French designer brand Vanessa Bruno is gearing up to open new points of sale and expand into the Chinese market by opening its very first store in Shanghai this summer.
The latest move comes a few months after fashion label Brand Sisters, a company headed by Arié Benayoun, who already owns Zapa and Tara Jarmon, took a stake in the premium label in December 2022. The expansion is very much aligned with the Parisian label’s growth, which claims to have recorded around 30% of growth year-on-year in 2022.
Together with Vanessa Bruno, the three brands now have a total of about 250 stores, compared to the 180 points of sale from Tara Jarmon and Zapa alone. However, Vanessa Bruno’s managing director Henri Sebaoun emphasized that these three brands will not be integrated under a single concept, “Vanessa Bruno Group currently has three shareholders: Brand Sisters, Vanessa Bruno with a majority stake, and myself”.
Unfazed by the slowdown caused by the pandemic on the execution of the brand strategy, Vanessa Bruno now holds about 300 retailers in the world and more than 60 brand sales points in France, distributed in department stores and boutiques.
“We will open China’s first pop-up store in Shanghai at the end of June, and then officially open a boutique on West Nanjing Road. This is a very interesting project, I would love to see how it lands and runs and hope it will be a success,” stated Vanessa Bruno.
According to Bain & Company, China is expected to become the world’s largest luxury market by 2025. Moreover, in its China Luxury Report 2021, the global management consulting firm indicated that the domestic sales of personal luxury goods in the Chinese mainland increased 36% year-on-year to nearly 471 billion RMB (74.4 billion USD) in 2021, doubling its sales from 2019.
Given the growth of the luxury market in China, coupled with the greater maturity of the e-commerce sector in China, expansion into this market presents a plethora of opportunities for a French label such as Vanessa Bruno to increase its brand visibility overseas.
