Buccellati CEO Nicolas Luchsinger on Competing with Fashion Brands in Jewelry [INTERVIEW]

MILAN — Nicolas Luchsinger is so passionate about jewelry, it’s contagious — and he’s always made sure the category would be at the heart of his career.

“I have been interested in jewelry my whole life, since very early on,” said Luchsinger, who became chief executive officer of Buccellati in April, succeeding Gianluca Brozzetti, who was named executive vice president.

“When I was 12 years old, I received a book on jewelry from a friend of my mother, and I fell in love with jewelry. And since then, I have always collected jewelry books,” he related in his first interview since joining the Milan-based brand, his manner informal, upbeat and zesftful.

Luchsinger was previously president of Asia-Pacific at Van Cleef & Arpels. Over the past 17 years, he has held managerial roles ranging from retail director to heritage director at the brand, which like Buccellati is controlled by Compagnie Financière Richemont. Previously, he worked for almost 10 years at Christie’s.

Here, Luchsinger maps out his strategies for the Milan-based Buccellati — a brand founded in 1919 now designed by fourth-generation heir Andrea Buccellati and his daughter Lucrezia, known for exquisitely engraved and openwork jewels, handmade with traditional goldsmith craftsmanship dating to the Renaissance, and recognized for its tulle, lace and twisted thread motifs, as well as for its silverware.

WWD: What attracted you so much to jewelry as a young boy?

Nicolas Luchsinger: I was very much interested in its history and how it was connected to royalty, celebrities, movie stars. I grew up in Lausanne, very close to Geneva. And in Geneva you always have these auctions from Christie’s and Sotheby’s, so I used to go to look at the jewelry and take the catalogues, because they also have these incredible catalogue collections of all the jewelry sales. I studied law because I didn’t really know what to study [laughing], and my family are lawyers, but then I interned at Christie’s and it became my first job in Geneva for a year. After, I moved to New York to study gems because I knew nothing about stones. I never had a piece of jewelry in my hands before, I was just looking at them in books and in show cases. When you start your life in the jewelry world, it’s great to start with an auction house, because from very early you see amazing pieces. You have so many pieces coming from dealers, from privates every day, coming and leaving, and at the same time, you meet incredible clients, because every day there is an interesting client pushing the door in an auction house.

WWD: How formative was the experience at Christie’s and how did it help shape your career?

N.L.: I always say that my French accent helped me, because clients cannot remember your last name but they remember I was a tall man with a French accent [smiling]. So I could network a lot, meeting people from around the world, and this network that I built at Christie’s is still a network that helped me a lot at Van Cleef & Arpels and at Buccellati.

WWD: After staying at Christie’s for 10 years, why were you ready for a change?

N.L.: It was a great, great adventure, but an auction house has a very regular calendar throughout the year, and you know exactly what your year will look like and where you will be. And then I, as much as I love selling jewelry, and I still love selling jewelry today, I love meeting the clients and I love finding the rare pieces for them, understanding what they like, advising them, but when Van Cleef came, it was the perfect timing, and they offered me to be the director of the New York store. And I loved it and I learned a lot about the selling techniques, because at an auction, they buy with a paddle. Here, you have to sometimes convince the client to buy a jewel, to push them elegantly.

WWD: You then rose through the ranks at Van Cleef & Arpels under the lead of Nicolas Bos, former CEO of that brand and current CEO of Richemont, who eventually brought you to Buccellati. What attracted you to Buccellati?

N.L.: I always liked Buccellati because, funnily enough, it’s a maison that my mother always liked. When we were in Milan and she wanted a bracelet, it was Luca Buccellati who sold it to us at the store, already on Via Montenapoleone, I remember [the Buccellati heir] very well. And then he took us to see the archives because at the time they were above the store [they are now in the Milan showroom where the interview took place] and he showed us letters from [Italian poet] Gabriele D’Annunzio [who named Buccellati “Prince of Goldsmiths”] to [his lover, actress Eleonora] Duse and I remember that very well. It was an incredible experience. And when I started six months ago, I met Luca again.

Also, silver is another interest of mine. I love silver, and I always collected silver myself because I grew up in Lausanne, a city where there were a lot of very famous silversmiths. Buccellati’s silver is extraordinary and it’s a business we want to develop a lot.

WWD: COVID-19 has helped turn the attention on redecorating the home. Have you seen an increased interest in the silverware segment?

N.L.: Yes, during the pandemic people were so bored that they started to set up these incredible tables at home, mixing flowers, tablecloths, silver dishes, and suddenly it started to be a trend. On Instagram, you have a lot of people who just post incredible tables every day, which I follow them all, obviously, and we can see that.

When I joined, we started setting up a table according to the season, so the first one was for summer in Via Montenapoleone. We did it with the blue china and the Tahiti set. And we put a silver lemon and a big lobster. And then we found the matching linen. We had it in Capri last summer, and a client came fresh off of their yacht and ordered the same table for 60 people. I told the retail department I wanted exactly the same table to be in every store worldwide and we are doing the same for fall and so on. I want to keep the tradition of jewelry and silversmiths the way it has always been, making it a little bit fresher, newer sometimes, but I will not do a complete break.

