Retail Confessions: Loro Piana
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Retail Confessions: Loro Piana
Loro Piana is more than a hundred years old, but became part of the zeitgeist around the time of the pandemic as the stealth wealth trend exploded. The characters of Succession, the HBO show based on the Murdochs, gave the brand a new platform and new customer base. “I saw it go from an empty store to a huge line of one percenters waiting to buy things at Loro Piana,” said a former employee of the Rodeo Drive store in Los Angeles who worked there during the pandemic. The brand hired more staff to accommodate the increased demand and steadily increased prices like the rest of the luxury industry in its quest to become the next Hermès.
The heightened interest in the brand was both good and bad for the sales staff. While more customers were coming into stores, not all of the new clients were the uber-wealthy sort who could drop $20,000 — if not much more — in one visit.
Ahead, the former employee talks about how they avoided the most difficult customers and how he sold $3,000 polos to some of the richest people in the world.
Who was the old client versus the new client?
The old client was the 1 percent that's been shopping with the brand forever. Extremely conservative and older. Very international. Everybody's Google-level — you know exactly who they are, what they do. They invented the cell phone or run a major AI health company. The new client is tech for sure. There's also the new client who's the shoe person. This was stigmatized because they were the people who were looking for the aspirational price point and didn't really care to understand the brand on a deeper level.
Tell me more about the shoe client.
The shoe client is the same person who's into New Bottega, or trends they've seen online, and they want to be part of it. You always hope that the person you're working with is your $20,000 sale — and then you get $1,000 sale in shoes.
Did they ever talk about the show Succession?
That’s the shoe client. In Rodeo Drive, you would get people who are doing the Hollywood tours, and they’re fans of the show, and they would just come in to see where the character would shop. That’s why we saw more than a 300 percent increase in our hat business. After the guys from Succession wore the black cashmere baseball hat, everybody wanted the cap and we went from having 20 caps in the store to hundreds.
How do you work with a client who spends $200,000 a year versus the baseball cap client?
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