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Bernard Arnault Page 3 of 4
Ownership certainly applies to kinship. "Our goal for the group is to remain a family company," Arnault declares. Though Delphine and Antoine say they were never pressured to work for their father, they felt included in the business from an early age. When Arnault was wrestling for control of LVMH in 1989, Antoine, then 12, remembers, "He was always explaining to me what was going on." After he took over the group Arnault spent Saturday mornings in Paris, taking his son and daughter to visit LVMHowned shops.
"He always said, 'If you want to work with me, you have to work harder than the others and do well in school,'" recalls Antoine, garrulous and model handsome and, like his father, clad in a Dior suit, matching tie and Berluti loafers. at Insead, Antoine spent two years launching, then selling, an Internet venture and toiled for three months as a sales assistant at the huge Vuitton store on the Champs Elys selling handbags, before taking a management post responsible for 13 stores outside Paris. Delphine also labored in the LVMH retail trenches, as a perfume salesgirl at the Paris Dior boutique. She studied at the London School of Economics and worked at McKinsey before joining her father's company in 2000. (She is married to Alessandro Vallarino Gancia, who runs his own finance company and serves on Dior's board.)printnewslettershareDigg It!FacebookRedditUnsurprisingly, both young Arnaults express reverence for their father. "I think he's a visionary, one of the most visionary of his generation," says Delphine. on a Thursday evening. "I feel very lucky to be part of what he is creating."
Arnault has three other children from his second marriage, in 1991, to H Mercier, a French Canadian pianist: Alexandre,[url=http://www.sport.fr/smartphones/moncler.asp]moncler homme[/url], 18, Fr 15, and Jean, 12. These days Arnault does his Saturday morning retail tour with Alexandre, who has already expressed interest in joining LVMH.
Patrimony has deep roots. Arnault was raised to go into the family business, a construction company called FerretSavinel in the northern industrial city of Roubaix. At age 7 he visited building sites with his grandfather, learning the importance of hard work and giving Arnault "the flavor of entrepreneurship." After earning an engineering degree at Paris' prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in 1971, he joined his father, taking charge of the company at age 25. trying to establish a branch of the family business as a developer of Florida real estate. The venture didn't work out, but Delphine and Antoine learned flawless English. Arnault brought home an aggressively American approach to taking over and running businesses. It has made him a terrifying competitor.
In 1984, when the French government was looking for someone to take over a bankrupt textile and disposablediaper business called Boussac, Arnault convinced Lazard Fr to add $80 million to his $15 million of Arnault family money. The bedraggled company included one jewel, fashion house Dior, and Arnault quickly stripped away the other businesses. Dior had earlier sold its perfume brand to Louis Vuitton Mo (the result of a 1987 merger). Arnault coveted the label, so he used the $400 million from selling off Boussac's assets and, backed by Lazard, took advantage of dissent within the Louis Vuitton Mo ranks, siding with Vuitton Chief Henri Racamier to oust Mo Alain Chevalier. Then, buying up sufficient shares and exploiting the courts to amend corporate bylaws, Arnault deposed Racamier and seized the entire company in 1990.
He took charge immediately, sweeping much of manufacturing and distribution under his control. In order to extend LVMH's reach across a range of highend brands, Arnault turned into a binge acquirer. Throughout the 1990s he paid billions of dollars for fashion labels that included Fendi, Kenzo and Thomas Pink; jewelry and watchmakers Chaumet, Zenith and TAG Heuer; and retail chains like DFS and Sephora. He also bought a handful of ultrahaute boutique companies like Berluti, which makes custom men's shoes.
There have been spectacular busts. After failing to bag Sotheby'sBID ), Arnault paid a reported $97 million for Phillips, a distant number three auction house, in 1999. Hurt by the plunge in business following Sept. 11, Arnault dumped Phillips in early 2002. His one attempt to create a fashion brand ended badly. Founded in 1987, Christian Lacroixan eponymous label whose strategy was to start with couture items to grab attention, then introduce a readytowear linenever quite clicked. Arnault unloaded it in 2005; it filed for bankruptcy last year. Most dramatically, Arnault tried and failed to turn a minority stake in fashion house Gucci into control of the company but lost to French billionaire Fran Pinault's PinaultPrintempsRedoutesetting up a rivalry on several fronts (including fashion and art collecting) that persists today.
Until his latest move on H Arnault contented himself with emphatic and creative brand extensions, infusing classy labels with a sense of contemporary cool, carefully controlling quality through his trusted aides. At corporate headquarters on Avenue Montaigne, which houses Paris' biggest Dior boutique, Delphine oversees the haute couture atelier on the top floor, where three dozen seamstresses stitch triple silk organza, handpainted with purple flowers, that will adorn a oneofa kind gown designed by John Galliano that might cost $35,000. Each dress is fitted to its own custommade white muslim dressmaker's dummy, labeled with the client's name, many of them the wives of Middle East oil barons.