Why This Luxury Founder Tells Customers NOT to Buy – Marc-Antoine Barrois Strategy Briefing

[00:00:00] Retail today is very efficient and it forgets about emotions where everything I want to live in a store is emotions. Everything I want my clients to live in my stores is emotions. I feel being disruptive for this reason but I wish most stores were interesting the same way our stores are interesting for clients to be. Because it's not only a question of a purchase experience, it's just a question of the memory that is going to stay in your brain. Online gets a lot of the buying power and even though our clients they can buy online

[00:00:28] but they keep coming back to our stores. And sometimes they don't buy the first time and they could buy online the second time but they desire to come back to the store because they've lived in emotions, they've lived a souvenir they want to repeat. You're listening to Retail Disrupted, a podcast that explores the latest industry developments and the trends that will shape how we shop in the future. I'm your host, Natalie Berg.

[00:01:04] What would retail look like if the goal wasn't to sell but to make customers feel something they'd never forget? Today's guests have built four flagship stores on that exact belief. In this episode, you'll hear from luxury fragrance founder Marc-Antoine Berrois and architect Antoine Bouillot. They're going to tell us why they think modern retail is globally efficient but emotionally bankrupt. You'll learn how art becomes infrastructure, why their sales associates are trained to tell customers to leave the store without buying,

[00:01:33] and how they're building intimacy at scale, right down to the handwritten notes that are inside every online order. This is Retail Disrupted. Marc-Antoine and Antoine, welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to have you both here. You both have very interesting backgrounds. You both started out in this industry at a very young age.

[00:01:58] Marc-Antoine, I know you worked with Jean-Paul Gaultier at Hermes and then eventually went on to launch your own eponymous brand, your Maison de Couture. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and the journey so far. Well, the journey has been interesting. I started studying fine arts, then went from fine arts to textile and fashion.

[00:02:23] And yes, I had a chance to work at a very young age with Dominique Sirot from the right hand of Hubert de Givenchy, then with Jean-Paul Gaultier. So learning the basics with great masters. And then it came to time to launch my own Maison de Couture, to find the way to bring something new to this world and eventually to make something a bit more ecologic than it was before.

[00:02:51] So back to make-to-measure and creative pieces for people who would not waste their clothes and create only bespoke pieces they would want for themselves. It started all about creativity and service. And the journey continued into designing more and more, into jewelry, into ceramics, into... And then it came 10 years ago into perfumes.

[00:03:17] And since then, the brand kept growing and growing. And I kind of forgot I was an artist. But it got back to me and I'm focusing a lot on artistic projects, but still continuing couture, perfumes, jewels, everything. Amazing. And Antoine, you've designed a number of Marc Antoine's boutiques, which we will come on to in a second in Paris, London, New York. So we're going to come on to that in a sec.

[00:03:44] But first, tell us a little bit more about yourself and the creative partnership. I come from fashion, actually. Marc Antoine, I worked a lot for Issey Miyake for a long time. Started at 16 with him. It was even more precoce than I am. Wow, teenager. Yeah, exactly. But that was amazing. I did a lot of art direction for luxury brands.

[00:04:09] And then I did a switch into art and design and architecture, interior architecture. And I always focus on my work on how to create meanings in what I do in terms of design, not just a free design that is my head and has no purpose. To have, you know, a sense. And it's always complicated with clients to try to explain, try to negotiate.

[00:04:38] So it's always very complicated. And Marc Antoine called me six years ago, something like this. The day of his birthday, six years ago, yes. So, yeah, my birthday is in two days. So pretty much six years ago. And saying, OK, I have a boutique project. Could we have a meeting? And we didn't know each other really well. And we instantly clicked creatively.

[00:05:04] We had met each other once, but it had just been like, hello, I'm going, oh, nice, I just arrived. We have seen each other, but we've not been able to talk. Yeah. And so, and it was extremely refreshing to find somebody which has the same mindset, creative mindset, which is honestly very rare. I feel from my career, it's quite rare to find people which you really link creatively.

