LVMH x VivaTech 2019 – Day 2: The Rewards of Innovation
LVMH
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© Gwenn Dubourthoumieu
10:00 am: the LVMH Innovation Award winner is finally announced. Thirty startups from nine countries had been pre-selected by LVMH for the quality and ambition of their responses to the challenges of crafting the customer experience of tomorrow.
LVMH Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault and Chief Digital Officer Ian Rogers presented 3DLOOK with the prize. The startup is specialized in mobile body-scanning technologies for apparel retail and other industries.
And, because LVMH’s Maisons continue to innovate by updating age-old traditions, Viva Technology was a natural arena for the Group to share its innovations.
Innovation as a Tradition
Being the world’s foremost luxury group implies a responsibility to preserve the industry’s traditions and know-how. It also requires the Group to keep searching for new processes, and new ways to approach often ancestral know-hows and precious materials.
The second day’s first speaker was Julien Tornare, President of watchmaker Zenith, who spoke of the meeting between traditions dating from 1865 (the year of the House’s founding) and 21st-century technologies, evoking how the passion of its artisans contributes to their craft’s constant evolution.
Demonstrating that digital assistants can strengthen the intimate bond between brands and consumers, Acqua di Parma President Laura Burdese described the integration of the Italian company’s Barbiere universe with Google Home and Alexa assistants.
Over at Ruinart, Cécile Riffaud and Aurélie Doré, respectively the House’s Head of International Marketing and Manager of Digital and Consumer Engagement, explained how the company combines tradition and modernity, while strengthening the link between luxury and digital content.
New Ways for Brands to Tell Their Stories
Jean-Denis Mariani, Chief Digital Officer of Guerlain, then spoke about the contribution of digital advances to the richness of storytelling, drawing on his team’s recent experience with a fragrance launch.
Hublot and Bvlgari revealed their own immersive strategies: Hublot showed off Digital Boutique, a 360-degree virtual reality that allows customers to contact the House directly, while Bvlgari demonstrated Tovch, a device that infuses luxury into the heart of the Internet of Things.
Geeks with a Taste for the Finer Things
Cutting-edge technologies that are often invisible to the consumer were also brought to light. Leslie Serrero, Dior’s Senior VP of Global Client Development, Marketing & E-Retail, then delineated the luxury universe’s specific data-collection issues with her talk on artificial intelligence.
Robotics in service of Hennessy’s vineyards was the topic of Research and Innovation Coordinator Xavier Poitou and Vineyard Market Products Manager Guillaume Delprat’s talk: The two explained how the House expected to achieve its “zero pesticide” goal thanks to TED, their robot.
A Passion for Entrepreneurship
On the entrepreneurship front, the afternoon saw Laetitia Roche-Grenet, Business Synergies Director at LVMH House, and Léa Baudin, an intrapreneur at LVMH, discussing the DARE program, a revolution in the group’s corporate culture that encourages in-house innovation.
Later, Laetitia Roche-Grenet was joined by Olivier Le Garlantezec, Partnerships Director within LVMH Digital Department, and three of the startups that LVMH incubated as part of its “La Maison des startups” accelerator at Paris’ Station F to discuss their experience.
Come back to the LVMH Pavillon on the third and last day of Viva Technology 2019 for an open-house full of discovery, innovation, savoir-faire and entrepreneurship! The future is now…