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Maureen Chiquet

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66

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2018-12-04

most recent

2018-12-04

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1

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1. “Right, as long as they want to do it, you're in good shape. So everybody was expanding opening four, five, six stores a year in China, which for luxury is a lot, by the way. And we didn't. And my philosophy on it was you've got to make it feel really special. Number one, you've got to make it feel really special and rare. But mostly, you've also got to have the kind of service that you need in any country. And it's got to match at least the service that you might have in Paris or in New York. And that's not an easy thing to do when you're going in and you're working with a new culture. So I think rarity becomes a really key issue in any luxury brand is how do you maintain rarity? Also, how do you balance that with growth that is needed, not just, not by the way, just in publicly held companies, but also in privately held companies.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “You know, it was fascinating when we were when China was growing really fast, a lot of our competitors decided that they were going to grow really, really quickly in China. And granted, you know, Chanel had the advantage of being a privately held company, which means that whatever you read in the luxury book that you read is exaggerated because you actually don't, you really don't have to do anything. Your shareholders are a small group of people.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Cold and it's boring, and also everybody, not everybody's heard of it, but a lot of people have. So we did this thing called Inside Chanel, which was kind of a cool retro take on her story. But once we finished it was in chapters and it was really cool online. But once we finished that, the idea was, okay, what can we do now that's really current to our consumers? So then we switched to something called outside Chanel, which was basically looking at women who embody her spirit and her character. And these were people who were famous, some women who are famous, who are less famous, who are artists, who are dancers, who are business people. So it was a pretty cool way to say like, how do you look at history? You can't forget your history and you have to keep anchored in it. But you also want to move that history forward and give people a reason to believe today that your products are still as great as they are.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Almost a constant conversation when you're in that kind of company because you're constantly, like, for example, at Chanel, you've got Gabrielle Chanel, this woman, an iconoclast. I mean, she really changed the way women dress forever, took us out of high necklines and corsets and long gowns and put us in jerseys and fluid products that allow us to move freely. That was her idea. So in a way, she was very contemporary. And at one point, that company, and it still does, but we wanted to tell her story. But you know that you can't tell it just as a history because once.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Absolutely the opposite, and I'll never forget him sort of wide eyed in the meeting, you've got to be kidding, we sold more units, not less. So it really less is more. I had to unlearn absolutely everything when I got to Chanel. Coming from Old Navy, it was all about exploit what you've got. Don't sell ten thousand, sell a million flag cheese. Like, more is better. And Chanel, the more you sell, the less exclusive you were. So handbags is a perfect example. You don't want to see Chanel handbags coming and going on a street, otherwise that means ultimately your brand will be less valuable. And what luxury company, this may have been in your book, but what luxury companies really do is they care quite a bit about the image of their brand. So they're preserving that brand image in many ways. The trick is it's not just preservation, you also have to push it forward. So you have to figure out what that delicate balance is between kind of holding it into a very prestigious or historical place and making it.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Completely. I'll never forget one of the funniest meetings. We had a new employee when we were at Chanel. And this person was from sort of like me from a more mass market environment. And so we had to raise prices of our classic handbag because we actually hadn't raised prices in years. So it was time to kind of inch them up. And he was quite afraid that if you raise prices, you sell less units.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “This is an aspirational thing. You know, you want to buy the products because they're so beautiful and there's something that they give to the camera that's not just plastic, physical beauty. It's an aura of beauty that helps a customer draws a customer, I should say, to your product. So to me, it was really fascinating shift of frame to say, no, no, it's not using someone. It's actually aspiring. It's inspiring someone so that they aspire to your product.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yeah, it was when I was at L'Oreal. The part of the business that I loved talking about creativity was a part of creating images. I loved it, I think, more than all the marketing studies and things like that and charts and graphs that we were doing. I was just drawn to this idea of creating an image that could draw someone to your product. And I remember these endless marketing meetings where you'd have the agency on one side of the table and you'd have the customer, which was L'Oreal on the other side of the table. L'Oreal with their marketing briefs and checking off the boxes of does the hair look this way? Are the eyes right? And at the end of the day, really what you're looking at is a picture of something that either you say I identify with that or I want to look like that or I don't. And so with these models, I got very close to the art director who explained to me because I thought, well, wait a minute, aren't you using women in a way that's sort of, you know, I had this sort of instinct about it feels kind of weird? You're using women for their beauty. He said, no, no.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Always think that empathy is one of the most important things that you can have both as a leader but as a business person is ultimately if you're thinking about putting yourself in a customer's shoes that requires letting go of your perspective for a second and sitting in there in theirs. So for me that kind of sort of empathetic way of being ends up scoring high and I've seen it that and I'd say the second thing I want to add is curiosity and that's not really an emotion maybe that's kind of a way of being but I've noticed that the best merchants are curious because they're not looking at something at face value and they then becomes of course agility and being able to serve change and move with really rapid changing environment that we're in.”

