Ahead of the opening of Bucherer’s Time Machine showroom in New York, the group’s global chief commercial officer Patrick Graf told me that the spectacular flagship would learn from the brand-building skills of the world’s greatest watchmakers and other luxury maisons.
I don’t think I gave that description enough thought at the time, but it has been nagging away at me recently because I am seeing more and more evidence of retailers applying lessons from the most successful brands through brand ambassadors, sports sponsorships, collaborations, lavish events and so on.
The education is not a one-way street. Brands are learning from retailers every day as well.
This theory applies best to the biggest retail groups like Bucherer, Watches of Switzerland, Wempe and Signet Jewelers, plus megastores like Harrods and Selfridges, because what global brands do requires very deep pockets.
For example, the biggest brands need flagship stores in the very best locations in the world.
Our upcoming book on the World’s Greatest Showrooms, which includes examples from small family-owned multibrands up to global monobrand flagships in Paris, London and New York, is illuminating on this topic.
Very few retailers today are investing as much into global or national flagships as the brands.
Bucherer is one, and has incredible flagships in Switzerland and now New York.
Watches of Switzerland has 155 Regent Street in London, but currently lacks a blockbuster store in the United States in a AAA location.
You could argue this is for good reason, because many branded boutiques in ultra-prime locations are so expensive to run that they struggle to make a profit.
This, however, is the point I am making. If retailers are going to raise their profile to the level of brands like Rolex, Cartier or Bulgari, they are going to have to act like them.
That might mean losing money on a flagship that is the very pinnacle of what a retailer can achieve. Like the brands, they can allocate this loss to marketing or a capex expenditure amortised over many years.
A flagship says everything about a brand, and retailers must become brands — at the very least — of importance to their local community. National or international retailers have to be countrywide or global mega brands.
Retailers can have more than one flagship, but one must stand above all others as a testament to everything they can deliver. That might be in Manchester, Leeds or Glasgow, but a global flagship would invariably be in London.
The most successful brands today insist that their retail partners add provable value that they alone could not achieve in the same market. If not, they are jettisoned.
This is a constant tension that is good for the industry as a whole because it drives up standards and rewards success in a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest.
The direction of travel right now is that retailers need scale and ambition to hold their own at the negotiating table with these brands, and that is why I expect more of them to open spectacular flagships in the coming years.
Even in the most competitive shopping streets and malls in the world, retailers must be ready to go toe-to-toe with the brands’ own greatest showrooms.