[00:05:32] And it's very interesting that we have the same vision on a lot of things. And it's interesting what Marc Antoine does in his company is really to make sense of everything, every single element he does, either couture, jewelry or perfume. And so it's extremely exciting to work with Marc Antoine because we have the same, the same way of seeing things. OK, so that's super interesting.

[00:06:02] We're going to, you've already touched on some things that I want to come back to. But I guess if we just sort of zoom out for a sec, the name of the show is Retail Disrupted. I'd love to know from each of you, what does disruptive retail mean to you? And as a kind of follow-up to that, do you consider yourselves disruptors? Personally, I do. I wish I was not. But I feel retail today is more and more, you have some exception now, but globally very efficient.

[00:06:33] And it forgets about emotions, where everything I want to live in a store is emotions. Everything I want my clients to live in my stores is emotions. So I feel being disruptive for this reason, but I wished most stores were interesting the same way our stores are interesting for clients to be. Because it's not only a question of a purchase experience.

[00:06:56] It's just a question of the memory that is going to stay in your brain when online gets a lot of the purchase buying power. And even our clients, I believe they can buy online, they can buy on our websites and everything. But they keep coming back to our stores. And sometimes they don't buy the first time and they could buy online the second time, but they desire to come back to the store because they've lived in emotions. They've lived in souvenirs they want to repeat.

[00:07:26] So in that way, for me, I feel being disruptive into retail today. Disruptive into retail the same way I'm disruptive into couture or even the way to do retail in a sustainable way. We are building stores to last, not thinking, oh, it's never been the point where we were saying, oh, in any way in five years we're going to redo the design. When so many brands, they refurbish and refurbish and refurbish all the time.

[00:07:54] Like we do refurbish, but that's changing the carpet, which is light gray and that has been stained. Oh, it's painting again, but it's not changing the funitures. Furnitures in our stores are made of noble materials, glass, sculpted woods, plain woods. It's made to last. It's made to be there for a long time. At no point I could have accepted to put plexiglass in our stores, for example.

[00:08:23] So in this way, too. So it's got to reflect your brand, I suppose. Sorry? Your store has to reflect your brand. Yeah. It has to reflect the brands, my DNA, and my values. And a state of mind, I think. And you see, for me, I think what we do in terms of retail is very disruptive because we're not focused really on selling.

[00:08:49] You know, the idea is not to push, push, push, sell, sell, sell, and how to make it, you know, like we sell more. So like Marc-Antoine was saying, we focus on creating an emotion, creating an experience in that store for people who buy and for people who don't buy. And I think, in a way, it's disruptive because we don't see it as let's try to, you know, sell as much as possible. Yeah.

[00:09:16] I recently was in our stores in Rue du Foubault, Saint-Henri. This was on Wednesday afternoon. Like a lady comes in and I welcome her and she doesn't recognize me. And I serve her and I ask her what she wants and what she's looking for. And if she knows the brand, and I'm telling her a little bit about the brand, she likes what she likes in terms of perfumes. I get her to try two fragrances and she says, any more?

[00:09:45] I'm saying, well, from what you've told me, like I can make you try the others on papers, but not on your hand because it's everything but what you like. So it's fine, but take your time. If you have a crush, you'll be back. And just enjoy. I can tell you more about the brand. I can tell you more about everything. And I discussed with her, but without trying to push any sales. And at some point she was like still wondering if she wanted a Ganymede or a Tilia, which she had on both of her hands.

[00:10:14] And none of the two, she was hesitating. And I told her, I said, I don't know, but if you want to take the two, just go away and you'll get back at some points if one of the two is meant to be for you. And she told me, wow, you both is not going to be very happy if you do sales like this, because if I go, I might not be back. So I told her, I said, no, I'm my own boss.

[00:10:41] And that's the way I want my retail sales associates to be, to be advisors, not to be selling only. It's the way I want to do things. There's no reason for me to sell you a perfume that you don't need. If it's for you or if it's a shirt or if it's a jewel or anything, if it's meant to be for you, you know it and it's calling you. But if it's just to buy something because you entered and you felt guilty, you should not. And it's going to stay on the shelf.

