People Are Still Shopping

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1:49Hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Lauren Sherman, writer of Pucks Fashion and Beauty Memo Line Sheet. And today with me on the show is Frances Bellin, the CEO of MyTheresa. Talking about the state of luxury in 2026, how multi-brand retail can work in the age of DTC, and so much more. Before we get going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck where I send an email called line sheet. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. It's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries. Line sheet is scoopy analytical and above all fun.

2:32Along with me, a subscription to Puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment, media, sports, politics, finance, the art world, and much more. If you're interested, Did listeners of Fashion People get a discount? Just go to puck.news slash fashion people to join Puck or start a free trial. Happy Friday, everyone. Hope you had a great week. Unless there is some big catastrophe. Let's hope not. I will be in Paris the next time you listen to this. I took the red eye back from New York yesterday. Hmm. What can I say about New York these days?

3:11It did feel a little like end times. That was the word, the phrase people use, end times. Is it New York? Is it America? Is it everything? Is it just like the state of our culture? The Met Gala is a reflection of the times and the Bezos of it all, the sort of over the top element. It was all there. Look, they raised$42 million. Can they top that next year? Probably. Do they want to? I don't know. I think it's going to require them to ask many more people to pay a million a ticket. Anyway, on Wednesday night, I had an amazing puck private dinner with the team from Belmont Park Village, this shopping destination near the stadium out there.

3:53I've talked about it on here before. If you haven't been, you should go. If you've been to the legendary Bicester Village in the UK, which I know many of you have, you're familiar with this group, but we had a great time. It was a mix of C-suite executives, some who have shops there, some who don't. And then a lot of media people. And it was fun. It was a very lively, off-the-record debate. I also just wanted to thank the King and Dean's team, Lay Wine Bar. They also own that Annie and Jess and Jupiter. They made an incredible meal. It was very King-coated, the chocolate cake, which flourless chocolate cake is my favorite dessert of all time.

4:31If I only could have one dessert, that's what it would be. So I enjoyed it. I also ate at Dean's with my friend Marissa Meltzer and frequent fashion people guest on Tuesday night. And it was delicious. We had a great time. Great fish and chips. But look, New York is very weird right now. And anyone who says differently is lying. Cabs are very expensive. Flower bouquets at Meadow Lane are$200. Please don't buy one. I did get the almond milk there, though. It was pretty good. And I did get that loon and water and it's delicious. But I don't know. It feels like everything. Everybody's talking about AI, it felt like everything is AI generated.

5:10And I'm not a person, I don't think about my finances enough, but like, I really saw the cost of things on this trip. The world is, is just weird right now. But I did go to a lot of great art shows and saw friends and, you know, the sun will keep rising and setting whether you want it to or not. That's from Anne of Green Gables. Anyway, excited to see how Dior and Gucci and Louis Vuitton and all those other resort shows are in the U.S., please send your reports. And let's get going with Francis. It was a pleasure to chat with him. My Teresa is one of the only retailers who didn't mess up yet. And so it's fun to hear what he has planned.

5:53Francis Bellen, welcome to Fashion People. Hi, Lauren. Good to see you. Good to see you too. What did you have for breakfast this morning? For breakfast. I skip breakfast. I believe in fasting. As do I. So what did you eat lunch? Are you in Europe right now or are you in the US? I'm in Munich. So I had a light lunch from the canteen. We have a really nice canteen. And it's just nice to be there and to see the rest of the team during Men's Club. You know, it's interesting. It feels like to me, I've been in New York for five days now. And I'm coming from Europe. And it feels like in some ways, Europe, and I don't mean this negatively, is 10 years behind the U.S.

6:36in terms of adaptation of trends of self-improvement and the use of AI and the cost of things. But it's interesting that you're into the fasting. It feels like a very American thing to me. Is it? Look, I've been doing it for many years, and I think it works pretty well. Well, good advice for everyone. So tell me, how long have you been at MyTeresa for? So it's been just a few days over four months. So it's four months and a few days now because I joined the beginning of January. And how's it been so far? It's been amazing. It's been really been a great journey. I didn't know so much the space because my background is actually not in fashion.

