Brioni embarks on a bold plan to bolster its business
Now that Italian luxury menswear brand Brioni, is owned by French luxury conglomerate PPR Group (parent company of Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and other brands) – they are focused on expanding into the markets that show the greatest interest and promise of success today for Italian luxury brands. Doing so, Brioni has embarked on a bold plan to bolster its business in areas it has been lacking: company-owned retail, accessories and nontailored men’s wear.
They recently opened a new mono-brand store in Hangzhou, China within the Hangzhou Tower Shopping City. This store in Hangzhou, covering 100 sqm, follows on from three monobrand stores in Wuhan, Guangzhou and Shenyang, opened in January 2012, and follows the same design concept by the architects Ignazio Galante and Niccolò Menichini.
Brioni has also expanded its presence in America, with a new flagship store in Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive. The new Brioni store expands over 300 sqm and reflects the brand’s latest interior design concept. The structure of boutique pays homage to two great masters of Italian design: Carlo Scarpa, with his inspiration taken from the water and Carlo Mollino who played a crucial role in defining the urban scheme, regarding the celebration of works composed mirrors and his approach to architecture as structural art form.
The brand’s current retail network consists of 76 stores, 32 of them corporate owned, but its new retail strategy should swing the franchise-to-owned store ratio more in the “owned” direction. “You will see a very significant increase in the number of shops we own in the next five years,” said chief executive officer Francesco Pesci. Asked what the store count could be in five years, he offered, “Doubling it could be a little too ambitious, given how the economy is performing at the moment.”