Up close and personal in travel retail
You don’t go from a start-up, single-shop operation in 1991 to a powerhouse US brand within a few years and the subject of a successful majority divestment to the mighty LVMH before your first decade is out unless you are doing a whole lot of things right.
Before you knew it I was receiving LIVE gifts in appreciation of my efforts. Perhaps it was audience sympathy – they may have thought I was past my ‘cell by’ date – but whatever the reasons the livestream ranked number three in Hainan that day.
With me barely leaving my desk from 6am to midnight for several consecutive days due to needing to get our latest China Travel Retail Report eZine over the line, it has at times felt a rerun of one of many COVID hotel quarantines.
The bowl of chicken pieces had more bones than a 500-year old cemetery, so many it could have modelled for Kiehl’s in fact, but as we chatted we all agreed the offering was delicious.
Who knows when the next expression will be released. Or who will be the Cellar Master. Those thoughts do not concern Baptiste but instead enrich him. For his living memory in liquid form will endure through the generations to come.
This bird is much smaller than an eagle and much smaller than any of the large birds you would have heard of. But it flies faster. It’s an agile bird that flies 5,000 miles and… sees its prey miles away. That sounds a lot like us, right?”
“Namaste. In India we never say goodbye, we say hope to see you again.”
Isn’t this precisely what Avolta CEO Xavier Rossinyol had in mind when he talked about the fusion between retail and F&B in an interview with me last year?
If the crabs – carefully protected here by man as well as themselves – don’t want company, neither do you. This is a place to simply let go, to feel the weight of mental pressure and physical tiredness dissolve.
I have well and truly entered the stage of life – and certainly of career – where the mantle of ‘veteran’ is placed onto my shoulders and no amount of shaking is going to displace it. At least I still have the mental energy of a 12-year old.
I don’t so much have a bee in my bonnet as a whole hornets’ nest about the lack of Sense of Place in most airport retail offers. The SASCO shop shows what can be done with investment, imagination and a real understanding of a culture and its associated crafts and products.
As the pictures confirm, the American beauty powerhouse’s brands remain in big demand and I suspect that CNY 2024 has contributed very significantly to honouring CEO Fabrizio Freda’s pledge to return to ‘normalised’ stock levels in the very near future.
If I can’t be home for Valentine’s Day, I can at least send a selfie. Did you really buy two bottles of Cognac my wife asked?
