#Americart2019 Documentary to Highlight Importance of Promoting Art & Culture in America’s Heartland

Series will be shot by crew traveling cross-country, documenting real American’s connection with art and culture

Legit Productions, the New York City based documentary films productions company, announces the launch of the pre-production of #Americart2019, a one hour documentary and six episode series about art and culture in America, featuring intimate interviews of everyday Americans about their personal connection with art and cultural heritage and their connection to their own city and community.

Directed by the NYC artist and photographer, EFDLT Studio, #Americart2019 will be shot on location from NYC to Sonoma County, from mid August to mid September 2019, with a camera crew in a van crossing the country and inviting everyone on the road to be part of the project.

“My goal is to reach everyday Americans, meet people and discover their intimate relation with art using my years of experience of conducting interviews as a former social worker. I am hoping for open heart discussions to collect authentic stories and personal relationships with art and culture,” said EFDLT Studio, the film Director.

Co-produced by local Conventions and Visitors Bureaus, #Americart2019 brings a new narrative to the relationship of Americans with art and culture. The team will make stops in the cities and counties partners and take the time to explore their arts and culture scene: Montgomery County (MD), Franklin (TN), Pueblo (CO), Glenwood Springs (CO) and Sonoma County (CA) have so far joined the project.

#Americart2019 is presented by WhistlePig Rye Whiskey, an independent distillery in Vermont producing small batches of handcrafted Rye Whiskey.

“#Americart2019 is the first of a new generation of documentary film and series giving directly a voice to actual residents of small and medium size cities in America, with no filter, no preconceptions and no bias. We also want to encourage more domestic and international cultural travelers to discover the rich and diverse cultural heritage of lesser known U.S. cities and counties,” said Pierre Gervois, CEO of Legit Productions and #Americart2019 Executive Producer.

The documentary film and the six episode series will be released in 2020 for cable television and streaming platforms in the U.S. and internationally.

Everyone is welcome to join the project and learn more on the official website www.americart2019.com

Luxury Retail & Poverty: Let’s be uncomfortable a minute and see what we can do as responsible citizens

Pierre Gervois, President of Gervois Hotel Rating and Producer of “The Face of America” Interview Series

For the past thirteen years, I have worked as a media entrepreneur and producer, serving the luxury industry in Paris, Shanghai and New York City, producing luxury digital publications for the very affluent Chinese global traveler. I have managed international teams of marketers, editors, bloggers, photographers and community managers to build successful communications campaigns in more than twenty countries for a variety of clients, private and governmental organizations, willing to attract High Net Worth Chinese travelers to their country, region or hotel.

I have met outstanding individuals in the luxury goods and luxury travel industry, incredibly skilled artisans who are making beautiful objects with their hands and heart, innovative entrepreneurs who are breaking the rules and reinventing luxury, and countless hotel executives who warmly welcome their guests in the new generation of boutique hotels.

I have learned to understand the new generation of affluent Chinese outbound tourists, what they really wanted (vs what the travel industry assumed they want to do), and how they felt routinely disrespected in Europe or in America, dismissed as second-class travelers by the luxury travel and hospitality industry.

I published several luxury lifestyle and travel magazines in Shanghai and New York City (including the acclaimed STC magazine) and featured more than five hundred luxury lifestyle stories, working with very talented journalists, and in particular Elaine Ke, Managing Editor of the STC magazine.

I have given speeches and lectures about international luxury travel marketing at Universities and at corporate events and always felt grateful for the opportunity to exchange ideas with students and fellow professionals.

It has been a rich professional and personal experience. Thank you to all of the wonderful people I have met over these years, from the clients who trusted me to the great individuals who composed my team, and without whom I would not have achieved such successes.

I have lived in New York City for the past five years, and now consider it my true hometown. NYC is by far my favorite city in the World, for one reason: the entire world meets here, in this city created and run by immigrants, bringing their ideas, cultures, languages and foods in this happy melting pot.