WWD: How are you applying your retail experience at Buccellati?

N.L.: When you develop a network, you need to have rules and to train the sales associates for the experience. Buccellati is Italian so I really want the sales associates to express this Italianization of Buccellati all over the world. When you are welcomed in a store, being in China, being in the Middle East, in the United States, you must feel that it’s an Italian maison. And I bring my experience knowing the American, Asia-Pacific and European markets, which helps, given that Buccellati is also an international brand with 73 stores. I want to develop our stores and the home and silver corners, because I think that’s something you will buy more of if you see it displayed.

WWD: How is the business split?

N.L: Jewelry is the core, followed by watches, made in Switzerland, and then home. In quantities, the homeware is much more important because we sell a lot of pieces but in value, it’s jewelry.

WWD: Are you planning a renovation of the stores? What are your plans for Buccellati’s retail network?

N.L.: I’m very happy with the stores, which were designed by Andrea Buccellati and I love this mix of traditional boiserie and the furniture from the 18th century and the mix of bold pieces from the ‘70s, a mix of wood and metal. We plan to add even more original pieces as we just did with our store in Venice. We just opened a store in Seoul, we are relocating our store in Aspen and we are opening a store in Riyadh.

WWD: What is Buccellati’s main market?

N.L.: Asia-Pacific, but the U.S. is also a very big market and we want to develop it further. We can be even bigger. It’s a big jewelry market, and Buccellati opened in first store in New York in the ‘50s. And it’s also a very important market for the home collection. Americans love decoration, so we want to have more collaborations with decorators and have silver featured in shoots.

WWD: What are your other main objectives going forward?

N.L.: Coming from Van Cleef, if you enter a store, you have a lot of jewelry, and a few core collections, and in this core collection you have different models, but at Buccellati you have even more core collections, and a lot of pieces. You have different necklaces, bracelet rings, large size, small, long, short. When I joined, I was bit overwhelmed by all this different product. We have to concentrate and edit, so that was my first reaction.

When you go shopping today, if you go to fashion brand, you see the same product in Milan, in New York, in Dubai, in Shanghai. And I think this for the customer, is boring, you see them in the same showcase, the same window, the same thing. When I started to travel for Buccellati, to the U.S., to Japan, every time there was jewelry I didn’t recognize. And then I thought, it’s very, very charming that we have all these different products. So what I still want to do is analyze clearly all these different products and to see what sells, what doesn’t sell, and if it’s something which really doesn’t sell, I want to discontinue it, but I don’t want to streamline so much as I wanted the first weeks or months on my job, because I think it’s really part of Buccellati to have so many products and to have each client to experience a discovery when they enter the store.

Also, we have these incredible bracelets and cuffs, and I want to push them, to become signature Buccellati jewels. I want every jewelry collector in the world to have a Buccellati cuff. Jewelry collectors need to feel very secure. They will buy something that they can recognize.

WWD: Jewelry brands have been investing in high jewelry collections, presentations and itinerant shows. What is Buccellati’s strategy for this category?

N.L.: We had a high jewelry collection that was very successful called Mosaico, which launched two years ago and we will launch a new one in two years again. We have been remodeling the floor above our Via Montenapoleone store [which will be unveiled next week in Palazzo Gavazzi] to present our collections and entertain our clients. But everything is handmade, so we have to find the right artisans and train them for at least six months. We have 52 artisans here in Milan and a total of 159 in our six ateliers, but we are gradually increasing that number.

WWD: Do you have an in-house school?

N.L.: No, we work with a lot of schools though, and it’s something I’m thinking about, a sort of accademia as an organization to accompany the students after they leave school.

WWD: Especially in challenging times, jewelry is considered an investment, but do you think the industry and the perception of this category has changed recently?

N.L.: Yes, jewelry is considered a refuge, but things have changed a lot from my days at Christie’s because of the marketing campaigns by the big players. People buy branded jewelry, which was not the case when I started in this business. When I was at Christie’s,  you could have an incredible Art Deco bracelet that was not signed and today, a signed bracelet is [valued] 300 times more than a non- signed bracelet. People don’t trust or want unsigned jewelry, because they trust the brand, they trust the signature, the quality of the craftsmanship and of the stone. It’s a shame because there’s some  great vintage pieces from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, which were not signed.

WWD: Fashion brands have also entered the arena.

N.L.: Yes, which leads to a lot of competition, but I see that mostly in Asia, where they associate the brand’s jewelry with the long history of the fashion category, and they may not know when exactly that brand started offering jewelry. The huge advantage that a fashion brand has with us in Asia is client database, because the fashion brand can decide to do a high jewelry dinner in Shanghai, and they will say, ‘I will invite everybody who bought 100,000 dollars or more of fashion.’ And they know that these people are very rich, and they show them a high jewelry collection, which they can afford.