7:25It's not in e-commerce. And so it's been a few weeks of discovery and continuing to feel that it's a very strong business in a relatively complicated landscape. And I think there's many more things we can do and we will do. So I'm very excited to come from, you know, with a very different perspective and be able to build on all the great things that have been achieved by the firm. So tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up at MyTeresa. You worked at Christie's for a long time, right? So how I ended up, Luke, I still don't know exactly. It's just a headhunter who kind of picked up the phone and called me.

8:07But I have a background, which is I had three main periods in my career before joining MyTeresa. The first one was a management consultant. I started my career at McKinsey in Paris. I worked quite a bit in Asia and very quickly into consumer goods, retail consumer goods. Then I had a retail moment. So I moved to Japan in 2005. I joined Richemont to lead one of the watch brands. It was interesting because Japan at that time was still, compared to the rest of the world, was still an absolute powerhouse when it comes to luxury. And while I was in Japan at John Zorowski, the Austrian crystal jewelry, and I worked for them in Japan.

8:49Then I worked in Hong Kong in different capacities. And then I left about 10 years ago to join Christie's where I did a number of things. So I was global managing director for Asian Art, so managing all the specialist team across the world that based in Hong Kong. Then I took over the portfolio in addition to the Asian Art of Asia Pacific. And then luxury from 2022 where I looked after wine, watch this handbags um jewelry and and a year before i left cars who acquired a vintage car company in california called gooding that became in company that was one of my big project when i was there must be really interesting going into first line retail after getting such a a strong understanding of the the secondary luxury luxury market which many i feel like many of the luxury brands have been sort of reticent to engage with, but you saw it all firsthand how it was working.

9:51I think it's interesting to hop. I mean, you can tell from my retail experience to the auction house experience and then to fashion and e-commerce. I mean, they don't seem to overlap so much if you look at it from far away. But if you dig a bit deeper, there's actually a lot of the prerequisite for these businesses to operate in a successful way that actually overlap. And I think what is an obsession at my Teresa is the customer and the way we've built everything we've done is always around who's our customer. We've defined very clearly who the customer is and then how do we serve them the best we can from the assortment, the service, the relationship and emotional connections with the event that we host.

10:42So if I go back to my Christie's time in the ocean world, of course it was a different business model. It was a different type of object that we were selling. But at the end of the day, it's the same recipe. It just has to be very sharp about who you want to serve and how you can be the best at serving them. What was it like being in Asia during the period you were there? So were you there for 20 years? I was in Asia for 21 years, yes. So you were there as the luxury industry was consolidating, as China was kind of becoming a huge driver of growth. As you mentioned, Japan in the 90s, you saw the sort of ups and downs of that maturing market.

11:29And then living in Hong Kong during a period of transformation there as well. what did you observe about the sort of power of that part of the world for companies that are you know selling stuff to people yeah look i think it's been i mean it definitely doesn't feel like a linear life that i have for the 21 years that i spent in asia it was i when i joined japan i started when japan was still in the absolute powerhouse i think in asia and china China was just starting to emerge because really things started to change after 2002 in China. And Japan was a country very sophisticated, really at the forefront of everything you can do intellectually.

12:18And Japan has shaped actually a number of players that are powerhouses today, but they started first and foremost by being successful in Japan 30 years ago. and then moving on to Hong Kong a few years later into a different field because it was not hard luxury it was affordable, we said premium with Zrowski it was fascinating to see the speed at which that business was developing I mean I started to look after China in 2011 for Zrowski and we were literally opening 30 stores 40 stores per year and we started with slightly over 100 And when I left in 2016, five years later, we had almost 400. But it's been also a moment where things were changing.

13:04When China was maturing at a speed which is phenomenal. It was becoming an exceedingly sophisticated market. And that has not changed. Moving into Christie's, I continue to see also how collectors were moving from categories very close to their heart and their cultural heritage with Chinese ceramics or Chinese painting. and then gradually over the nine years when I was there just becoming some of the most sophisticated collectors of Western art whether it's contemporary or modern and moving the market literally in these categories and being exceedingly active. So what I think is always interesting when looking back at these 20-some years in Asia is to observe how the Asian consumer has been shaping actually what happens in some of these industries and has been so important to a lot of the successful brands in the luxury world.