As the Founder and Publisher of Gervois magazine, I have seen wealthy individuals buying very expensive jewelry, watches, apartments, as a result of the marketing campaigns my company has created and it’s a good thing: that means more jobs in the jewelry, watchmaking, retail, and real estate, and potentially more money for philanthropic causes.

I have also seen hard working Americans with not enough money to feed their families, dads and moms without a job having a hard time to come back home and face their children, individuals discriminated for their race, gender or sexual orientation, and courageous immigrants -from China and all over the World- struggling to fully embrace the American dream.

I know we are, as business professionals and entrepreneurs, supposed to remove our emotions out of the equation and always think in terms of return on investment, business credibility, and project an emotionless and politically correct image of ourselves. This is specially true in the luxury industry where talking about social issues, hunger, poverty or racial discrimination is largely taboo.

I cannot change the World alone, and there are in New York City hundreds of very talented and very experienced philanthropists, activists, social entrepreneurs and dedicated elected officials.

As a privileged media entrepreneur fully conscious of my privilege, I decided that the best course of action for me, although modest and certainly limited in scope, was to help to create awareness about issues that really matter to me.

One year ago, our production company launched an indie, experimental YouTube channel Legit News based out of our Brooklyn studio. The first program we created was named The Face of America, an interview series.

Since October 2017, I had the pleasure to interview outstanding individuals from diverse backgrounds, who came to our recording studio to tell their own stories and share with us how they were working to make America a better place, one small step at a time.

We have explored multiple aspects of American society: social discriminations, race relations, LGBTQ issues, 2nd amendment, poverty, religious issues and women’s empowerment.

This interview series has changed me profoundly.

What I never told to the first persons I have interviewed is that I have no formal training in hard news journalism, and no experience in interviewing people. I was really scared when the camera was rolling and I had to conduct the interview. I was also ashamed of my strong foreign accent, and having sometimes to repeat questions as they were formulated in my imperfect English. (Most of my English vocabulary revolves around the luxury world, and I’m poorly linguistically equipped to talk about complex social issues).

I want to thank all the persons I have interviewed. They opened their heart, trusted me, and frequently went well beyond the context of a formal ten minutes interview. I felt sometimes I was not supposed to witness the incredibly intimate stories they were sharing with me, drifting away from the main topic of the interview.

I remain a proud media entrepreneur working in the luxury industry.

And I’m even prouder of sharing inspiring stories in The Face of America.

Pierre Gervois

English language magazines are the new cool for HNWI Chinese: iconic travel & shopping Gervois magazine now distributed to Shanghai Travelers’ Club members

GERVOIS magazine has been selected to be the new preferred global travel publication of the prestigious Shanghai Travelers’ Club, and is now distributed to its members.

GERVOIS magazine is proud to follow the steps of the iconic STC magazine, the Club’s own iconic travel magazine that has been published from 2008 to 2017.

Founded in Shanghai in 2008, the Shanghai Travelers’ Club is China’s most exclusive international luxury travel club for discerning Chinese global entrepreneurs and executives seeking experiential & authentic travel discoveries.

Its 12,000+ members have an average annual income of US$580K, travel overseas on average four times per year, and spend on average US$63,500 per year during their travels. 23% of them have invested in real estate internationally. Excluding their real estate investment abroad, they collectively spend & invest more than US$700M per year in travel related expenses.

Shanghai Travelers’ Club

As the vast majority of Chinese high net worth individuals who travel frequently overseas is now speaking Engligh fluently, the Shanghai Travelers’ Club members felt the need to partner with an English language luxury travel magazine.

The club has selected GERVOIS magazine for its acclaimed editorial content, featuring exceptional hotels, men’s fashion styling ideas, art investment, real estate investment, and their iconic travel photoshoots made by the New York based famous travel photographer EFDLT studio, Director of Photography.

Starting with the Spring 2018 issue, released on March 16th, GERVOIS magazine will proudly partner for the years to come with the Shanghai Travelers’ Club and invite its Chinese members to travel and discover the United States and the World in style.