[00:11:08] It's too much carbon footprint for nothing. Yeah. Yeah. It's not just a customer who maybe, you know, won't come back or is less loyal or isn't happy with the transaction. But also there's the environmental waste as well, which is a good point. I love that. Yeah, I think that's that does feel like the way that things are moving in retail. You have to provide that kind of service to the customer and you have to really go above and beyond. And obviously that's a core component in luxury.

[00:11:37] But I think when we look across the wider retail sector, I think that's becoming an expectation. That's kind of very personalized service and experience. You know, customers just won't tolerate mediocre. They really do expect retailers and brands to kind of roll out the red carpet for them. And so really interesting to hear that story. I guess we should probably just clarify or kind of paint a picture for our viewers and listeners about your flagship stores, because they are genuinely immersive experiences.

[00:12:07] And I think in especially in luxury, we know that the experience can be just as important as the product, you know, potentially even more important. In your flagships, you get all kinds of unexpected finds, giant ant sculptures, abstract art that's suspended from the ceiling, comic book murals. Like it's a really interesting space. So I'd love to know what role does art play in the customer journey? And why is that important to your brand's identity?

[00:12:35] Well, for us, everything's pretty much linked. And in stores, when we created the first store, so what's funny is the stores are very wide differences. And for us, we like to see them like a family. Everyone kind of looks the same, but at the same time, everyone has a very strong identity. But still, you can still feel everybody's there. And we wanted clients to feel at home.

[00:13:03] So when you see a store in Paris, in London, or in New York, they have the same key elements. The DNA is the same. But at the same time, we created pieces which are very identified to each store. London has a giant blue bunny, giant, it's like nearly four meters high, from the ceiling looking down over the perfume with a big ear near the perfume.

[00:13:31] The first store we did is tiny, it's nine square meters. It's very small, but it's in a beautiful gallery in Paris, an historical monument gallery, and has giant snails that kind of came and took over the stairs. And there's like, what, 30, 50, 50, 50 of them. So it creates something very different. And again, we come back to the emotions.

[00:13:59] When you're in this tiny store, very often you see kids on the window looking at the snails and being quite amazed. And this really tells something that I wanted to say at first to Antoine when I met him. I said, there is one thing. It's like, not everything is about the products. I didn't want the products to be on the walls. I wanted the walls to be.

[00:14:24] And actually, the walls are covered with a glass with painted clouds behind it, which figure out to be my blurry imagination when I start creating something, which I wanted to bring people in my mind. And there's this concept that I like with my retails. It comes from the movie Inception, where you jump from one dream to another to another.

[00:14:51] And my idea is always to try to get people to jump from the 21st century to another dream, where they can just the time of a visit or the time of a little afternoon, drinking tea with a retail associate or anything, they can tend to forget about this world out there and just enjoy something that is different. And if it's not mesmerizing, contemporary art helps people to get out of their world.

[00:15:19] And when you're in New York and you're sitting on a sofa that looks like it's a sofa that makes 12 meters long. A bit more. Or more because it reflects into the mirror. And on this sofa, there is like an orangutan playing with a perfume. You just feel you're in another reality. And that's where I want to bring people. Perfume is about another reality. Fashion is about another reality.

[00:15:45] Do you need a beautiful shirt or do you need a beautiful perfume? It's not a vital need. It's an emotional need that you need because you've spent that moment. And in this moment, you figure out that this shirt was the best shirt you could buy. And it's true. You really have this thing, whatever the size. So the first Paris one is nine square meters. And New York is a bit more than 300.

[00:16:13] So it's very widely different. Yeah, 1,000 square feet. Yeah. And but you create something. You create you're inside a bubble, you're inside the world, even the tiny one. And it creates something quite strong. Yeah. And I agree. I think that's so important, especially as our world becomes more digital, as AI becomes embedded in our everyday life.

[00:16:39] You know, I think as consumers, we want something that we can't get from a screen. Right. Like online shopping is fantastic. There's, you know, nothing against it. But I think it's everything cyclical, isn't it? And I think being able to live a brand and live that experience and that retail theater is just going to become more important. And that actually kind of is a nice segue, I think, to another thing I wanted to bring up with you both, which is the campaign that you launched when you opened in New York.