13:59I think that's something I don't think we should forget. No. We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it. But the outdoors is closer than we realize. With AllTrails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on-trail navigation. Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with AllTrails. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B-plus life?

14:41It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B-minus or a C-plus life because when you're living a B or B-plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Suzy Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A-plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts. You're talking about the Christie's consumer as a collector. When you look at how people buy art or buy secondhand fashion or luxury cars, that sort of thing, versus how they shop for contemporary fashion or new fashion, I guess is a better word.

15:32What do you think the difference in this? Is there a difference in the psychological mindset when they're looking to buy a painting versus looking to buy a skirt? I think it's very different. And I don't think it would surprise anyone by saying so. But I think the journey of an art collector is a very personal journey to start with. I mean, you're talking about sums at stake that are very significant. Even collectors who are serious with a smaller budget, it's still a very serious part of their finances. And it's a journey of discovering art, but also of self-discovery of what is your own taste, what type of art actually speaks to you as a person.

16:15And it's an emotional journey, which is extremely, I think for a lot of the collectors and the top collectors that I met when I was at Christie's is very deep. And there's additional motifs to it. There is a legacy part to it. There is a philanthropic side of it. I've met so many collectors who really see themselves as a, and rightly so. As a custodian of art, when you collect Qing dynasty ceramics, you're not the first one to have it. You're not even the second one. I mean, I don't know how many generations have actually seen that object. And the responsibility that these collectors feel they have in protecting art for a future generation is actually very heavy.

17:00Fashion is a different category in a way that it's an emotional genre as well. as a way to express what individuals feel through the way they dress and what they wear. And the secondary market, I think, is just part of this. It's just a wish to maybe have a more environmental friendly approach to it, or there's an economical aspect to it, a financial aspect to it. But I don't think, I mean, I do see clients collecting fashion in a that they are very active, but I don't think it's the same objective ultimately as what you would find from our colleagues. The My Teresa customer from all the communication that the group does regarding the performance of the business, but then also I've been to a lot of, I've been to customer events that you all have done and I've sort of watched since it spun out of Neiman Marcus group, the development of MyTeresa in the last five, six years.

18:05What observation have you made about the MyTeresa customer in particular? And what sort of distinguishes it from the customer of other competitors or other retailers or single brand? It is one of the few retailers left that I sort of can picture the customer in my mind, which is pretty remarkable. Well, thank you for saying this. I think what we have always been laser focused on at MyTheresa is customer who needs a great partner to be their wardrobe builder. So this is fundamentally what we do for women, for a large portion of our business, increasingly for men. we basically want to be the best and the preferred port of call for whatever these top customers should be looking for in terms of fashion and I think this defines everything we do whether it's the assortment that we have the brands that we select within these brands the assortment that we actually carry, it defines the experience that we have across the different platforms whether it's our website or the app or WeChat for China, but it also defines the way we engage the customers, whether it's our social media or with much more proximity for some of them, the events that we host.

19:32And I think it's a customer who is exceedingly active in terms of buying fashion. And it's a customer who is very, of course, very sophisticated and very specific about the brands that she or he is looking for. and this explains also why we want to keep everything at my Teresa being laser focused, very simple. We want to keep things very simple. We have 250 brands across our assortment. We don't want 300 and we don't have 300 because our clients don't want 300. If we say we have the best edit, it means that if you're looking for a black dress, we give you 20 black dresses. We don't give 500. because we don't want you to scroll through pages and pages and pages.

20:22We say, like, we do our job. We have a point of view, and we think these are the best ones. And this is, I believe, also the simplicity is something that has found an incredible amount of value for our clients. The simplicity of the design of our website, our app, the simplicity of our communication, our newsletter. You don't see editorial content at my Teresa because it's not something that our customers feel they need or they want. We don't send you a newsletter saying this is the five best dress for your first job interview. So like this is not the MyTheresa customer. And MyTheresa customer is like we're launching this brand's exclusive capsule.

21:03We're launching this brand's, you know, newness. And this is what speaks to them. So many of the big luxury brands. One of the things that's been interesting about MyTrees in the last year is, you know, having Phoebe Philo really early as a multi brand and also having it online. It recently publicly launched Phoebe Philo and it was it was a big deal. And also having, you know, a lot of the bigger luxury brands that have pulled back from wholesale quite a bit. some of them will never be in wholesale or will only, you know, Chanel may only ever be in Hershleifers and the Webster or what have you.

