Louis Vuitton will unveil its revamped and expanded Matsuya flagship in Ginza next week, underscoring its long-term commitment to the Japanese luxury market, which is showing signs of a rebound.
"We’ve never ignored Japan, even with the rise of China. Japan has always been a top market," Michael Burke, chairman and chief executive, told wwd in an interview a day after the French brand held an event here at the Tokyo Station Hotel to celebrate the opening of its "Timeless Muses" exhibition honoring notable women such as Catherine Deneuve and Kate Moss. "We always said we don’t think you can exist in the luxury world if you’re not successful in Japan."
The Matsuya store, which will reopen Sept. 14, is the brand’s top-performing store of its 58-store network in the country. Dating back to 2000, the store originally covered 16,146 square feet. It is gaining a third floor and will cover an area of 20,451 square feet, carrying the same mix of leather goods, accessories and ready to wear but also the brand’s new Ecriture range of pens and stationery. The revamp, which includes a new building facade, was several years in the making, Burke said.
Burke said the company’s retail distribution in Japan will remain largely in tact for now, although it may relocate some stores to better positions. For example, Vuitton is also preparing to open a new location in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district opposite Isetan to replace a sales point lost when Mitsukoshi closed to make way for Bicqlo, a hybrid Uniqlo/Bic Camera store.
The executive said Vuitton’s business in Japan started to pick up in a "significant" way at the tail end of last year, although he declined to quantity by how much or discuss sales figures. He said consumers here, like in the rest of the world, are responding to Vuitton’s shift in focus to high-priced leather handbags.
Perhaps more significantly, Burke noted that the profile of the Japanese consumer base and his or her spending patterns has changed over the years. Japan’s vast middle class of occasional and entry-level luxury consumers propelled luxury market growth in the past but that is not the case anymore, he explained. The "office lady" demographic of women who live at home and save up for months to buy a designer handbag is diminishing, he said.
Burke noted a growing class of "higher-end" consumers who are eager to spend the wealth they have amassed in fields like entertainment, software development and start-up companies. Often these customers are self-employed, he added.
LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton‘s leather goods division saw its first-half sales through June 30 grow to 4.71 billion euros, or $6.17 billion at average exchange rates for the period, from 4.66 billion euros, or $6.06 billion, the year before. Japan accounted for 13 percent of the total.
source: wwd