Gallé launch the new website for Mitsi, the Brazilian leather bags and accessories brand.
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Luxury Briefing: Luxury vs. Action Heroes
Luxury vs. Action Heroes, by Alexander Gallé, originally appeared as a column in Luxury Briefing's May 2010 edition.
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Luxury vs. Action Heroes
by Alexander Gallé
BaselWorld, to be frank, can sometimes be a little disappointing...
Or rather, it can be if you're more interested in watch brands' communications than in their complications. The moment you walk through that long corridor at Geneva airport on your way to Basel, all you see is an endless row of ads displaying three-quarter-angle product shots with tired slogans on plain-coloured backgrounds, the only difference being the logos underneath them. None of them really stand out, and very few of them will even try to do something resembling a lifestyle campaign. The ones that do go there inevitably end up complementing their ads with some word-kit-generated platitudes about experiencing luxury or indulging oneself in a unique world of craftsmanship.
There are the exceptions, of course, brands that have understood that people don't buy a £20,000 watch because they want to know what time it is - a £50 quartz watch will do just fine if that's all you want - but because they're enchanted and engaged. Some companies, like Patek Philippe, try to own an aspect of time itself: long time, time expressed as a legacy, leaving something for the next generation, etc. Our own studio's work for Corum, from 2005 to 2009, tried to own another aspect of time: the now. This aspect of time inevitably takes you down the road of "seizing the moment", from which came the idea that there is a Corum watch for every exceptional hero you want to be. Want to become a great statesman? Buy the Romvlvs watch. A billionaire? Buy the Coin watch. A great adventurer? Buy the Admiral's Cup... What all these great careers have in common is that you need courage to take the first step. You need courage to quit your day job and run for candidate, start your own business or travel the world.
Result: Corum is courage. Unlock yourself and conquer the world. Unlock and Conquer.
Nothing expressed this better, of course, than Corum's owner himself: Severin Wunderman, Mr. Courage incarnated. A Holocaust survivor who went to America as a kid after the war, who founded Gucci Timepieces in the 70s, who beat cancer in the 80s, who bought Corum in the 90s and designed some of the most theatrical and interesting watches in the 00s. When Severin Wunderman passed away, about 18 months ago, a huge source of courage and creativity simply vanished from the watch industry.
How delightful, therefore, to have found a new brand that expresses these values with all the more aplomb. And how refreshing to see that it is a small brand, with an even smaller advertising budget.
I remember thinking a few years ago how great it would be if luxury brands could get more involved with extreme sports. Most millionaires today are under 40. Many of them have made their fortunes from dotcoms and cool tech companies. Many of them like to do the kind of sports that'll either make your heart stop or pump more blood to your brain than could possibly fit between your ears. So, you would think luxury brands would be falling over each other to attach themselves to something other than golf or tennis. How about skydiving, freediving, snowboarding, parkour or rock climbing?
Enter Linde Werdelin, who not only make the watches to give you that adrenaline rush, but who have also embarked on a new and exciting communications route: graphic novels. Action heroes and heroines, all sporting the coolest gadgets on their wrists while flying, running and swimming to the Earth's most extreme extremities.
What's even more exciting is the level of interaction you will see with the brand communications over the coming months, until the newly branded site is officially launched. Much of the audience's feedback, ideas for new characters and stories, are discussed openly on the brand's own Facebook page. New pictures of character illustrations and outlines for future stories are presented and discussed right there. Nothing gets a fanclub going more than this kind of open-source, open-minded, peer-to-peer way of interacting with the audience.
Of course, you need an action hero's nerve to do something like this, because getting it wrong when you stand out that much will make your brand that much more vulnerable. The stories will have to be engaging, the characters will have to look sexy and ultra cool, and the content will have to have its own emotional rewards rather than just look like a feature-length ad for the watches themselves. But Linde Werdelin's rewards will be there for years to come, as new episodes come out in time for new collection launches. Walking down that corridor in Geneva's airport will become something to look forward to with all the excitement and anticipation of a kid waiting for the newsagents to open, so they can buy their latest fix of action and adventure.
Monday, 1 February 2010
Michel Dyens, brand identity and website
Gallé create brand identity and website for Michel Dyens, the luxury industry's leading investment banking and M&A specialist.
If I had to choose one person in the luxury sector who best incarnates its values, it would have to be Michel Dyens. For what is luxury if not courteousness, culture and quiet confidence? Aside from these great personal qualities, Mr Dyens's knowledge of this industry is simply encyclopedic.
www.micheldyens.com
www.galle.com
Van Pul & Thieltgen: brand identity and website
Gallé create brand identity and website for Van Pul & Thieltgen, the Brussels-based executive search company.