21:41But when you look at the landscape, how much of what MyTheresa does is Tiffany going out and finding new designers versus making sure you have the mix of this established brands that people sort of go to no matter what? Yeah. I mean, as an introduction to your question, you talk about Phoebe Fido. I don't think we can put that into the new designer category. So I think we have customers who have a very established test and they know what they're looking for. So we get intrigued and interested by new designers and new brands, and we do introduce some of them. But we very carefully look one season, two season, three season, four season to see is that really a brand that shows consistency and that we are confident to add.

22:34Because we don't add lightly. We have very few brands. and when we add, we add very seriously because we have a strong belief that actually it fits the needs and the expectation of our customer. Now, of course, what we love to do is what we've done with the brand that we were just referring to because we pre-launched under a section of our website and app which is called Privé, which is only accessible for a limited number of our clients and it worked really well and I think we managed to convince the brand to actually launch into public, and it did exceedingly well. But it's not the only brand that we have that we keep a little bit secret in terms of we have it, but not everybody would know because that's also what Maitreza does.

23:21We might not be, you know, some of these brands are actually very high in demand. They are difficult to find. The quantity that they produce is limited. And I think we like to keep it quite secretive if we think that's the right thing and also if the brands we talked with want it that way. So we do, I wouldn't say we don't experiment, but we don't see ourselves as, we don't see this as something for the metal in our offering. But once we've built a good understanding of where a small brand is going and a strong confidence that what the brand is offering fits into what our customer is looking for, then we'll add, but then we add for the longer term.

24:04We don't add for a season, and then we move on. We add brands, and we do add every season a few brands and take out a few just to keep the assortment really tight, which I said earlier was important.

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26:35Do you think it's because the consumer in the U.S. has been protected from a lot of the kind of global strife because it's not in their backyard? Why do you think the U.S. market has been so resilient? I think there's a first the top line the GDP growth in the US, if I'm not wrong, is pretty resilient compared to other geographies around the world. I think there is, at the very top end of the market, we see a lot of velocity and dynamism. And I mean, I can't speak for brands who sell in the US, but I can speak about, I can speak for my Teresa and what we've seen in the multi-brand environments.

27:14And there's a lot of, we started in the US four and a half years ago, we've done incredible things to set up a team, put in place personal shoppers, get everything working, build a brand with a very specific brand equity that MyTheresa has. And we've built a great business in the US. And since the beginning of the year when there's obviously an even bigger window of opportunity for us because not everyone has products and clients still want to shop. And if they don't find their brand, just wonder where am I going to find the brand that I'm used to? I've been buying for so many seasons, and I think we've become the preferred destination for a lot of them.

27:58So the U.S. for us is an important market, and it's a growing market, as we explained in our earnings last time. And we continue to invest quite heavily because we believe that this is just the beginning for us. And we are still, I think if you look at the total size of the luxury market in the U.S., we're still relatively small. So I think we have a long way to go to capture even more market shares. We're very excited about this. Here's a question for you. You're coming into this business, the multi-brand retail landscape, forget about what's happened in the past year. The last 10 years have been totally crazy.

28:37There have been all these multi-brand retailers that had all this private equity backing that have imploded. Many companies have failed. When you look at the business model of multi-brand retail, it's hard to understand sometimes how it can work. I feel like if you're a certain size and you manage it really, really responsibly, it's possible. But as someone coming in who wasn't in this direct business and you evaluate your P &L and you look at your top line and your bottom line and all that stuff, if you were going to explain how multi -brand retail can work in 2026, what is the essential formula if there is one?

29:25I think the belief that multibrand can be anything for anybody is probably wrong. And the first thing to look at is, even if you're online and there's technically no real estate, there is a real estate because that real estate is the attention of your customer and how much time they're willing to spend to actually get what they're looking for. so being focused on the assortments being focused on the customer and being sure that the two actually match i think is is the absolute golden rule because if you start to think yeah but we could add this and this and that but there's no discipline in thinking but is that really for the target customer that we have then you probably you probably start to get out of the core of what's going to make you build a good business and a profitable one.