IFCCI Luxury Symposium 2025: In conversion with Alexis Mourot, CEO of a Global Luxury Brand

First, happy to be here. Always a pleasure. Even if my team keeps telling me I'm not coming very often, it's always a pleasure being here. Yes. It's we have in India, it all depends how you qualify how many years have you been in India because if you ask Christian, it's about 45 years in his mind. He started traveling in India when he was 15 years old, so India was always part of the DNA of his DNA. Business-wise, when I joined Christian, he says 'I want to open stores in India, I want to open stores in India.' I said 'Christian, we have such a big other roadmap to do.' 'No, I want to open stores in India.' So we have been opening stores more than 15 years ago, and we have two stores: one in Delhi in the mall and one in the ornament circle close to here, again a choice to be in a historical building. So it's two stores. But I've been invited about 10 years ago to a luxury conference and everybody was, the question to the brand is 'Okay, why are you coming in India?' and everybody was saying 'Because we think it's going to be like China, like China.' And I came on stage and I said 'We don't even know. It's not the problem, it's not the purpose for us. The business plan is not what we want to do. We are in India because Christian loves India again and again, and we are doing so much the craftsmanship, many things we're doing in India that we cannot not have stores and presence in India.' We partner, and I will done with that, we are also partnering with Bain group. So I love your presentation from Bain. I don't know if the gentleman is still there, but we were, I love it but there was a mistake is that he didn't put us part of Bain group. So we partner with this wonderful partnership with Ashish and Sat.

Yes, obviously they are important and I want to go into some cliche. One thing that matters to us today at least to me is that clearly you understood that we love India but now I think India doesn't love us anymore. So what I said is that the consumer, the people, they love us but the government doesn't love us anymore. So that's a subject that the new regulation with the BIS especially on shoes is creating a big problem, a big issue for us. I'm not only talking about Louboutin. I'm talking about most of the shoe brands, luxury shoe brands that produce in Italy, and it's getting really complex to operate now. As we have a certain size, obviously we cope with this new regulation, but if you want to import new brands made in Italy in India, that's going to be very difficult, so for the consumer it's going to be limited choice. Also for us, what we believe is about obviously craftsmanship and bespoke shoes, and with this new regulation it's going to limit as we have to get control on each of the new styles, it's going to limit the choice and the possibility that we can bring. So I think for me it's a downside. We hope with the FIB and the EU regulation and the group that we can try to convince the government to change it because I think it's really a step forward instead of being a step backward. Sorry, instead of being a step forward. And you explained this morning that it's time consuming and very costly for a brand that wants to enter, and time consuming. But it clearly shows that they don't understand. We cannot unfortunately today, there's no possibility to produce the shoes that we are doing in India. So I understand there was alternative but there's no alternative.

We, I give you some, I mean two examples. First, go back to, I'm sure most of you heard about the NRF in New York. It's a retail summit that always happened in January, and which was interesting for the first year is that the main topic of the NRF was about authenticity and craftsmanship. I mean, picture that the digital world, you're in New York and they say that what works in the future is authenticity and craftsmanship, which is what India is. So I think somewhere for us is that we have been working and doing this craftsmanship bespoke shoes in India for many many years. Now what we need to do is to bring that to a certain level and to a more global level. So I think it's important because India that was probably the leading of this in the future is going to be much more in the center with the spirit of the Indian team. So first, it's much more for us moving to craftsmanship on the global way with a dedicated team to do more and more bespoke shoes. Secondly, I will give you another example which is always a tough example to give is the rise of comfort. So we're probably not known for being the most comfortable shoes in the world. So I love to tackle that subject. And I give you a little bit of history. In 2009 after the crisis, the shoe market was really small. I mean we can look with the old historic but it was a couple of percentage of percent of the total business. We were coming out of the 2008 crisis and there was a big increase in business, and the shoe brands got market share from 2009 to 2014. The biggest luxury brands, we were doing only a percentage of their business in shoes. Started to say, 'You know what? This is a market that we cannot let just to do shoe brand.' And it was the time where most of the department stores doubled their size for the shoe department. And they started to try to tackle us, but they were not successful. But they did something quite clever in 2018 or 19 is that they introduced the sneakers in the fashion show and that was a big change. The shoe brands didn't think that it was going to be a big threat. But it took a lot of market share at the beginning, and it has been reduced in 2022. So what left today is that the consumers are looking for comfort shoes. They are not looking to get sneakers because they move. But so we have to tackle that subject. And what did we do? If we look at today, 70% of our product offering is below 10 cm high heel when it was two years, I mean three years ago exactly the opposite. So yes, we are known to be the king of the red sole high heel brand, but we are now presenting and we have adjusted with the team where we are taking a lot of market share in the mid heel. So that's very important but people don't realize that, but that's something we change. Secondly, we also work a lot on comfort, and you know Christian was probably not his best, I mean his more important expression wants to empower a woman, and he said comfort is coming after, first she has to feel quite strongly that what she's wearing is a statement. But now we work with the team where we launch a new shoe called the Miz that has been completely restructured, and now we are happy to talk about comfort. So comfort is one thing that we address to tackle with the trend and the change in the market. So thank you for all the women. Yeah, thank you.

