Satoko Fujiwara has the mission to represent and promote Loewe to clients around the world through her role in sales merchandising.
“I began my career at the Louis Vuitton Store in Osaka. While working as a sales associate, I had the opportunity to spend about four months at the Champs-Élysées store as part of an exchange program. I had the chance to observe the merchandising team in Paris, and when I returned to Japan I decided to turn my career path to merchandising. After several years in the Louis Vuitton Japan merchandising team, I got a new role : to lead the development of the small leather goods department in the marketing department at the Louis Vuitton Malletier headquarters. This is how I started working in Paris in 2009. After that, I took on several roles related to merchandising at the Paris headquarters, then transferred to Loewe in March, 2017. My first impression of Loewe was that it’s a brand with a warm and welcoming environment, with bright-minded, lively and motivated people. The brand’s vision and strategy are built around people like the designer Jonathan Anderson and CEO Pascale Lepoivre, and each employee carries a shared passion for building the awareness of the Maison worldwide.
Right after joining Loewe I was entrusted with the store clustering project. Clustering is grouping stores with client at the center, while also considering locational environment and other factors, and then deciding an adequate product assortment for each cluster. It is an ongoing project with various departments—from merchandising to retail, visual merchandising, and supply chain—working toward a single goal, and it is both rewarding while also being a great learning experience.
Our key challenges are to convey our core values to our clients, increase brand awareness, and enhance customer loyalty and experience. I think Loewe’s strength is that we have highly motivated teams and we all work together to overcome these challenges.
I think this applies to the entire LVMH Group: we run cross-border and cross-department initiatives in order to deliver the brand’s core values to an international customer base around the world. Working in a multicultural and multi-department environment, and gaining inspiration from those I work with daily, is a great motivation for me.
In order to deliver Loewe around the world, as a member of the merchandising department I work closely with merchandisers in each region to understand what’s happening there and what kind of support they need, and work on purchasing and assortment accordingly. At the same time, I gather customer feedback and relay it to the product and design teams so we can optimize the experience. All of these things are connected, and for that reason we must be entrepreneurial and always think about how we can contribute to Loewe’s growth and brand influence.”