Although the objective is exclusivity, there are many luxury brands that are crazy about selling as much as possible. While it is true that the desire is for the wealthy buyer to be a patrician who appreciates the value of the product, the nouveau riche fascinated by the logo will also do. For this reason, the restricted luxury sector does not hesitate to apply the same techniques as other commercial industries, such as advertising, marketing, social networks or online sales.
Fortunately, in luxury crafts you can still find small and long-standing brands that maintain their obsession with quality and the pleasure of what is handmade. However, if you don’t have a $50,000 crocodile travel bag or a shopping bag from the 1800s, there’s no way you know the best-kept secret in fashion: Goyard is the French leather goods and accessories brand that only those – and few know about. – who can buy your products. Well, the brand does not advertise in fashion magazines, it is allergic to logomania, it does not spend on advertising, it does not sell online and its production is restricted.
The year was 1792 when Pierre-François Martin founded a small workshop for the manufacture of boxes, trunks and packaging. The so-called Casa Martin, the seed of what is now Goyard, specialized in packaging fragile objects and furniture, with such efficiency that the workshop became the official supplier of María Carolina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, Duchess of Berry. Soon, the articles of the Martin house were positioning themselves among the elites of French society thanks to their quality and craftsmanship.
However, it was not until 1852 that the Martin house made the qualitative leap that allowed it to become what it is today. Pierre-François Martin had no children and therefore the succession of the workshop went from bosses to apprentices. One of those pupils was François Goyard who, together with his son Edmond, turned the brand into an increasingly elite institution with an international clientele. The key factor that introduced the Goyard surname to the brand was the creation of new, more modern workshops and maximum control of the entire production line. In fact, Edmond’s sons turned the firm into a true family company where each one had a specific responsibility in the assembly and production line.
Thus, while the workshop passed from bosses to workers and the Goyard surname appeared, the firm was positioning itself among the elites of France and all of Europe. The firm’s order files include important personalities of the 19th and 20th centuries such as Pablo Picasso, Sacha Guitry, the Maharajah of Kapurthala, Jacques Cartier, the Agnelli and the Rockefellers, the Romanovs and the Grimaldi, Estée Lauder, Barbara Hutton, the Ms. Pompidou and Princess Aga Khan, Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin, Romy Schneider, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf and Arthur Rubinstein, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Karl Lagerfeld.
Despite the success and after five generations of the Goyard family, in 1998 the firm was sold in a precarious financial situation to the French textile businessman Jean-Michel Signoles, founder of the Chipie children’s clothing company. Signoles begins to make important changes in the firm to modernize the long-standing brand. The entrepreneur introduces new designs, colors, products, and a customization service for items. He reforms the workshop, opens new stores in Asia, North America, a couple in Europe and one in Sao Paulo. And he ends up opening a web page and a Facebook profile.
However, Signoles continued with the essence of the brand and maintained its quality, a limited production level, a commitment to advertising silence and even hired members of the Goyard family. The changes paid off and if in the year 2000 the income was 1.14 million dollars, a figure that rose to 41.2 million in 2013. In other words, Jean-Michel Signoles achieved a perfect mix between tradition and modernity.
Unfortunately, the history of this 224-year-old brand may end in the lion’s den, that is, in the jaws of the oligopolistic market of the luxury industry. The giants Kering and LVMH could be behind the purchase of this firm, according to Bloomberg. For the moment, Jean-Michel Signoles has not mentioned whether he intends to sell the company, however there are experts who point out that the firm could be reaching such a volume of business that to survive it needs a know-how that only the largest groups can provide.
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