This was the Olympic games, the Olympic team. Yes, that was with the French Olympic team of the Synchronized Swimming. And I mean, let me explain. Can you ring the bell in 20 minutes if you don't mind, because it's going to be my favorite subject, so please make sure you control. No seriously, I will start with what I call the magical triangle. Why is it a triangle? Because in fashion there's three parts which are very important: shareholders, CEO management, and the designer. In most other businesses there is only the shareholders and the management team, but in our business the designer is as much important as the two sides, so there's this triangle with the three parts. So we can find a lot of examples, but my job, our job, is to make sure that this triangle, which by the way by definition is unstable, the minute you get this triangle working, there is one part of the triangle that disappears: a CEO is leaving, the shareholder the brand is sold to someone else, or the designer wants to go somewhere. We can take so many examples today of what's going on in the fashion brands that illustrate my topic. So bear with me a second. We have this magic triangle, and in the middle at the center of the triangle there is what I call the brand equity. So when you have a certain level, when you reach a certain level, you have to make sure that you understand what your brand equity is. You define your brand equity, that's work that is very important, and after that you put what we call a brand equity score. So what is it? I'm talking as a KPI because I think the KPI of the brand equity is much more long-term than the KPI of sales, you know, EBITDA, because that's short-term. But the problem is that most of the times the CEOs of the company are here for three or four years. Private equity, they want return. People are just looking at sales, but they don't look at brand equity. But the brand equity score, it's something that needs to be relevant and given to the shareholder because that for me was the best KPI to follow. Just quickly on the brand equity score, I just say how it works. You have four pillars to calculate it. One is the brand awareness. So what is it? Bu has visibility and you said it has, you love it. So meaning that, I mean sorry, you see it, you must see what it is, and sometimes this awareness is probably less action but the biggest one. That's the best example. You know when we spoke with Christian, we were doing it was the sixth show that we've been doing and nobody knew. I met a lot of people and say 'I didn't know Louboutin was doing shows.' I say 'It's the sixth one that we are doing' but nobody knew because before we were doing small shows. This was completely unexpected, and in terms of awareness it was really a wonderful success. Also the fact that it was unexpected, I mean you are a shoe brand, doing a presentation of the new shoes in a pool, that was quite unexpected. So the one pillar is the brand awareness. Second one is the brand desirability, and that's very important. It means, you know, buzzword, the buzz world. So it's different from awareness, it's desirability. It means 'I want this shoes. I want this one.' So what do we do with that? For example, we partner with John Galliano with Maison Margiela on a limited capsule edition and we did that for the couture show. That was a year ago, that was quite a huge success, but people says 'Can we buy it?' and we didn't even think about that, and John and Christian say 'That's not for sale, it was for couture.' So we just launch now a capsule collection that started one week ago with John and Christian, and people are looking for that desirability because it's the last collection of John and it's very two designers working together launching that. The third piece quickly, I only have 3 minutes 50 seconds. The third pillar is about brand territory. What is your territory of the brand? For us it's joyful, it's colors, it's fun. And the territory for customer is that I can relate to it. So it means they can relate to the territory of the brand. And what is it for example in India? It's doing the show of Sabyasachi, collaborating with Sabyasachi, bringing Sabyasachi to London for the first time with Harrods when Christian spoke with him. That's our territory. It's not fake. It's what is going on. It's a friendship between Sabyasachi and Christian. That's real. So that's the brand territory. The fourth one, which is the negative one, is what we call the brand danger zone. What is it? Be careful because it means that this is a negative impact and it's coming forward. It's what the people says 'I look down on the brand, I look down on having this brand.' I can give you many examples but I don't want to go on a negative one. But what I will say is that if you probably push too much distribution, the sales, the markdown, the outlet things like that, at least you dilute your brand. For us, one couple of important things on the danger zone is number one counterfeiting. So how we control counterfeiting because otherwise it's quite complicated. Secondly, it could also be a little bit of risky ambassadors that we don't want, but we are the brand, or it could be also over-sexualization. Be careful because it could be, we don't want to be too much. So it's important to be sexy but not too much. Anyway, with those four pillars and you have people doing it, what is important is that you calculate your score and you compare this score on a year to year, and you go to see your shareholder and you say 'This is what has been doing' because you could easily push the sales but kill or reduce your brand scoring. But sorry, went too long.

I give you again two examples. Again, not going to the cliche where we all the generation over 50 have been working a lot, probably not efficiently, but a lot. The youngest ones obviously are much more balanced in their work. So give you two examples. I call it the bottom-up instead of the top-down approach. And it came to when we were looking for someone to hire for CSR, someone came from a bigger company and she said, I said 'Where do you want to leave?' and she said 'Because they don't listen to us, the special committee, the steering committee, they don't listen to us.' I said 'Okay, with the HR we said this is what's going on. You're coming to the company and you are going to create your own committee, which is people that are between 28 to 32 in the company, 12 people, and you are going to create what you want to do for the CSR, and we will just say yes or no, but you are the driving force.' They felt so much committed to that that we got a lot of really good feedback. So that's a way to say to the youngest ones, 'You take control, you are the one creating the path of what you want to do.' We also apply that to a second one which is what we call a shadow committee, a steering shadow committee, where we ask some again, eight people that have been here for, again young persons, to work on special subject, and they work on this subject and they present that to the steering committee, but they are the ones working on that, and we have very interesting subjects that could be quite sensitive for the company, but they are the ones presenting that to us. So to answer your question, I think one way to probably address that is to give them much more power. Give the responsibility. Yes.