Life After Lanvin

Luxury marketers, if you only follow one new brand… I strongly recommend you take a look at AZ Factory. Why? It has all the predictable ingredients a new brand needs for success right now:

1. A talented designer / creative director at the helm (Alber Elbaz, staging a comeback after Lanvin)

2. They have some provenance, linking them to respectable brands of the past

3. They are “digitally aware” and socially relevant

4. The designer cares about sustainability

5. They are inclusive from the start, considering all nationalities, colour and diversity in other forms including plus-sizes and gender choices

6. A powerhouse group backing the business (Richemont)

That’s not the key takeaway for me though, from a learning perspective. Watch their launch collection video (which was live-streamed, or maybe just some of it was) on Instagram and Net-a-Porter). It’s only 25 minutes long.

See how AZ Factory have ignored the predictable path they could comfortably take on a rapid path to success. Instead, my luxury brand friends, Alber and his team invite you to be one of their ‘Amigos’, joining in their fun journey. Yes, some of it is rather cheesy, but you do wonder when watching if that is part of the point? The raw format footage continues a trend to produce behind the scenes unpolished content that performs very well on the social media channels, and they’ve taken that to a new level, inviting you to join them behind the scenes for the whole journey. They’ve picked up the role influencers play in luxury consumers’ lives (more on that here) and started to act that out for themselves. I can see Alber’s team becoming the new influencers and tastemakers of the future.

The video shows the simultaneous launch campaign for their first capsule collection (that isn’t a capsule, they say, as they are designing in stories – just so socially relevant, aren’t they?!) and their brand which is very animation friendly – or should I say optimised for TikTok? My recent research highlighted luxury brands should focus more of their budgets on quality creative content and less on ad spend, and that’s what you can see in action here.    

Oh, and I mustn’t forget the exclusive distribution deal with Far Fetch and Net-a-Porter (also owned by Richemont…) to add that degree of exclusivity to build desire.

I’ll stop talking now and let you enjoy the show.

All images copyright AZ Factory