PARIS — Fans of Roland-Garros will have a new way to express their love of tennis thanks to a collaboration between the French Open and Parisian jeweler Fred launching Tuesday.
The jeweler is unveiling a capsule of Force 10 bracelets dressed in the terracotta and white palette of clay courts, the signature surface of the famous Parisian tennis stadium.
Available in white gold or a gradient gem-set yellow gold version, the bracelets are finished with the Roland-Garros shield and Fred signature with a terracotta-hued garnet between them on one side of the buckle. On the other, there’s a tennis ball motif. They will retail for 3,810 and 8,910 euros, respectively, from Fred and Roland-Garros’ e-commerce sites as well as a physical pop-up located within the Roland-Garros stadium complex for the two-week duration of the tournament.
Related Articles
While this isn’t the first time the French Open has collaborated with a luxury house — it called on Louis Vuitton to make trunks to house its trophies, produced by world’s oldest jeweler and goldsmith Mellerio — it’s the first time that a jeweler is setting up shop at the event.
You May Also Like
“Nowadays, especially at Fred, we believe that jewelry is to be enjoyed, to be worn — and why not at sport?” said the jeweler’s chief executive officer Charles Leung, for whom there was no more direct way to sum up the brand’s message of tenacity, sporting spirit and elegance than this collaboration.
Along with the unisex nature of the Force 10 design, the late founder Fred Samuel’s passion for sports — he and his sons were sailing aficionados — makes for a “very distinctive and different” identity from its competitors in the jewelry space, Leung continued. He described the capsule as the opening serve of a three-year collaboration between the French jeweler and the tennis tournament.
In 2022, there were more than 613,000 spectators at the Roland-Garros stadium in Paris for the French Open, but what Leung expects most out of the collaboration is “awareness of the brand and the association of Fred with sports in general.”
Exposure is just what Fred needs as it gears up for the next steps, hot on the heels of its first exhibition and well-received high jewelry collection that “helped elevate the brand” last year, according to Leung.
He feels that with the current global appetite for luxury, watches and jewelry in particular, brand success will come down to logistics and putting the product within consumers’ reach, but also an ability to impart a story and make sense to them.
For the latter, there are projects like the Roland-Garros collaboration or the brand’s retrospective. And for the former, the brand is breaking ground “in places that we have not yet been,” like Hefei, the capital of the Anhui province in Eastern China, and Zhengzhou, the capital of the east-central Henan province, which Leung deemed “the new hotpot for luxury goods in China.”
An additional eight stores are planned by the end of the year, including the May opening of a first store in Bangkok, in the Emporium luxury mall, and Fred’s second Dubai address in Mall of the Emirates, later that month.
In light of continuing economic and geopolitical uncertainty, overall there was a lesson in the reopening of China, which Leung said was that “after three years of hardship, people will still enjoy themselves [and] you just have to have a nice excuse — or a good reason.”