How do you sell luxury to poor, impoverished people,” I asked my host and chairman of the world’s biggest luxury brand Louis Vuitton, Yves Carcelle, over drinks at the upscale FACE bar at Ruijin Guest House in Shanghai. It was the night before LV’s launch of its mega store at Plaza 66 across the hotel where we had put up.
I had landed in Shanghai barely 24 hours ago and was taken up by the glitz of urban China that reflected on its countless aluminium, glass and concrete structures. Its broad streets and elevated carriageways. Under neon lights across the city. Earlier, Rebecca, Yves’ better half, had raved over dinner at Ye Shanghai in XinTianDi, a hip and happening district, about how the face of the city had changed since she first set foot here in 1991. “You still had the rickshaws. And a million bicycles all over the city. That was Shanghai then. Today, all that is gone. Shanghai belongs to a different civilisation.”
I soaked in a slice of this new, prosperous civilisation on the night of LV’s big launch party, jiving in the company of 2,000 of the city’s elite where a thousand and five hundred bottles of Moet & Chandon were uncorked in the dazzle of glittering lights, to the beats from all-time favourite Beatles to the more in-tune Punjabi MC. But that was a gift- wrapped surprise that had to wait till tomorrow. Today, my mind was still wrapped up in the dirty and unwashed linen of third-world India, agonising over the ‘human face of reforms’ that our prime minister had made famous on taking office this summer. “How do you sell a $400 wallet to a person whose average daily earning is as low as $1.60,” I asked. Earlier this year, Louis Vitton opened its store in Delhi at the Oberoi, and a big splash has been planned for the November launch of its Mumbai store at the Taj Mahal, where a thousand more champagne bottles are waiting to be uncorked. The Shanghai glitter stood in the distance.
“You don’t sell luxury,” Yves responded. “People chase luxury products across the world because they excite their emotional needs. The way you decide to have it. The packaging. The selling ceremony. Luxury products are something that makes your heartbeat quicker. They make your dreams come true.”
For Indians chasing a dream at the end of a rainbow, the $3 billion luxury brand of Vitton has been the ultimate luxury statement for well over 100 years since the days of the maharajas. But for a country fed on socialist diet for 50 years now, still debating what it takes to lift a a quarter of its people over the poverty line, the LV sign should be as distant as the rainbow, which is perhaps why you don’t see its signboard on the high street, but in the confines of luxury hotels, where people as rich as the wine-loving, Havana-smoking media baron Aveek Sarkar and film star Ameesha Patel and Mumbai tycoon Adi Godrej can better appreciate the meaning of high life.
Or is it true that luxury is only for a handful?
“Not quite,” announced the International Herald Tribune on Thursday, running a four-column back page anchor: “India’s rich buy into a lifestyle,” quoting a world wealth report from Merrill Lynch that India has 61,000 millionaires, in US dollar terms. That’s quite a number. Small wonder then, Yves told me on the eve of the Shanghai bash that the sense of luxury had been always there in India though limited in its reach. Now it’s time for a big time celebration. A generation ago, Indians went to the West and settled down there, soaking themselves in the luxuries that the prosperous markets had to offer. The new generation that’s going out, is coming back home as young entrepreneurs. They are into software, textiles, pharma and research, building the future India. Bringing back with them the good things of life to a confident and prospering India. This is why LV set shop at the Oberoi and the Taj. Yet, look at it deeper. LV could be getting its numbers by offering luxury to those who can pay for it. What does it get for the average Indian? And before you have the likes of communist mascot Sitaram Yechuri screaming invasion from the rooftops, go, get out and take a view of Shanghai where Mao jackets have given way to Armani and Hugo Boss.
It takes a dream for a person to move ahead. And reinvent a civilisation to march with modern times. There are a hundred and one problems that still confront China. But there are a thousand and one dreams that are getting real every day. Because it’s brands such as Vuitton and Armani and Chanel are driving ordinary people to aspire to the good things in life. And in the process, creating a market for world-class brands that, in turn, are pulling in bigger investments and helping more people get better jobs. What else could be better than that? It’s time to shed our socialist baggage in favour of the Louis Vuitton handbag.
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