Luxury Retail and Digital Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2Do Luxury Products Still Sell in Stores?

If you control your distribution, you control your image.

–Bernard Arnault¹

The question: ‘Are luxury products still being sold in stores?’ as it appears in the title, seems to have an obvious answer. Of course, yes! For these products are intended for the end customer, and apart from cases where they are delivered directly to their doorsteps, they have had to obtain them somewhere, and so, one would imagine, this would be from a shop.

The question could also be asked differently: Does the client buy his product in a store belonging to the brand, or belonging to an independent intermediary who can apply its own criteria of performance and quality? Or, formulated in another way, does he buy his product in a multi-brand store or, on the contrary, at a sales point dedicated exclusively to the brand?

We should also distinguish between two different situations: when a client buys a Cartier watch from Galeries Lafayette, he knows he is making a purchase at a sales outlet that does not belong to Cartier, but if he makes the same purchase at an exclusive and single-brand Cartier outlet in Bangkok, he feels like he is ‘at Cartier's’, when he is in fact at an exclusive distributor of the brand for Thailand. Americans have a simple way of distinguishing these two cases, as we explained in Chapter 1. They speak of either Directly Operated Stores (DOS), i.e. a store ‘directly managed by the brand’, or Third-Party-Operated Stores (TPOS) ...