We had an internal team discussion about this because we only had one collection a year [before], and I felt it had to be a brand statement; we needed to show our creativity and innovation. But the commercial people said that [the designs were] too innovative, too creative, and too difficult to sell. So, at some point, I said I wanted to separate the two collections. For [Histoire de Style in] January, I asked Claire [Choisne, artistic director of Boucheron] to cast a fresh eye on our archives – more about classics and big stones, etc. – and I told her, for this collection, she had no KPIs regarding press coverage. But I told the commercial director that his KPI was to sell all of the pieces. Then, for Carte Blanche in July, Claire had total freedom, but she had maximum KPIs in terms of press. Then, I told the commercial director if he didn’t sell any of these pieces, I didn’t care. One year later, we discovered that we sold all the pieces from July and had a lot of press in January! So everybody’s happy. We still have quite a few clients who buy high jewellery for investing, but we also have clients who want to jump into Claire’s high jewellery world – it’s much like buying contemporary art.
This year will be very exciting for you with the 20th anniversary of the Quatre collection. What can people expect?