Last Week Today: The Business of Luxury Brands In Paris 💄👀💰
March 27, 2024
Welcome to my Substack where I share the best of my week. Think of this as a catch-up between friends with life hacks & advice sprinkled in. Grab your beverage of choice and let's get started ☕️
Highlight of the Week🔥
Bonjour de Paris (hello from Paris 👋🏻❤️). I’m writing this from my hotel room before I head off to our Stanford alumni dinner. I’m in Paris for spring break with 20 of my classmates on an academic trek: we’re visiting iconic fashion and beauty brands this week to learn about the business of ~luxury~ … no, seriously. Read more below.
What: Visiting the corporate offices of brands like L’Oreal, Cartier, Celine, Vacheron, LVMH, Maje, Sandro and learning from their teams about the business of luxury. Think: history, branding, R&D, pricing, retail experience, etc.
Why: This isn’t your typical Cabo spring break, my friends. We’re here to learn from these legendary brands. Why have some of them had 100+ years of lasting power? How are they innovating now in the digital age? Do they even want to innovate in the digital age? Hint: no, some of them don’t because they’re so steeped in tradition.
When: 4 days of our spring break at the end of March. I’m staying in France after this trek to hit some of the classics: Normandy, Musée D’Orsay, Versailles, and vintage shopping in the Marais bien sûr.
How: This is the Luxury Trek organized through Stanford’s Consumer/Retail club.
I’ll be consolidating my latest learnings in the next substack post - stay tuned! Here’s a little preview of what we chatted about in our L’Oreal visit which was AMAZING.
What’s Cooking 🥘👩🏻🍳
I couldn’t be happier with my latest podcast episode with Nicole Quinn, General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. She’s invested in iconic consumer companies like Calm, goop, Rothy’s, and Cameo and had great insights not only on building her career, but also being on the board for all of these companies.
A little behind the scenes: Roelof Botha connected Nicole and me after my episode with him (linked here ICYMI). It was such a perfect connection in that I’ve been trying to get more Stanford alums and more women onto my podcast. My main takeaway from this experience is to never be shy with your asks. People can’t help you if they don’t know your goals or interests — and the worst they can say is no. So just ask.
However, the thing Nicole said that resonated with me the most was to just start now. While she had great advice on how to think and plan ahead in your career, I think 90% of the work is just getting started. Take this podcast for instance. I could have waited until I found the perfect camera, mic, setup, guests, but then I would have never gotten started. By getting started and experimenting (read: trying and failing), I interviewed a ton of people I admire and learned podcasting skills and knowledge over time.
I hope you’ll love this episode as much as I do! Check out the full episode on both Spotify and YouTube.
What I’m Perplexed By: Art & Beauty Around Me
Am I a city woman or a nature girlie? Every time I feel that I’m done with “city life” and I move onto granola-bar-eating, dirt-on-my-hiking-boot, camelbak-carrying Cherie, I inevitably visit a city and fall in love with all the things that only a city can offer: the food, the art, the culture, the museums, the hustle…it’s addicting. London and Paris are two incredible cities I’ve had the pleasure of visiting over the last week.
On plays: In London I watched my first play in years: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (part 1 & 2) which was a 5.5 hour affair. It’s a 6/10 for me and I honestly wouldn’t recommend it even though I’m a huge Potter Head. The special effects are cool but it’s not worth the time and the money – sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
On museums: In London I visited the National Gallery which is a free art museum which houses a few Van Goghs, Van Eycks, and Monet. I highly recommend visiting if you’re in London (9/10 experience). In Paris I went to the Louvre and I honestly had a very stressful time (4/10). Even though we had purchased tickets online, we had to queue for an hour to even get in! Once inside the Louvre, it was a madhouse. Sure, we were there on a Sunday -likely high traffic- but even so, the crowds every where made the experience so stressful. With enough coffee, water, and food, I can wander museums for hours and hours, but the Louvre was not it.
💅🏻 In Case You Missed It: What I posted on IG
💥 Taking in hard truths + feedback
📚 Getting dinner with my professors
🎓 My biggest regret at Stanford
🏌️♀️ Golfing with the former Secretary of State
Advice from Luxury Executives
As part of this trip, we’re meeting with executives across these fashion and beauty brands. I’ve compiled a few of the quotes that stood out to me. I like these quotes because I feel that they apply to my life as part career advice and part life advice:
On adaptability and positioning of a career: “We’re a marketing company. I speak like a marketing expert even if I’m a scientist and my background is in biology.”
On the balance of scaling a brand: “Scale in the luxury business is complicated. We want to reach scale without diluting the brand value.”
On brand exclusivity and scarcity: “We have a value, not volume strategy” & “do not be ashamed of being small”
Good things take time: “The idea is NOT to hurry up” (referencing how a single high luxury watch can take 8 years to conceive and build. Sometimes art cannot be rushed).
One of the key takeaways for me on this trip is that not every business wants to scale. My background is in technology growth and retention. Coming from Silicon Valley and the GSB, my brain is wired to think through 10x’ing a business. In the realm of luxury, that might not be the ultimate goal. In the case of the top tier of brands like Vacheron Constantin, they thrive on being small batch. They make less than 100K watches a year as compared to Rolex which makes over a million.
I’m digesting all of the learnings still. I will report back once I’ve finished out this trek! Thanks for being with me for this ride ❤️
Meme Reminder
XO,
Cherie