[00:17:08] The New York openings, really, was it last month, was it? It was a month ago. Yeah. Yeah. So hot off the press. But I wanted to ask you about the IRL is better campaign, which is sort of an anti social media activation, kind of pushing back against all the noise. So can you tell us a little bit more about it and how customers have responded?

[00:17:30] Well, it's funny that this campaign came from me at the beginning because I'm addicted to my phone and I'm always with my phone in my hand, taking pictures, getting inspiration and and writing words and everything. It's like I don't have a book where I write everything. I put everything on my phone so I could feel sometimes disconnected from reality. But anyway, I suffer a lot from social networks.

[00:17:53] And when when I met Fred from Fred and Farid agency, as I told him, you know, I don't know what I'm doing, wasting my time talking to an agency. I just don't want to do any marketing. It's not interesting for me. Look, my Instagram, it's black and white because I just feel Instagram is so fake. It's a it's a filter on reality.

[00:18:16] Like if you basically my point of view on Instagram, if you look on Instagram, you always see some people that are richer than you, happier than you, always on vacations. You have everything to be to be sad. And reality is not about that. Reality is about is about smiling to your friends, enjoying moments, enjoying moments with people you meet. And and I'm telling him there's no way I'm going to change that. I know it's not good for business to put everything in black and white because the algorithm doesn't like it.

[00:18:44] But it's me and I'm not going to change that. And he heard me and said, oh, I'm not going to ask you to change who you are. But that's interesting because why don't you do something like a blackout on your Instagram at some points and just invite people to come to meet you in your store because it's better in real life.

[00:19:04] And then that was the beginning, the starting point of the campaign of on thinking about this campaign and thinking, yeah, it fits straight to my DNA and to the reason why I'm doing retail. If I'm doing retail, it's because I want to meet my clients. I want my clients to meet the same retail sales associate every time and to create link with them. And and and I see those like if we talk about New York, the sales associate from Bergdorf Goodman, they have their own clients which are never going to be the clients of the boutique. It's two different type of retails.

[00:19:35] And retail is not only about this one thing that needs to be said about retail. It's not only about the retail concept. It's before the retail concept. It's about humans. It's about the people. Yeah. And just to build on your point, I think authenticity is so important. And, you know, you as the founder and being true to your values, I think that and having a purpose, all that is just becoming kind of table stakes today, because I think there is this growing backlash against social media, against AI.

[00:20:04] You know, it's all this technology. I mean, I'm not anti-tech by any stretch, but I do think that, as I said, it does drive people to want something authentic and that connection and to kind of live in the moment and be present, I think is becoming more important.

[00:21:03] So, you know, I think that's the thing. You know, I think that's the thing. I think that's the thing. I think that's the thing.

[00:21:29] I think that's the thing. I'm happy you're going to try Tilia, for example. It's all about bringing some humanity, even on the online sales, is to be as close as possible.

[00:21:57] And one of the things I really hate and which I'm happy we don't have is when you make an order on our website, people receive an email from Laura or from Anne or from Benjamin, and it's not a do not reply email. They can create a link. Like sometimes Laura receives messages from clients who have received that saying, oh, thank you. It was your attention was super good and starts talking, like discussing with some clients. It's even online sales for us is treated as retail.

[00:22:27] And I think sometimes it is those really small, but small things that can make such a big difference to customers from a service point of view, from an experience point of view. And ultimately, that's going to make them more loyal. Especially the do not reply. Like there's nothing you hate more than having received an email, like you receive a thing and it's do not reply. How do I contact those people? I made a double order or I made a mistake on my order. How do I contact them? I have not, I don't, I don't know how to do it.

[00:22:55] First, on business hours, they can reach them by phone or they can reach them by email just by answering the first email they received saying, oh, we well received your email. Feel free to let us know if you have any issue. You have my email now. Yeah. Problem solving is so important. And, you know, being able to solve problems immediately and especially I think in a luxury setting. But Antoine, I'd love to ask you just kind of on the topic of friction, but going back to stores.

