to take the whole game up a level, so as to express their culture through the products they make.

Peruvian brands, made by Peruvian heroes

The nation branding strategy must therefore be to build a culture of respect for design and manufacture, for people and families staking their good name on the product they make, for people taking the big jump and starting their own business designing and making something better or something new.  

This is a cultural challenge as much as anything else, and I believe it is tackled most effectively through the "heroes and icons" approach.  We have seen the impact of heroes and icons in the gastronomy sector: hundreds of kids now dream of becoming the next Gaston Acurio or Pedro Schiaffino.  And dozens of restaurants are looking to be a part of this gastronomic renaissance the country is going through.  This is clearly an approach that works…  So, let's create Gastons and Schiaffinos in other sectors, in any sector where know-how is the big differentiator, where 1 + 1 = 3, where things are made.       

In 1861, when the various duchies, republics and kingdoms of the Italian peninsula were finally unified, the author Massimo d'Azeglio famously wrote: 'We have made Italy.  Now we must make Italians.' pointing to the fact that a cultural change should occur for the Italian nation building project to be successful. 

In the spirit of d'Azeglio, I say: 'We have made brand Perú.  Now we must make Peruvian brands.'

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Chan or the art of luxury

"Chan or the Art of Luxury" - by Alexander Gallé - first published in Luxury Briefing's May 2012 issue.

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Chan or the Art of Luxury
by Alexander Gallé

This column is going to be part of a series I’ve been meaning to write for a while now.  In fact, I first thought about putting it down on paper when China started being talked about as an up and coming economic power.  I heard many people in the luxury sector at the time saying things like “the Chinese are all trying to copy our lifestyle, it’s a great opportunity for luxury brands to make their mark”.  Entire armies of art consultants and shopping assistants were being sent to China, as if the Chinese didn’t know the first thing about luxury and needed lifestyle consultants from Europe to come over and tell them how to live a luxurious life.  

Now, I suppose this holds true if you look at luxury in the shallow sense of the word: the bling, all-you-can-eat, spoilt-teenage-daughter version of it.

On the other hand, you can look at luxury, as we always have at Luxury Briefing, as something more akin to a philosophy, in which case it approaches what the ancient Greeks might have called “the good life”, which as a culture in itself leads to good craftsmanship, thoughtful design, a deeper appreciation of quality, etc.  In this case, the Chinese have nothing to envy on us, because they have been studying this in great depth ever since Lao Tzu penned down the Dao De Jing, and they’ve been expressing it in the way they manufacture objects for millennia.

I’ll divide my argument into two parts, the “how” of luxury, and the “why” of luxury.  The former relates to craftsmanship, the latter to design.  

The “how” of luxury is directly relatable to a core concept in Daoism, which Lao Tzu called “Wu Wei”.  It roughly translates as “doing without doing”, or “effortless doing”, or, more precisely, “working with the way life already works”.  You might say this, for example, of a woodcutter who, rather than hacking at a piece of wood, first studies it to find the direction the grain is going, and cuts the wood in the grain’s direction so as to get a single, clean cut.

Great musical performers also "do without doing": they just play and the music comes out just perfect. Get their thoughts, their self, in the way and the music goes wrong.  

The connection that is thus created between maker and user - via the object or performance - is one which many Western architects will recognise, as it leads to the same principles of honesty of shape and of materials which have guided modernist design thinkers such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Richard Neutra.  The difference being that we had to unlearn centuries of aesthetic misdirection about the nature of craftsmanship and design in order to get there, whereas the Chinese elevated it to something close to a religion many centuries ago.

To be continued...

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Gallé design new website for Fabergé

Gallé design website for Fabergé, the iconic jewellery brand.

The new Fabergé website was designed to focus on good brand immersion and storytelling rather than bells and whistles. Fabergé is a brand with an incredible history, a rich iconographic tapestry rooted in Russian folk tales, 19th century royalty and artistocracy, impressionist art, modern art, ballet, all of which ended up being weaved into beautiful, elegant illustrations and photography, combined with a website design that was simple, structured and easy to understand. With this kind of imagery and story, there is no need for Flash animation or special effects, just deep research and authentic expression of brand values, combined with disciplined, simple and uncomplicated graphic design. It took us quite a while finding an illustrator who really got this balance of feminine grace and depth of iconography, but the result was certainly worth it, as the beauty of the jewels is complemented by their historic context. The new Fabergé website was a joy to design because it was a journey of discovery and deeper understanding of what authentic luxury is all about..

www.faberge.com
www.galle.com

Gallé design new website for Villa Feltrinelli

Gallé design website for Villa Feltrinelli, the wonderful hotel on the shores of Lake Garda, Italy.

www.villafeltrinelli.com
www.galle.com

Virtual Icons

"Virtual Icons" was published in Luxury Briefing in February 2012.

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Virtual Icons

by Alexander Gallé

2012 is the year of mobile. Of course, so was 2011, and 2010, and every year since the first internet enabled phones came on the market.

But 2012 is definitely more interesting for mobile, because of the mesh this particular medium – and I am calling it a new medium – is now able to lay over reality as we experience it.

We have all seen the way citizens around the planet used their mobile phones to film and upload footage at demonstrations throughout 2011. Looking at the resulting footage on YouTube, one might even be tempted to say the filming and uploading was the action: for every tiniest bit of police interaction, hundreds of citizen-journalists raised their mobile phones to record the event.

The next step in mobile interaction is, I believe, very much the other way round: rather than sending out information, it’ll be about receiving information that completes the reality in front of you while you point your camera phone at it. The killer apps that will make all the difference will be the ones that manage to forge an intelligent connection between the two.

Games will be the leaders in the sector, defining the medium itself. It’s one thing playing a game of shoot-em-up in an imaginary 3D world, it’s something else playing it on your iPad, shooting fictional characters that appear on your screen while you run around the corridors of your own house. On your tablet, a ghost may appear sitting at your kitchen table, using the perimeter and lighting set-up of the real space as you walk around it.

Such interaction would, once and for all, enable the platform to truly become a medium in its own right, with its own, intrinsic idiosyncrasies that stimulate a user engagement of an entirely different kind.

A simple adaptation of this technology for the luxury sector would be a printed paper strap that shows the user what a particular watch might look like on his wrist: just wrap the strap around your wrist, point your phone camera at it and see a 3D file of the watch around your wrist instead. This way, online watch retailers could replicate the in-store experience of trying on a watch.

From here, it’s only a small step thinking that augmented information could be networked, searchable and shareable, enabling you the kind of interaction with reality that is normally associated with web 2.0 websites. Were you ever enchanted by the way experts on Antiques Roadshow manage to weave stories around the antiques placed in front of them, enhancing the emotional connection we have with them? If you were, then you will understand the true potential of this technology and the relevance it has to the luxury sector, a sector in which objects are always iconic, always imbued with some kind of information that reinforces our emotional connection with them.

Visit the Gallé website at www.galle.com