Life takes you places and so, sometimes, does fashion. With the latter, it can often be the most unexpected places. For Parisian luxury brand Zadig & Voltaire, it was Mexico.
The brand, which was founded in 1997 and opened its first boutique in Mexico City in December, is known for its edgy and eclectic aesthetic, has stores across Europe and the US, and is hoping to lend a taste of its zesty style to a growing consumer base in the region.
The retailer already operates within Mexico through a wholesale business in the El Palacio department store and has seen “strong customer sales” from local residents as well as from Southern America, according to the company.
In fact, Zadig & Voltaire North America CEO Kristen Sosa is so confident about the company’s popularity among shoppers in Mexico, she tells Retail Brew, the brand plans on rolling out eight more stores in the next three to four years, with about two boutiques in the pipeline for the end of this year.
In an exclusive conversation with Retail Brew, Sosa talked about the retailer’s uniquely tailored strategies for the region and how it plans on appealing to locals in Mexico.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the new store in Mexico and the key retail strategies for the region.
We have three key focuses to launch and expand our boutiques…[Our first is] in the Artz Mall, which is the premier luxury center…So boutique expansion is No. 1. The second is our accessories growth. In fact, we’re finding already so far in our boutique, we’re selling out of handbags. Handbags are close to 50% of our business. We will definitely be focused on growing our accessories business, which is also one of our US strategies as well.
We’ve had a nice-sized business [in Mexico] but we’re really focused on growth. I met all the buyers and we’re going to be growing really all categories of business there as well as we just launched our first men’s shop as well.
How do you plan on targeting the local consumer in the market?
Similar to our US customer, our customer there is also multigenerational. Very often you’ll come into one of our stores and you’ll see a mother and daughter in our stores buying a handbag and buying a RTW piece, and we’re very lucky that we have that as part of our brand DNA. Our handbags are highly sought after by the younger customer and now really starting to resonate with the RTW customers as we evolve our handbag line.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
The other thing too, is that our collection in both RTW and bags has a diverse following of women, men, etc. In the fall, we launched our first official unisex collection, even though many of our pieces cross gender. And it really was to meet the demand of our customer. Now that we’re in Mexico, we’ll have a destination for our Mexican clients to shop.
One of the reasons we decided to launch in Mexico was because we have a significant number of Mexican clients that shop in our stores in the US, everywhere from southern Florida to Southern California, you name it. Now we’ll have a way to talk to them to communicate with them, and then also a place for them to shop as well.
Do you feel like handbags or accessories are the best performing categories for you in that region?
Handbags are trending right now at almost 50% of the business. That’s very strong. We actually have some stores in the US where it’s very similar, our Aventura store, our Southern California, southern Florida, etc, that also trend very high and in bags.
We want to grow the accessory business, especially outsized growth over the next five years. It’s really great to have those data points in certain markets to understand why it’s happening, what we’re selling, what works, who the customer is, for that category. So we can use that as well to build the balance of our markets.
How do you plan on standing from both homegrown brands and international brands?
It’s a mix of international brands, as well as the local brands, and there are brands that we’re competing with that we haven’t competed with before, because they’re really specific to the Mexico market.
We’ll focus on what we offer that is different from what everybody else offers, which is the specialness of our brands and the brand equity that we carry on a global level. That’s important to a lot of the consumers in Mexico is just that global brand equity.
We also used local artisans for some of the special pieces that are in the stores, and we did things a little bit differently in that store to make it stand out with lots of color, inspired by Mexico.