One key topic discussed during the call was the commercial impact of the designer debuts. A flurry of designers recently made their debuts at some of LVMH’s most significant houses: Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Michael Rider at Celine, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe. Meanwhile, Maria Grazia Chiuri was today announced as Fendi’s new chief creative officer and is expected to present her first collection for the house in February.
So how much of a commercial impact can these new collections have? “ The timing of each one is very different,” Cabanis said. Rider’s first collection at Celine will be in stores in November, with new bags already in stores, she said. At Dior, the men’s collection will start to hit the stores in January. “Then it’ll be gradual with some capsules for women, but probably more towards the Q2 than the Q1. We have not waited for that. There’s a very nice campaign that just started to rejuvenate Lady Dior [starring Mia Goth, Greta Lee and Mikey Madison]. The commercial effort that we did has led the Lady Dior to find its natural floor, and we are very optimistic about the re-ignition of the growth of the Lady Dior. In addition, the Dior Toujours handbag continues to perform very well.”
Cabanis added, “The way you need to look at it is really around gradual and sequential improvement rather than a giant difference. But we are very confident with the [designer appointments] decisions that we made. We had great feedback from the different shows, so we are now making sure that all this will be executed, and we’ll see when they will materialise in terms of top line.”
When asked about M&A and whether LVMH will still have more or less 80 brands in its portfolio next year, Cabanis declined to comment. In his will, Giorgio Armani instructed his heirs to sell a stake in the business to LVMH, L’Oréal or EssilorLuxottica first. On LVMH being specifically mentioned, Cabanis said: “We were very honoured, obviously, to have been named as partners. Other than that, I have no comment to make.”
Thomas Chauvet, managing director of Citi, wrote in a note titled “A ray of hope” that LVMH’s organic growth beat in Q3 “will likely set a positive tone for the upcoming luxury reporting season”.
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