Van Pul was an interesting brief, since the company brings into the executive recruitment market an approach that is very much that of a luxury brand, both in its values and its aesthetic approach.
The company was created by Mischa van Pul - ex-partner at Russell Reynolds and Heidrick & Struggles - and Catherine Thieltgen, an ex-Unilever executive now dedicated to business coaching.
Their added value lies in the complementary nature of these two services, providing not only a very 'boutique' and focused way of working that you just don't get from the larger players in this sector, but also an approach to human resources that is highly original and, well, unique: human resources as a raw material that an artisan needs to craft in order to deliver a made-to-measure 'product'.
This is how Van Pul approach the task of placing and nurturing the executives they take on: like a piece of the finest wood that needs to be crafted and shaped into a beautiful and useful item of furniture.
Our own treatment of the brand aimed to bring to the foreground this idea of 'craftsmen in executive search' as well as the added value of the two complementing partners, which is expressed rather well in the slogan - Heroes are Made - as well as the isotype: aside from being perfectly symmetrical and balanced, it actually looks like an instrument that might be used by a precision-driven craftsman.
www.vanpul.com
www.galle.com
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Luxury Briefing: Google vs LVMH
Google vs. LVMH, by Alexander Gallé, is a column published originally in Luxury Briefing's December 2009 edition.
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Google vs. LVMH
by Alexander Gallé
2009 will be remembered as the year luxury giants piled up the lawsuits against the internet giants. First came eBay, then Google.
In a recent column, I took eBay's side in the ebay vs. LVMH case, presenting eBay as a modern-day saviour of the free market system, the very thing that ensured the success of the luxury industry to begin with. Some readers responded that the basic flaw of the free market is that it only works in a 'perfect information' environment. Simply put, the point made is that true demand / supply equilibrium can only be achieved when consumers have all the information about the options at hand. This has long been the ground for accusations made against the advertising industry: that it distorts the information presented to the consumer.
In this column, I argue that what is true for goods and services is equally true for information: a free market in information ensures near-perfect information, much in the way that the free market ensures a near-perfect match between the supply of goods and services and what people actually want.
Let's imagine, for example, that a documentary comes out explaining some horrible method of producing everyone's favourite food. Having watched the documentary, opponents of the free market will immediately call for tough regulation to ensure new standards in food production.
What they are forgetting, however, is that the documentary itself is a product of free entreprise: a producer sees an opportunity to produce a documentary that everyone will want to watch - which means he will sell it to many TV channels and get a high return on his investment - and invests in getting the best possible information to make his case, invests in cameras, cameramen, etc. The documentary is made, lots of people see it and make up their own minds as to whether they still want to consume their favourite food. The market in everyone's favourite food is then adjusted accordingly. Problem solved.
Of course, not every product or service on the market deserves a documentary. Some things just require lots of press articles, or academic papers, or opinion pieces, or blogs, or other forms of cheaply-produced information. As the free market, via the web, supplies all this information, we find that some of it is very valuable, and some of it less so. A measure of information value is called for. That measure is relevance.
Enter Google: the search engine that ensures the highest possible relevance in relation to consumers' information requests.
A quick description of Google's services. Google has turned the web into a questions-and-answers medium. Users type a question in the form of keywords, and they receive an answer in the form of links to various websites that all claim to address the subject of enquiry.
Google's way of measuring relevance is two-fold.
First, the website publisher makes a claim in his website's meta-data that it is about a particular subject, by attaching keywords to it. Google measures the frequency of said keywords in relation to the website's actual content. If this frequency is high, the site is deemed more relevant.
Second, the website is linked to by other websites, by other people who find its content useful or interesting. Google values this type of relevance the way an academic paper is valued when many people refer to it in their own work: the more people quote you, the more important you become. According to Google, the more people link to you, the more important you become.
The usefulness of this method of sorting has proven itself by the very fact that Google became, without advertising or substantial PR activity, the preferred search-engine for hundreds of millions of web users. You only have to cast your mind back to the mid-to-late 90s - the pre-Google era - to see the value of this service, which is provided to the world in unlimited quantities entirely free.
Now, Google operates in a free market. Just as we do not expect bakers and butchers to provide bread and meat out of some charitable sense of duty to society, we do not expect Google to do this work unpaid either. Google's source of income is in the paid-for search results. Google makes no claim that this information is not paid for: the paid-for search results are separated, and highlighted in a different colour to the rest of the algorythm-generated content. It is, in other words, not Google undermining the integrity of the information by telling you this paid-for information is relevant to the keywords you entered, but the people who paid for it.