More informations about GERVOIS magazine:
http://www.gervoisrating.com/shanghai-travelers-club/

More informations about EFDLT studio, Director of Photography:

http://www.efdltstudio.com/

https://www.instagram.com/efdltstudio/

Affluent Chinese shoppers trust Gervois rated hotels to book their shopping trips in the USA

The Gervois rating system is a hotel rating system created in 2016 by Pierre Gervois, a media entrepreneur based in NYC and widely considered to be a “Luxury travel guru” by wealthy millennial Chinese travelers coming frequently to the United States.

“Over the years, I have been disappointed by the numerous existing hotel rating systems” said Pierre Gervois. “Too often, there is a tendency to give too generous ratings to hotels members of luxury hotels chains, and to underrate independent boutique hotels”, he added.

Based on these facts, Pierre Gervois has created an entirely new hotel rating system, purely based on the sole merits of each property, considered alone, regardless of its association to a hotel chain, an affiliation program, other rating systems, or online reviews. Every hotel is rated professionally and independently, without any preconception about the property.

With 117 rated properties (33 new properties have joined in 2018 the prestigious ranks of the Gervois rated properties), this year’s ratings put a focus on the traveler’s experience rather than on old fashioned luxury.

The Broadmoor (Colorado Springs) is still #1 hotel, with 93pts, in recognition of the exceptional quality of service and dining, both unmatched at this level in any other property.

Four hotels make a remarked entry in the 2018 Gervois ratings with above 90pts ratings: The Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia (91pts), the Langham Boston (90pts), The Blackstone Chicago (90pts) and the Montana Paws-Up Ranch (90pts).

Independent properties with an incredible charm and authenticity make also the cut for the 2018 ratings. Amongst our favorites are Inn at Cuckolds Lighthouse (89pts), The High Lonesome Ranch (88pts), El Cosmico (87pts), Pioneertown Motel (86pts), and Casa Hudson (84pts).

As the Gervois Hotel Ratings are famous for their blunt and brutally honest ratings, some hotels get searing and hilarious reviews in 2018, in particular for uninspired decoration and failed interior design.

But on a more serious side, some high end hotels are reminded that disrespectful or discriminatory behavior with guests -Chinese or not- is unacceptable and must be quickly corrected through appropriate staff training.

For hoteliers, receiving the reviews like “The service is cold and sometimes condescending with guests who do not look affluent enough to the taste of the hotel’s employees” or “The training of the front desk staff should be seriously improved as the customer service sometimes reaches unacceptably low levels” must definitely trigger additional staff training sessions…

“Gervois Hotel Rating is on the discerning, multicultural and sophisticated traveler’s side, not on the hotel booking business’ side” concluded Mr Gervois.

The Gervois Hotel Rating rate hotels according to five essential criteria: Location, Building, Atmosphere, Dining and Service, each rated on a 20 points scale. The addition of the points give the final rating, on a 100 points scale.

The 2018 Gervois Hotel Ratings are available on www.gervoisrating.com

Also available on
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GervoisRating
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gervoisrating/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GervoisHotelRating/

After years of chasing the mythical wealthy Chinese consumers, Western luxury retailers start to leave China

Famous luxury brands have dreamed on the Chinese market for the last twenty years. Ignoring common sense (China remains, per capita, one of the poorest country in the World), they decided to open massively luxury retail stores chasing the mythical wealthy Chinese consumer.

It’s time for a reality check.

China has recorded the most number of closures of luxury stores between July 2016 and July 2017, the latest report by the investment research and management company Bernstein shows. The report, titled “Store Wars,” based its findings on Bernstein’s tracking of about 7,000 stores referring to 36 luxury brands including big names such as Burberry, Saint Laurent, and Céline. Burberry and Dunhill had the most store closures in China of all the brands during that period.
China has seen 62 net closures of luxury brand stores during the surveyed period, the largest number observed by Bernstein among all significant geographies. The firm viewed the trend as a revision of the over-expansion, in previous years, of luxury brands into the Chinese market.

