Karl Lagerfeld takes on London
Designer Karl Lagerfeld debuts first British store. Nina Dos Santos talks with the CEO of the designer brand.
First and foremost, I'm expecting that we excite the consumer,that is what we wanna do without our brand with whatever we do. In general, that's very important, consumer needs to love it.
You are the chief executor officer of this company, not the designer himself Karl Lagerfeld, you will have to manage this from a business point of view, what do you expect from this company revenue, how big can it get?
The revenue expectation or the revenue opportunity of this brand are massive. That are massive for a variety of reasons and the first reason is that the awareness of the icon of his owner Karl Lagerfeld is incredibly broad across the world. And he resonates to a very broad audience of consumers, very young to more mature age groups, men and women, so the opportunity is really a global opportunity and it's a huge opportunity.
One of the interesting thing about this base is so much of it is dedicated towards accesories, nose accesories, include * of the man himself,is that just a little bit ego typical?
No, actually not. First of all, I think Karl is the master and king of accesorization, so if you look at him, how he portrays himself is a lot of accesories with him. So therefore, it has also a great part of our store, but on the other hand also Karl is an icon. So when consumers come in, what they experience in our store, they want to become part of Karl Lagerfeld world and that means also that there is objects that he likes,that are fun as he is not taking himself too seriously.
It's not just the image of Karl Lagerfeld you have sold here, it's also the image of Karl Lagerfeld's famous cat as well, the cat, tell me about that, shoo pet.
Well, it features on a few items. It's a good fun iconic item, actually it's alomst a kind of consequence of the whole conversation as it is going on on social media about the shoo pet, so we say ok we have to give the consumer something. And then we have built a very funny but still sophisticated small cat around. Fortunately, people love it.