TOKYO — Delvaux, the 185-year-old Belgian luxury label known for its top handle handbags, is celebrating the opening of its first freestanding store in Japan as part of its Asian expansion drive.
Delvaux opened its 2,476-square-foot store back in August but hosted its inaugural party Friday evening. The boutique, the brand’s largest to date, occupies the ground level of Tokyo’s Gyre Building on the main drag of Omotesando in a space formerly occupied by Bulgari. Chanel is next door.
The store is just the latest Asia-related development for the brand, which opened at a smaller outpost at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong in January and is gearing up to open a boutique at Shanghai’ s Plaza 66 mall in December. Stores in Beijing and Macau are also in the pipeline for the first half of next year.
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Although Jean-Marc Loubier, president and chief executive of Delvaux’s parent company First Heritage Brands, and Marco Probst, chief executive of Delvaux, declined to disclose sales figures, Probst said the brand’s sales in Japan are in line with expectations and the Hong Kong store “kind of tripled our initial budget.”
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Loubier said he’s pursuing a strategy of slow but steady growth of the brand’s retail network. He declined to quantify how many more stores the brand might open in the coming year but said it won’t be trying to keep pace with bigger, traditional labels. At the end of this year, Delvaux will have 19 directly operated stores and a few others run through partnerships.
“We don’t have a kind of quantitative discussion about our future,” Loubier said. “We don’t want to repeat the recipe of the last 40 years… but we need to be bigger.”
The executives said the Tokyo store, like its counterpart in Hong Kong, helps to solidify its presence in Asia. Delvaux counts 10 sales points in Japan in addition to the new flagship.
“It was not true 20 years ago. It is now. Japan is a tourist destination,” Loubier said. “It was very important for us to establish a referential store in Japan.”
Probst, who lived in Japan for three years before becoming ceo of the leather goods maker, said it has taken some time to get Japanese consumers acquainted with the brand but ultimately the high-quality craftsmanship and uniquely Belgian heritage of the brand is winning them over.
“It’s not a quick sale,” Probst said. “[But] this is something which Japanese clients are definitely interested in.”
Loubier and Probst said Delvaux is making an effort to differentiate each of its stores to offer shoppers distinct shopping environments. The Tokyo store’s interiors feature modernized reinterpretation of Flemish design motifs and the boutique also houses a round “boudoir” dedicated to small leather goods.
“Every store has its own face if you will,” Probst said.
First Heritage Brands bought Delvaux in 2011. First Heritage is part of Fung Investments, a private investment arm of the families of Victor Fung and William Fung, the controlling shareholders of the Li & Fung Limited. First Heritage’s assets also include Sonia Rykiel and Robert Clergerie.