The rapid development of the country’s luxury industry fueled by affluent Chinese consumers has given luxury brands unrealistic projections of retail sales in the past. This over-estimation, according to Bernstein, has led them to aggressively open retail stores in China that exceeds consumers’ real purchasing power. The same situation occurs in the Middle East region, another area where luxury consumption is rising fast.
Globally, the number of the net store openings by luxury brands has also for the first time run into the negative territory. The report said most brands have more or less closed some of their stores in the department stores, a traditional channel that accounts for about one-third of these brands’ global sales.

Chinese consumers have demonstrated some remarkedly different purchasing behaviours from that of the West. According to Pierre Gervois, a leading expert about wealthy Chinese travelers’ shopping behavior, and founder of the prestigious STC magazine “Western luxury brands have been warned since 2010 that their projections about affluent Chinese consumers were grossly exaggerated.” “Brands refused to acknowledge that their future Chinese customers would buy in overseas stores  rather than in domestic stores, both for tax reasons but also because of the poor customer service in their Chinese stores”, Gervois added.

The really affluent Chinese consumers (as affluent as an average U.S. or Western Europe consumer) massively choose not to purchase in Chinese stores, neither online in China.  They choose deliberately to purchase overseas, as a sign of social status.

Another distinguishing habit that sets Chinese luxury consumers apart from Westerners is their huge interest in buying luxury items online. Over the past year, an increasing number of luxury brands have embraced the e-commerce marketplace and launched stores with the country’s top two players, Alibaba and JD. Moreover, big names like Louis Vuitton and Gucci even opened their own Chinese e-commerce stores to ensure their offerings meet the expectations of Chinese consumers. And then there’s the nature of luxury itself, the meaning of which is different to younger consumers from what it was to their forebears.

Another concern that Western brands cannot officially recognize in China, is that a growing part of affluent millennials Chinese are moving from government-censored social media (WeChat, Weibo…) to Facebook and Twitter throughout an increasing use of VPN’s. That makes much less relevant their communications campaigns on Chinese networks.

Source:  Chinese Tourists Blog / JingDaily Blog / Bain / Bernstein

Between a visit at the shopping mall and at their real estate agent, Chinese tourists create growth in the U.S.

The number of Chinese tourists traveling the globe has increased significantly for the last ten years, making them the largest group of travelers in the world. Now, thanks in part to a recent agreement between the U.S. and China to extend visas for short-term business travelers, tourists and students, the U.S. could see an increase in Chinese travelers in the near future.

This trend is supported by research from the latest Chinese International Travel Monitor (CITM) from Hotels.com which reveals the U.S. is the second most popular destination for Chinese travelers to visit in the next 12 months (behind France), with popular U.S. landmarks like the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty topping travel wish lists.
The CITM research also identifies that, while cities in Asia Pacific remain the most popular (82 percent of Chinese travelers have visited in the past 12 months), visitors to Europe and America have increased with a year over year growth of 25 percent and 11 percent, respectively. These destinations were particularly popular with millennial travelers, with 42 percent visiting Europe and 29 percent visiting America in the past 12 months.

“The CITM reveals that the United States is one of the top five countries Chinese travelers visit the most,” said Josh Belkin, vice president and GM of the Hotels.com brand. “With tens of thousands of places to stay across the U.S., like distinctive boutiques, spacious vacation rentals and familiar chains, our site and mobile app have the perfect places for Chinese travelers of all ages and lifestyles.”

In 2016, there were 122 million outbound Chinese tourists – four percent more than in 2015 and a massive 74 percent more than in 2011, when the first CITM was published. China is already the largest source of international travelers for many countries – despite the fact only 10 percent of the population had passports in 2016.