LVMH are now suing Google because some of the (mostly paid-for) search results come from vendors of counterfeit goods. But suing Google is suing the messenger, or the postal company, who delivered a letter with bad news. If LVMH is in the mood for suing, let them sue the people who paid for the keywords. If their claim is that there are too many to monitor, let them create their own search engine to track them all: the data is as accessible to them as it is to Google. They may not even need to do much of the tracking work themselves: if they think consumers are up for denouncing the vendors of counterfeit goods, let them create a simple peer-to-peer network that will enable consumers to report the vendors.
This will ensure that the information - the vital ingredient that ensures market recognition of the superior quality claimed by LVMH and other luxury brands - remains free-flowing and, of course, near-perfect.
www.luxury-briefing.com | www.galle.com
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Google vs. LVMH
by Alexander Gallé
2009 will be remembered as the year luxury giants piled up the lawsuits against the internet giants. First came eBay, then Google.
In a recent column, I took eBay's side in the ebay vs. LVMH case, presenting eBay as a modern-day saviour of the free market system, the very thing that ensured the success of the luxury industry to begin with. Some readers responded that the basic flaw of the free market is that it only works in a 'perfect information' environment. Simply put, the point made is that true demand / supply equilibrium can only be achieved when consumers have all the information about the options at hand. This has long been the ground for accusations made against the advertising industry: that it distorts the information presented to the consumer.
In this column, I argue that what is true for goods and services is equally true for information: a free market in information ensures near-perfect information, much in the way that the free market ensures a near-perfect match between the supply of goods and services and what people actually want.
Let's imagine, for example, that a documentary comes out explaining some horrible method of producing everyone's favourite food. Having watched the documentary, opponents of the free market will immediately call for tough regulation to ensure new standards in food production.
What they are forgetting, however, is that the documentary itself is a product of free entreprise: a producer sees an opportunity to produce a documentary that everyone will want to watch - which means he will sell it to many TV channels and get a high return on his investment - and invests in getting the best possible information to make his case, invests in cameras, cameramen, etc. The documentary is made, lots of people see it and make up their own minds as to whether they still want to consume their favourite food. The market in everyone's favourite food is then adjusted accordingly. Problem solved.
Of course, not every product or service on the market deserves a documentary. Some things just require lots of press articles, or academic papers, or opinion pieces, or blogs, or other forms of cheaply-produced information. As the free market, via the web, supplies all this information, we find that some of it is very valuable, and some of it less so. A measure of information value is called for. That measure is relevance.
Enter Google: the search engine that ensures the highest possible relevance in relation to consumers' information requests.
A quick description of Google's services. Google has turned the web into a questions-and-answers medium. Users type a question in the form of keywords, and they receive an answer in the form of links to various websites that all claim to address the subject of enquiry.
Google's way of measuring relevance is two-fold.
First, the website publisher makes a claim in his website's meta-data that it is about a particular subject, by attaching keywords to it. Google measures the frequency of said keywords in relation to the website's actual content. If this frequency is high, the site is deemed more relevant.
Second, the website is linked to by other websites, by other people who find its content useful or interesting. Google values this type of relevance the way an academic paper is valued when many people refer to it in their own work: the more people quote you, the more important you become. According to Google, the more people link to you, the more important you become.
The usefulness of this method of sorting has proven itself by the very fact that Google became, without advertising or substantial PR activity, the preferred search-engine for hundreds of millions of web users. You only have to cast your mind back to the mid-to-late 90s - the pre-Google era - to see the value of this service, which is provided to the world in unlimited quantities entirely free.
Now, Google operates in a free market. Just as we do not expect bakers and butchers to provide bread and meat out of some charitable sense of duty to society, we do not expect Google to do this work unpaid either. Google's source of income is in the paid-for search results. Google makes no claim that this information is not paid for: the paid-for search results are separated, and highlighted in a different colour to the rest of the algorythm-generated content. It is, in other words, not Google undermining the integrity of the information by telling you this paid-for information is relevant to the keywords you entered, but the people who paid for it.
LVMH are now suing Google because some of the (mostly paid-for) search results come from vendors of counterfeit goods. But suing Google is suing the messenger, or the postal company, who delivered a letter with bad news. If LVMH is in the mood for suing, let them sue the people who paid for the keywords. If their claim is that there are too many to monitor, let them create their own search engine to track them all: the data is as accessible to them as it is to Google. They may not even need to do much of the tracking work themselves: if they think consumers are up for denouncing the vendors of counterfeit goods, let them create a simple peer-to-peer network that will enable consumers to report the vendors.
This will ensure that the information - the vital ingredient that ensures market recognition of the superior quality claimed by LVMH and other luxury brands - remains free-flowing and, of course, near-perfect.
www.luxury-briefing.com | www.galle.com
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Luxury: the YouTube way
Luxury: the YouTube way is a column written by Alexander Gallé for Luxury Briefing's September 2009 edition.