[00:23:20] I think a lot of architects and designers are trying to create spaces right now that cut friction. And Marc Antoine, you talked about this at the beginning of the episode. You know, it's all about kind of speeding up the path to purchase, reducing dwell time, getting people in as quickly as they can. Now, obviously, it's going to vary greatly across retail. But there is generally a move to kind of, I think, make our physical spaces convenient, easy, digitized.

[00:23:47] And I think there is there's obviously a point and maybe that point differs depending on the sector, depending on the brand. But there is a point where seamless starts to feel a bit soulless, I guess. But obviously what you're doing is the complete opposite. Right. So you're creating an experience, as we've touched on, and you really you want people to stay. Okay. So what is the architectural toolkit for that? So, like, what are you doing spatially to change someone's pace when they when they walk into a store?

[00:24:16] But you see, for example, New York and New York, we have two floors. And the first floor is it's very big. And so you have a small window, actually, it's in Soho. So it's very classical old Soho building windows. Very, very nice. We loved it. It has a very New York feel. It has, you know, the fire escape on top. It's like super, super New York. But it's quite small in terms of size, in terms of width.

[00:24:44] But then we have a giant space that ends up at the end with a glass roof and, you know, a little courtyard thing. So it's very big. So what we did is to actually cut the space physically in different areas. So when people come and see the window, they're going to see a small space.

[00:25:09] They're going to see a space which is actually very manageable, which is not scary to walk in. I mean, you don't enter this giant space. You enter this kind of small boutique, elegant boutique like this. Of course, with extremely nice people welcoming you. And you have the main thing, which is the perfumes. You have the candles. You're going to have the soaps.

[00:25:34] So it's a small, smaller space, which you feel very comfortable as a client. But then you're going to see that suddenly there's something else that you didn't see from the window. That on the edge, you can see something. So you have a tendency to go and try to see. And then here we have an amazing kind of nest in wood done by a Lithuanian artist, which is suspended.

[00:26:03] And this ends up to a giant wall all in mirrors, which actually shows you a little bit of what's behind that structure. And then suddenly it's like, so you have the first thing. I was like, OK, it's a nice little store. And then, oh, that little store is, oh, there's something else. So you turn the corner. And then from the corner, you see something else. It's like, oh, you have a third space. And suddenly you have something extremely, it's a little bit like a treasure hunt. Like, oh, there's something cool.

[00:26:33] Oh, look, there's, you see, like Alice in Wonderland. Oh, there's a little door. And I go in. And then so you have this walkthrough that makes it not boring. It's not like you enter this giant space and that's it. You buy your product and you go.

[00:26:51] And also the idea for us, and it's quite, it's easy for, in our stores, but it's complicated also for distributors, is we want people to sit down, to have a nice experience, to have a calmer experience. What we don't want, really, is the client has said, oh, I want Ganymede and can I go really fast? Will other people take time?

[00:27:15] And that's why the third area of New York has this giant couch, like Marc-Antoine was stroking. And where people can actually sit, can take time, can look at a book, can have a, you know, a retail associate that comes and talks about the perfume. And suddenly I have a tea, suddenly it becomes a whole different experience.

[00:27:39] When someone explains to you the perfume and the mentality of the brand and, but sitting down with tea, it's very different that you do it behind a counter, which is super high. And yeah, you see, and plus we add to this a little bit of dream. So you see, just to explain the couch. So Marc-Antoine was saying that we have a long couch. When we saw this giant space empty, we were dreaming of a giant couch.

[00:28:09] And I say giant couch is like 20 meters long, which was very interesting. At the same time, very complicated to work around. And of course, we created those volumes to create this pathway. So we had to reduce the couch. And so the couch is only nine meters, which is still quite good. And also we, you were talking about, you know, people want to buy and go.

[00:28:37] We also work the way we sit, the quality of the phone. It needs to be not too hard. So you kind of want to stay. At the same time, it's not a couch where you want to watch TV. So it's not like you go down. But we were careful to make something comfortable. We know there's a lot of stores or even restaurants that make chairs and sitting not comfortable so you can leave quicker. Oh, wow. That's interesting.