“Chinese travelers in the United States tend to be more affluent than those who choose other destinations”, said Pierre Gervois, CEO of China Elite Focus Magazines LLC and Founder of the STC magazine, a luxury travel digital publication in Chinese Mandarin. “Real Estate investment in the United States is now the #1 real reason – and rarely stated in surveys – for affluent and wealthy Chinese outbound travelers, as they have acquired for $100 billion in U.S. Real Estate in 2016”

Source: Chinese Tourists in America Blog / CITM

U.S. Retailers wanting to target Chinese Millennial Shoppers should now use English in their campaigns

They speak English now (Just in case you didn’t notice).

They are the millennial Chinese travelers in the United States.

They are the Chinese tourists coming to discover the United States of America and to buy high quality Made in USA products.

They are the Chinese businessmen and businesswomen coming to invest in American companies and create U.S. jobs.

They are the smart Chinese millennial entrepreneurs coming to America to create start ups and contribute to America’s leadership in future technologies.

They are the Chinese guests fed up to be disrespected in luxury hotels when asking if they really can afford to pay for a suite when they ask for one and are offered first the cheapest room available.

They are the Chinese businessmen walking into a bespoke suit company in New York City and asking for a hand made in America suit because they also deserve to wear the finest clothes. (No, they are not only interested in “I Love NY” Made in China T-shirts)

They are the Chinese travelers annoyed to be depicted by U.S. marketing agencies as using only Chinese social media networks such as Weibo and WeChat, when they are actually using Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to stay in touch with their U.S. friends and freely discover the world.

They are the tourists who have spent $40Billion in the U.S. in 2016

They are the LGBTQ+ Chinese travelers wanting to be as respected as any other tourist and find safe places to just be who they are.

They are the Chinese shoppers who find utterly ridiculous when Western luxury brands add a dragon or a Chinese symbol on a watch or a handbag and expect that they’ll specifically want to buy this model.

They are the Chinese tourists who are grateful for the warm welcome they have received by American people when they were doing horseback riding or cowboy shooting. (Yes, they are not only obsessed by shopping in large shopping malls but want to discover the various aspects of America’s culture and heritage).

They are the Chinese travelers who are proud of their Chinese cultural heritage and Chinese language, but who also speak English and prefer to read in English original stories about the United States.

They are the Chinese travelers who are fluent in English and understand exactly what some people say about them when they are traveling overseas.

Actually, they are exactly the same as any other traveler in America.

By Pierre Gervois, Founder of Gervois Hotel Rating, Publisher of Gervois Magazine, Hospitality & tourism keynote speaker and expert about marketing to outbound Chinese tourists.

Chinese shoppers in the U.S. can now use WeChat Pay & Alipay, China’s leading mobile payment solutions

Citcon, the integrated payment and marketing platform, announced a strategic partnership to enable brands in North America to accept WeChat Pay and Alipay.

WeChat Pay and Alipay are the most popular and convenient payment options for Chinese consumers to purchase goods and services. Adding these payment options to retail point of sale allows brands to now tap into an even larger revenue stream from Chinese consumers who are the largest spender, and fastest growing traveler segment to the North America. The platform enables brands to optimize revenue growth without the costs and hassles of establishing a business entity in China.

WeChat Pay is a fully integrated payment solution within WeChat, the world’s most popular mobile social communications service with 936 million active users and Alipay is a super lifestyle app run by Ant Financial Services Group with more than 450 million active users. Together these platforms jointly account for 90% of China’s mobile payment market share. Both super apps allow users to book a trip, hail a taxi, order food, purchase movie tickets, pay for water and electricity bills, manage investments, perform transactions on e-commerce websites and more to create a cashless society.

