Hosted at the home of Bugatti, the Château Saint Jean in Molsheim, the “Luxury Summit” was designed as a platform to explore the current trends, but also to collectively plot the trajectory of the luxury sector. Special guests, including published luxury experts and CEOs of leading luxury brands, were gathered in the Château – once bought by Ettore Bugatti to host his customers and VIPs – to enlighten a room of global lifestyle media on the future of luxury through keynote speeches, panel discussions and a workshop. The compere and host for the day was author and leading expert in brand, luxury and culture, Rebecca Robins, who has long worked with the world’s most recognizable luxury organizations.
Professor Ashok Som’s opening keynote, Structural changes in luxury, outlined how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the mindsets of consumers and required luxury brands to adapt. The way users now engage with brands – as many were initially forced into complex, confusing and often time-consuming digital interactions – is shifting more rapidly than ever before and businesses need to reinvent the shopping journey so that it evolves to become a bold and unique multi-channel experience for customers.
Later, a panel discussion, Retail and Hospitality 3.0: redefining customer experience, fronted by Nathalie Remy, Partner at Bain & Company, Vincent Billiard, Managing Director of Hôtel de Crillon, A Rosewood Hotel, and Henri Foucaud, Co-Founder of Hapticmedia, took a deeper look into some of Professor Som’s points, identifying what makes a retail or hospitality experience ‘luxury’. A sense of seamlessness is key: smooth and harmonious transitions between different channels, different countries and different touchpoints for customers but with a very unique interaction each time.
The following panel, Tech as an ultimate customer relationship enabler, sought to examine how new technology and digital tools are enriching the luxury experience, with the help of Stefano Rosso, Maison Margiela Chairman and CEO of BVX (OTB Group), Daniela Ott, General Secretary at Aura Blockchain Consortium, Tony Pinville, PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Ali Walker, Chief Creative Officer for Asprey Studio. They explored how the digital interface can create ‘luxury’ experiences, with rarity and an exclusive members’ club feel that leads to physical experiences. Owners of Asprey NFTs, for example, are invited to exclusive events, or sent unique gifts, creating a full luxury experience that seamlessly blends between digital and physical worlds.
In the final panel discussion of the day, Mate Rimac, CEO of Bugatti Rimac, Daniela Ott and Manuel Mallen, CEO of Courbet, discussed Sustainability: the circular economy of luxury, including how brands deal with the fact that sustainability has become a core essence of the modern luxury world, from eco-friendly materials to full product traceability and how technologies can help brands adopt sustainable behaviors.
Ahead of the day’s closing keynotes, which would bring together all the themes of the day, PD Dr. Dr. Dominik Duscher, Regenerative Medicine Specialist, interacted with guests in a workshop focused on Longevity: health is the real luxury. His pioneering and thought-provoking research on epigenetics and the greater impact of cellular health has illustrated that genetics are not as set as was once believed, and changes to lifestyle can drastically slow cell ageing.
The challenge of summarizing the day’s exploration into the world of luxury fell to the final keynote speaker Dr. Hannes Gurzki, Luxury Expert and Researcher. His closing keynote established the parameters of what would always define a luxury brand, no matter the seismic shifts to come in the paradoxical world of technology. A brand must be rare but growing, innovative but full of heritage, physical but digital, global but local and data-driven but human-centric. In a world where AI can make things more efficient and predictable, it is the surprising human touches that will mark out special luxury experiences and products.
This insightful day continued with an evening celebration, beginning with an outdoor apéritif. This magical Bugatti moment was crowned with a live sketching demonstration from Bugatti’s Lead Designer for Sur Mesure, Jascha Straub, followed by the secret reveal of the Chiron Super Sport1 ‘Golden Era’, a Bugatti haute couture commission that represents the finest craftsmanship and the pinnacle of personalization offered by the team in Molsheim; a distillation of luxury today, incorporating heritage with modern techniques, thousands of hours of skilled work, artistry and engineering. This bespoke car, timeless and incomparable, was officially revealed later on August 10th.
Guests were then invited to walk to the Atelier where a fine dining experience carefully curated to embody the sense of the occasion took place. The menu and wine pairing provided by Paul Stradner, Chef of the two-Michelin-star restaurant of Lalique, Villa René Lalique, offered a taste of modern French gastronomy with local and global influences that perfectly encapsulated the day. Intimate, extraordinary, sustainable, traceable and delivered in a setting that was both exclusive and memorable – a luxury experience at its best, and one guests would never forget.
Images courtesy of Bugatti
