Gucci will open private boutiques for the world's wealthiest clients

What kind of clients should you invest in to consolidate your status in the highest range of luxury? The casual customers or the wealthiest of all, for whom spending tens of thousands of euros in an afternoon is not such an excessive expense? You can already imagine the answer - and so does Gucci, which has announced the opening of private boutiques (also called "salons") designed for la créme de la créme of the world's ultra-rich. «Nothing will cost less than $40,000», said François-Henri Pinault, «and it will go up to as much as $3 million for high jewellery». The move comes as a repositioning measure for the brand, which intends to quickly regain lost ground in pandemic, and restore that 14 percent drop in sales recorded in the last three months of 2022. Of course, Gucci's strategy also hinges on the new identity that Sabato De Sarno will devise for the brand, but since the new creative director will not present until September and therefore his collections will not arrive in stores until 2024, the brand will need not to lose an inch of ground in the competitive and fierce luxury market. The wealthiest customers, the VICs, are the most crucial market segment to not lose the advantage gained. Some of these private boutiques will be opened within the brand's pre-existing boutiques, while others, such as the one on Melrose Avenue, will be opened from scratch.

The idea of private boutiques has precedent in the brand's history. In the 1970s, Aldo Gucci had successfully opened first in Beverly Hills and then elsewhere the Gucci Galleria concept, a boutique for only very loyal customers who could access special collections and products by buying them in spaces organized like art galleries, among antique paintings and furniture. There are several factors that determined Gucci's desire to pursue an even higher positioning in the market. It is no mystery that, after the lockdown, products conceived under Alessandro Michele's direction had found less success because of customer brand fatigue. But according to BoF, the issue is also about the crucial question of the marketing strategy followed during the complicated pandemic years: if in 2021, for example, Louis Vuitton invested 890 million euros in marketing (Dior also made investments of this magnitude), Gucci spent only 487 million. That took Vuitton's sales to over 20 billion in 2022, a figure unprecedented in the industry, where Gucci had to reorganize to catch up even though at the announcement of Kering's new strategy, focused on product and «iconic codes» as Pinault called them, and since the announcement of De Sarno's appointment, the brand's shares have returned to more than healthy levels. There is no doubt that markets and customers look forward with confident anticipation and even some trepidation to the unveiling of De Sarno's "new" Gucci-for this year, however, it will be necessary to focus on the brand's more affluent and loyal clientele to remind the world that seasons may change but Gucci will always remain Gucci.