“China is changing fast. Mobile payment is the new frontier of commerce and China is leading this trend. By providing an integrated and easy-to-use payment solution, Citcon is creating a future that takes payment and marketing to the next level, empowering global merchants to drive business growth with millions of Chinese consumers.”said Chuck Huang, Founder and CEO of Citcon

As the first payment partner of WeChat Pay and Alipay, in addition to major credit cards such as UnionPay, MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express, Citcon is a one-stop shop for merchants to connect with Chinese consumers and accept payments anywhere. Citcon’s stand-alone mobile point-of-sale (mPOS), easy-to-integrate API and software products empower merchants to optimize growth both online and offline, with an easy and affordable rate compared to credit card processing. In addition to the convenient payment solutions, merchants will also be able to gain in-depth consumer behavior insights, manage business performance, run marketing campaigns, guides users to merchants stores while saving their shopping preferences for future visits and manage lifetime customer loyalty programs.

“Accepting WeChat Pay is a smart move for U.S. Retailers. That will definitely help with the category of budget-conscious Chinese travelers who choose to travel in groups. But they must keep in mind that the most affluent categories prefer to pay with their international credit cards, who show their status when traveling overseas and offer more perks in terms of miles and reward points.” commented Pierre Gervois, CEO of China Elite Focus Magazines LLC, a media group specialized in luxury travel publications for very affluent Chinese outbound travelers.

Source: Citcon / Chinese Tourists in America

Targeting Affluent Chinese shoppers the Bloomingdale’s way: Talking to the heart of Chinese tourists planning a U.S. trip

The growing purchasing power of affluent Chinese travelers is making it more important than ever for luxury brands and luxury retail brands to adopt marketing strategies to target them. With Chinese third-party mobile payment systems like Alipay and WeChat Pay beginning to set up shop in popular global tourist destinations, catering to this traveling consumer is becoming easier to do, but it’s not a brand’s only option.

Digital intelligence firm L2’s recent report “Cross-Border and Travel Retail: Connecting Digitally with China’s Shoppers” discusses ways brands can be targeting consumers online both during their journey overseas and before they set off.

“[Luxury brands] are under-serving the traveling Chinese consumer, whether it’s through their own brand site and its functionality and capability, their WeChat account, or from leveraging things like WeChat Pay and Alipay,” said Danielle Bailey, head of Asia Pacific Research at L2. “It’s a huge missed opportunity for them to not engage on these platforms that Chinese consumers are using all the time. Their phone is their number one travel accessory.”

Brands that do engage consumers digitally abroad with an omnichannel approach are using platforms like Alipay’s “Overseas Travel Channel (支付宝境外游)” to give travelers exclusive gifts, better exchange rates, or let them find deals near where they’re going, all within the app on their mobile device. WeChat’s website within an app feature gives consumers the opportunity to reserve a product online to pick up in a store and access store locators in their own language that they can hand to a taxi driver en route.
But about half of Chinese travelers are doing research on what they want to buy abroad before they leave, and luxury brands have been adopting strategies to target these consumers, according to L2.

In a dissent opinion, Pierre Gervois, Publisher of the STC magazine, a digital travel media in Chinese Mandarin, said “The most important for retailers is not the way Chinese shoppers are going to pay. It’s a technicality. Chinese Customers who want to make a purchase have plenty of options: Cash, credit Cards or WeChat Pay.  The really important thing to do is to convince them to choose a particular retailer”

“Too oftenly, we see U.S. retailers being obsessed by Chinese mobile payment systems when their strategy should be focused on branding their image to Chinese millennial travelers, and create an emotional connection with their future customers, based on their brand values”, Gervois added.

A good starting point is to provide an international store locator on their official online store in China, a strategy about 72 percent of brands employ. However, brands can also take it a step further by adding a Chinese-language travel retail site that let shoppers research the products, compare prices, read reviews, view maps that direct them to duty free shops, and even let them purchase the product online in advance so that they can simply pick it up at the airport if they’re in a hurry.
To help consumers find these pages, brands are paying for search term generated Baidu ads. L2 lists the efforts of beauty brands as an example—many brands pay for cosmetics-related key words, while others, like Lancôme, are taking a more travel-centric approach, targeting consumers researching phrases like “South Korean vacation.”