   2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Emotion is equally, if not sometimes more important in the way that we have to think as business people because we have to reflect where our customers are at the end of the day.”

    2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Almost all we think rationalize afterwards. Yeah, I mean, those are emotional decisions. And so what I learned, and it was really when I was a merchant that I learned this first, is that you can have all the numbers. You can study what's sold in the past. You can, I'm sure you can look at algorithms to figure out now even more than when I was a merchant, to figure out predictively what might sell in the future. But at the end of the day, a customer goes into a store and looks at a product and goes, I want this or looks at an ad and goes, I can connect to this. This feels like something important to me. And by the way, I think emotion is becoming more important, not less in as much as when I look at my kids who are both quote unquote millennials, they don't buy products from companies that they don't believe in. They don't buy brands unless the company is environmentally sound, social justice systems are right. They really don't look at brands. So for me,”

    2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “It's interesting. I mean, granted, I was in an emotionally driven business, you can say, because particularly by the time I got to Chanel, nobody needs a $6,000 tweed jacket. But that said, I think we discount the fact that we're emotional human beings in most decisions that we make, even ones we think.”

    2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “But I do remember that I got the whole tete de gono, which is the end cap, and I was like so psyched. But no, I think I actually think I'd ended up doing better than I thought, even though I really, I'm shy. So going out, especially in France, in French, in the north of France, and all the conditions, but I ended up, I think I kind of like adversity sometimes because it's a challenge. So it's like, I can do this, you know.”

    2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Exactly right, and know that I learned it even in a weird way when I was speaking French the first time I went to France, you learn French out of a book, you have the grammar structure, you might know the words, but boy, go to a country and try to start speaking it every day. Things fall apart quickly, and you quickly understand you can't translate. So I can't look at this thing sitting here called a table and say, table, what is table in French? It has to start to come from a different place. And in fact, you have to enter into the French language, the context of their language and their expression. And in fact, that became so important when I got to Chanel and I amused French is that I never spoke English to my French teams because I felt that if I spoke their language, which I did, and even if at times it was more awkward or more difficult for me to find the exact right expression, that we would have a different kind of conversation, that they would feel that I was on their side, and that ends up counting for a lot as the leader, for sure.”

    2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Guy who sells frozen peas, who buys frozen peas and sanitary napkins. I'm like, I've got this one. And I walk in, I say hello to this guy. And, you know, I'm like, getting out my marketing brochure and about to tell him how these, of course, he's got like shiny hair, brill cream hair, how the moose is going to give him further expansion and more volume to your hair. He's like, no, no. He's looking at me like, just cut to the chase. And I soon realized like we were not speaking the same language. He wanted to know what kind of discount he would get. And I wanted to tell him my beautiful marketing product. So I realized I had to actually speak his language. I mean, actually, I had to put myself in his shoes. And that was the early lesson that helped me, I think, throughout my career realize that it's we look at it one way, but we actually have to look at it in the ways that our customers look at it, our colleagues, our different people who work for us.”

    2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Yeah, this is a really early lesson I had, but then it seemed to keep reinforcing itself throughout my career. So when I was at L'Oreal, the first thing they do at L'Oreal is you go on the road sur la route, they call it, and you become a sales rep basically with a little suitcase. Love it. Yeah, it was amazing. Now here I'm American, by the way, and I'm 22 years old, and I'm sent to, not any part of France. I'm thinking I'm going to go to the C ⁇ te d'Azur. I am sent to the north of France, the Ste, which is coal mining country, and I get a hypermarket as my account. Fabulous. I'm like, okay, I can do this. It's the Mamut Mammoth really is the name of it. So, you know, I go in and I am, by the way, I have studied the marketing material because I'm a good student. And we were launching studio line hair gelers or hair mousse. And I have studied this and I know what it does for your hair and I know how you should, you know, apply all the facts. I am so good. I'm going to sell this to the same.”

    2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source