[00:29:07] Yes. You know that. I've designed quite a lot of restaurants where it's kind of brief. Like, if people could stay, you know, not too long and kind of go. So let's make it not too comfortable. So this is really the opposite. We want something comfortable. At the same time, it's not like lounge. You know, you're not going to nap there. But so this nine meter couch. You need to leave at some point. Yeah. At one point. We close at seven. So yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:33] But and so that nine meter couch ends up at the glass railing, which is to protect the emptiness of the stairs. But we created another part of the couch, which is behind the glass railing. So it's a bit more than three meters suspended above the stairs. Oh, wow. And it's fixed to the back wall, which has windows and also has a giant mirror.

[00:30:02] So this nine meters plus three reflects into a giant mirror. So it looks the feeling when you have when you enter and you don't know those details. You just come very fresh. You have this proportion, which is giant. And we also have, of course, we design with Marc-Antoine, we design a carpet for that little lounge. And the carpet, which is, of course, under the couch, is also under the suspended couch.

[00:30:31] So when our clients actually walk down the stairs, they have to walk under the couch. Oh, wow. And under the carpet. So you have this thing of suddenly you're kind of, ooh, different, you know, like inception. Different sort of dimensions. Exactly. Suddenly you're underneath a carpet. And it's, of course, has fabric underneath and the side of the carpet. And you walk underneath.

[00:30:55] So you see there's a lot of little tweaks like this that makes it, we shape the structure. We shape the architecture. But then we refine everything to, you know, finding those little smiley thing, which is, oh, okay, I'm going to walk underneath the carpet. Yeah. Those little surprises, I guess, things that you wouldn't expect to see. Oh, we have a lot of little surprises. When you walk into a shop. A lot of Easter eggs have been everywhere.

[00:31:25] Easter eggs. Exactly. It's funny because I'm really into gardening and I don't know a huge amount about design, but I have learned the kind of the basics of garden design. And it is exactly that, isn't it? You don't want to see the whole garden in one shot. You want to kind of create paths to kind of explore and encourage you to go to the back of the garden and create zones. And so, yeah, super interesting. Now, just to wrap up, I'd love to get your take on sort of the future because there's so much happening in retail right now. There's new ways of discovering products, new ways of shopping.

[00:31:55] You know, you guys have both touched on how and the importance of spaces being experiential and sensory driven and memorable. So I'd love to know when we start to think about the future of retail, what are you most excited about? Antoine is very shy. I would say his dream is to make a huge store in Korea. Yes. Soon. I hope so. Korea has a very interesting retail perspective, which I think is very interesting.

[00:32:24] And, you know, in Korea, you have this thing, which is in some of the streets, which streets from luxury stores, you actually you don't rent, you know, the bottom part of the building and you actually rent the plots and you create an actual building. You bring everything down and you create your own building, which create even more in a bigger experience than we've ever done.

[00:32:49] So the idea is this, is to be able to show more and create even bigger emotions. Because my content has a very small amount of perfume. The idea is really not to launch, you know, like 10 new perfumes per year. So physically, it's quite small. We don't need a giant space.

[00:33:14] But a place like Korea could be very interesting because we can have a different perspective. The parallax is very different. So I'm excited about this. But it's not in the plans because after New York, I must say that one of my dreams for me is to reopen another very small store like the first one we did, where people really feel like they're in a little piece of art and they arrive in a little cocoon where

[00:33:40] they really feel the authenticity of the brand and the size of the brand. So this is my own personal dream. But again, it's still always interesting to say, OK, now we want to do this and we have this general idea. And then that's why I said the creative osmosis we have together means that we can take the

[00:34:05] other to a different direction and it creates something very interesting. Fantastic. And I believe for the brand, we want to go where we're not expected to be. I think I've done the expected thing. Like I've done my expectation, Paris, London, New York, which no one expected us in New York.

[00:34:31] They didn't think a brand such as ours could be crazy enough to go to New York with a 1,000 square feet store. But I think now it's one of the reasons we're in Venice is like because we don't want to go where it's commercially the best thing, but where it makes sense for us. Amazing. Well, best of luck with everything. And thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast. It's been great to have you both on and I look forward to following your venture.

[00:35:01] Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to Retail Disrupted. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support the podcast, please leave a rating or review or share it with others. It really makes a difference.