Some high end retailers, such as Bloomingdale’s, choose a more qualitative approach, and advertise in luxury digital travel publications about the U.S., like the STC magazine, available for mobile but also in digital inflight entertainment.

With a very creative advertising campaign created by China Elite Focus Magazines in New York, they organized interviews of actual Mainland Chinese customers while shopping at their Third avenue flagship store.  The story of six actual Chinese Bloomingdale’s customers has been published in the digital edition of the STC magazine: It has much more impact than buying keywords on Chinese search engines and directly talked to the heart of Chinese consumers.

While maintaining an engaging physical presence in airports and shopping malls is always important for marketing to the Chinese shopper abroad, brands that understand how to make the most of China’s digital sphere are likely going to more efficiently connect with Chinese travelers who are in the process of creating their luxury goods shopping list for their next overseas vacation.

Source: Jing Daily / Skift / Chinese Tourists Blog

Luxury brands might have forgotten that Wealthy Chinese shoppers also wanted a good service

Kering, the French luxury group, is adapting its sales approach to better cater for increasingly sophisticated Chinese customers, according to group managing director Jean-François Palus.
“We’ve changed the way we conduct our business in China and the way we address Chinese clients when they’re abroad,” said Mr Palus at the Financial Times luxury conference in Lisbon on Tuesday.
“We learnt that a very serious risk is to become complacent, to think that it’s an easy business, an easy customer base, easy to open stores with good products and then people will come in. That was true for a moment but Chinese customers have become sophisticated and highly demanding and we need to adapt.”
Chinese consumers account for more than 30 per cent of global luxury consumption, according to consultant Bain, which is forecast to increase to 35 per cent by 2020.
How much of global luxury consumption Chinese consumers account for, according to Bain, a figured set to rise to 35% by 2020
In the past, luxury houses relied on rapidly opening up stores in China to fuel growth amid rampant Asian demand for their products, but this approach has been undermined by an economic slowdown in China.
In the final quarter of last year, Chinese consumers showed signs of returning, although notably shopping more in mainland China, while tourism in Europe has slowed in part owing to recent terrorist attacks.
In China, Kering is retraining shop assistants and replacing email communication with WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform with more than 800m daily users.
Mr Palus said: “The way the Chinese treat very important clients is different — they have a very candid approach to wealth.”
He pointed to a recent visit to a Gucci store in Beijing where the store manager told him he had hired the daughter of a billionaire to work with clients in the shop “because to talk to wealthy people in China, you need to be wealthy”. He added that bad feng shui in a shop can hurt client traffic.
According to Pierre Gervois, the New York Based Founder and Publisher of the STC magazine, a luxury travel publication for High Net Worth Chinese global travelers “HNWI Chinese clearly signaled about  five years ago that they wanted to purchase luxury goods outside China, to enjoy the full experience of the iconic flagship stores in London, Paris or New York”
“This new trend has not been immediately recognized by luxury conglomerates such as LVMH and Kering, that led to an inflation of store openings in China in the years 2010/2015, with little customer traffic, insufficient staff training, and in some cases damaging consequences in terms of brand image.”, Mr Gervois added.
Kering posted a 31.2 per cent rise in revenues to €3.57bn in the first three months of 2017, lifted by a 34 per cent jump in sales from luxury activities.
Among its brands, Gucci led the way, posting record revenue growth of 51.4 per cent for the three months — the latest sign of improvement under creative director Alessandro Michele. Other Kering brands such as Brioni and Bottega Veneta were doing less well than the likes of Saint Laurent.
Mr Palus said: “The market has become more difficult and the pace of growth has slowed down. In this environment you need to take market share from the competition.”
Kering was not looking at acquisitions, added Mr Palus. “We have so much on our plate with helping our existing brands tap their potential . . . we don’t have enough time to think about M&A.”
He said that Kering was also still adapting to digital platforms. “We need to open ourselves to what’s happening in other industries and other countries. Our industry needs to become less product-centric and become more customer-centric.”

Source: The Financial Times / Chinese Tourists Blog