BUSINESS
HOW TO START A
LUXURY BRAND
Alexander Gallé is the creative director at GALLÉ, whose client list reads like an ABC of the world’s leading luxury brands, starting with Asprey,
Boucheron and Corum, passing through Fabergé and Jimmy Choo, and ending with Yves Saint Laurent. For the benefit of new brands
starting up in luxury, we meet with him to discuss the craft of designing and marketing luxury brands.
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I want to start with some background behind what you do. How did I’m not sure I fully understand the analogy. Tell me more...
you get to work so intensively in the luxury brands sector?
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It’s probably easier if I give you an example. When Italy unified in
If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would have probably told the mid-19th century, Massimo d’Azeglio said “We have made Italy;
you about our studio’s progression from designing campaigns for now we must make Italians.” You see, Italians didn’t see themselves
Hollywood, and how both the film and luxury industries are primarily as Italians. In their eyes, they were Genoese, Piedmontese, Tuscans,
involved in selling emotions to their customers. That is, they both Neapolitans, etc. So, the biggest challenge wasn’t to complete a
rely on the uses of enchantment to sell an idea. The only difference political vision, but a cultural vision. In fact, that vision took a long
being that, in the luxury sector, there’s physical proof that you’ve time to complete. It was only in 1974, in the middle of the “years
bought into the idea... when you buy the product. of lead”, that Giovanni Leone and Aldo Moro – Italy’s President and
Prime Minister – realised that completing it was necessary if Italy was
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to have a raison d’être. They needed people to buy into “brand Italy”.
And if I ask you today?
My father ended up working for them – he was a professor in
philology – and he became the first non-Italian to receive an Order of
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Merit, which is more or less the Italian equivalent of a knighthood.
Well, nowadays, I take a more wholistic view, and I draw from a
much broader cultural experience. Luxury brands don’t just sell one
narrative, the way a film does. They sell an entire narrative fabric. A
cultural fabric, if you like. So, starting a new luxury brand is pretty
similar to starting a new country.
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The Art of Luxury
Issue 37 2019
Now, philology was in its infancy at the time, especially the area of
semiotics. So, the idea of using the study of symbols, of narratives, of
culture, to create what you would call a “nation brand” today... that
was very radical, back then.