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Luxury the YouTube way
by Alexander Gallé
My last column (Ebay vs. Luxe) got quite a bit of response, and a few people seem to have taken to the argument's main point: Ebay is a free market and everyone benefits from keeping free markets free, including the luxury sector, which is itself a product of that free market.
However, quite a few responses were made along the lines of "yes, it may be a product of the free market, but now that it exists it should be protected from the free market where and when the latter is proven to be a threat to the sector".
This response assumes that today's luxury industry is the best it can possibly be, that no evolution in this sector is possible, that it is the final answer to the long evolutionary path that has taken it to this point. The outlook is akin to the one that argues human beings today are the be all and end all, the end point of the biological evolutionary path that has led to our current DNA structure. Are there that many people who believe today's luxury sector is providing the best possible version of anything a consumer might possibly want or need?
Let's illustrate how things could be improved, and how the digital mindset might be applied to such a goal.
Take the beer sector. Let's make a hypothetical assumption that we know who produces the best beer in the world: the Belgians.
So, now, let's look at how the Belgians got there.
Belgium produces an immense variety of beers. At last count, there were over 500 different brands of beer in Belgium. Nothing special, you may say, plenty of industries have over 500 different brands of the same product. But here's where Belgian beer is different to other industries: with those 500 brands of beer come 500 radically different beers! There are dark beers, light beers, white beers, double-fermented beers, triple-fermented beers, beers using different types of hops and different types of grain, beers using fruit juice before the second fermentation, beers adding fruit at the end of the fermentation process, beers sold with the yeast still in the bottle, cloudy beers, clear beers, beers produced by monks in a monastery, beers produced by chemists in a lab, etc.
In other words: Belgium is the YouTube of beer.
To explore the metaphor a little further: hundreds of independent producers make something they're happy with. Then, they look at what everyone else produces, and consider improving their product, or changing it somewhat to attract a different public. Then someone new comes along, and produces everything in a radically different way, it catches on and becomes a viral hit, and the story goes on. Just like on YouTube's comments pages, the feedback and counterfeedback among producers and consumers is the source of endless conversations. Sure, every now and then, a few producers might say: "That's not beer, that's something else". But others simply reply: "Who cares? It tastes nice and people seem to like it". Nobody will ever say "Here's a law that says you can't add cherries to your grains and hops". Freedom to do what you want with what you have in front of you is the essential driver behind the sector's evolution.
Looking at the overall effect of such a mindset, looking at the overall quality that this "Web-2.0-avant-la-lettre" model has brought to this particular sector, there can no doubt that, today, it is the free-market-led digital environment that contains within it the necessary culture of openness and freedom, that is the lifeblood of creation, adaptation, and just-do-it-ism, which produces the fertile ground of new ideas that will surely produce the next best thing, ensuring the only constant luxury should really be about: quality.
www.luxury-briefing.com
www.galle.com
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Chêne Bleu: website and brand identity
Gallé launch website for the 'couture' French winemakers Chêne Bleu.
Branding Chêne Bleu and designing the website was an amazing experience, and a very steep learning curve.
In terms of brand communications there are, first of all, many deep and complex layers of information about the wine product itself and what Nicole and Xavier Rolet were trying to do with it. Talking about Chene Bleu means talking about:
- biodynamic wine principles
- altitude and its effects on sugar crystallisation
- pellicular maceration, a brand new technology that ensures perfect control over the skin contact i.e. contact between the skin of the grapes which contain the fermenting yeasts and the juice, which contains the sugars
- the use of propolis instead of sulphites to protect the vines against diseases, creating a rich and biodiverse eco-space for bees, insects and other bugs to actually thrive, ensuring the vines are stronger and more productive
- measuring the direction the winds come from; La Verriere is surrounded by forests, and overlooks Mont Ventoux, so different winds make a difference to the type of air the vines receive, which carries with it different pollens and perfumes from the various trees and plants
- developing methods for picking and moving small quantities of grapes from the vines to the winery to ensure the amount of time the skin is in contact with the juice is under control
- that, and much, much more...
Every single detail has been studied obsessively, discussed, intellectualised, brainstormed and worked tirelessly in order to get this amazingly complex brand identity known as Chêne Bleu, not just a wine, but a mission.
Aside from the product itself, there is a rich cultural package that comes with Chene Bleu. Ranging from medieval folklore, which two of the wines take their name from (Abélard and Héloïse), to the study of La Verrière's own history as a glassmaking atelier (Aliot was the name of the glass blower) and as a refuge for crusading knights before that...
I think we did a good job. The website is full of rich, interesting content, and the brand feels very consistent accross a range of media, i.e. on the labels, on the website, in the printed material, etc.
If you want to know what it's like meeting a team who are entirely taken over by the ideals of making the best possible wine, take a look at the Chêne Bleu website.
www.chenebleu.com
www.galle.com
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