Raffaella Banchero, CEO of Tiffany & Co for Italy and Spain, is optimistic. She is optimistic for 2014, for next year and for our country. She tells Giulia Crivelli of Repubblica why on the occasion of the Milanese launch of the Tiffany T line. The numbers prove her right: 1.59 billion euros in revenues in the first half of the year with a growth of 10% while net profit of 199 million rose by 31%. Here is the article.
«Strengthened by a record first half of the year and in contrast to the majority of luxury companies, Raffaella Banchero is optimistic both for the whole of 2014 and for next year. CEO for Italy and Spain of the American giant Tiffany, the second largest jeweler in the world after Cartier with a 2013 turnover of 4 billion dollars (3.18 billion euros), the Genoese top manager is even positive about Italy: in the boutiques of Milan, Rome and Florence, she says, purchases by local customers have increased, also thanks to the Tiffany T collection, in stores for a few days and celebrated yesterday evening at the Pac, the Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan.
How did the idea for the Milan event come about?
It seemed like the right way to present the first collection designed by Francesca Amfitheatrof, who has been with us for about a year and is also the first female creative director of Tiffany. In the coming months the collection will be enriched with earrings, new combinations of materials and models, but these first pieces, in stores around the world for a few days, are repeating the success of the Tiffany Keys.
In Italy, not a day goes by without new, negative, data on consumption. How are your stores in Italy doing? And those in Spain?
Italians have always been among Tiffany’s most loyal European customers, both for the silver collections, which have a very broad target, and for the most important jewels. The crisis has not changed this situation and in 2014 we saw a recovery in the average receipt. Unlike what happens to many other fashion and luxury brands, in our seven stores in Italy three-quarters of sales are to Italians. In the stores in Madrid and Barcelona the majority of customers are foreign tourists, but the country is emerging from the recession, thanks to the structural reforms it has made, painful but effective.
Many jewelry brands, from Bulgari to Cartier, are investing and above all increasingly communicating their presence in fine jewelry. How important is this segment for Tiffany?
Every year, in April, we present the Blue Book in New York, unique pieces of fine jewelry for a select clientele. Then, like other fashion houses, the collection, composed of a maximum of 300 pieces, stops in Asia and other markets. For 2015 there is a project to bring it to Milan too.
In 2014 you definitively closed the dispute with the Swatch group, linked to the termination of the license contract for watches. And now?
price ranges, from the accessible one to women’s jewelry watches. But we are in no hurry, it is one of the projects that Armfitheatrof will dedicate itself to in the coming months.
A few months ago you opened one of your largest boutiques on the Champs Élysées, in Paris. The next steps?
In 2015 it will be the turn of Geneva and we do not rule out relocation or expansion of existing stores. We are also investing a lot in the internet channel and Italy, in Europe, is the second market after the United Kingdom. A result that we consider exceptional, given the delay that our country has in e-commerce. The secret, in addition to a very easy to navigate site, is the service, obviously. Then there are social networks: Tiffany Italia’s Facebook page has 700,000 fans, most of whom are young, the best investment for the future!
The keys from the TiffanyKeys collection are among the most imitated jewels in recent years. How do you deal with counterfeiting?
We have a small army of lawyers who fight this battle with us. Every day we receive reports of sites that sell fake products and seizures of counterfeit Tiffany jewels on markets, stalls and actual street shops. We will never give up, but I believe that we need an alliance between luxury brands and agreements with search engines, like the one signed by the LVMH group with Google. Counterfeits are not only an economic and image damage for companies, but an expression of the criminal economy that everyone should have an interest in defeating”.
