Chabi Nouri has been one of the few to break through the
glass ceilings. She joined Cartier in 1998 and rose quickly through the ranks
to become Jewelry Group manager at Cartier International in 2004. She left the
luxury brand to work as global head of brand for Vogue Cigarettes at BAT in
2009, but returned to the Richemont group in 2014 as director of marketing,
communications and heritage of Piaget, and was named in her current role as international
managing director of sales & marketing last September. On April 1, she will
become Piaget’s global CEO.
Q. How has your career
prepared you for the new position?
I’m very curious and I like to look at things with
different filters, which is why I didn’t really focus on one side of the
business throughout my career. Instead, I did a lot of different jobs. When I
joined Cartier in Switzerland, I started as a watch product manager, then I
went to the headquarters (in Paris) and was in charge of merchandising for all
the retail stores, cutting across all the brand’s offerings. And then I went
into retail, and was put in charge of boutique operations for half of the network
[US, emerging markets and a part of Europe]. I was also lucky enough to
experience the fast-moving consumer goods business [at BAT] and developed my
trade, finance and management skills. All of this has given me a multicultural
and multi-context background and I think it has helped me in the last few years
and will help me in comprehend the complete environment. It has put me in a
good position to understand all the different part of the business I have to
deal with. Of course there are always plenty of new experiences to discover and
learn.
Q. The announcement of your appointment mentioned
you’ve “already had a strong impact” at Piaget. Could you elaborate what you
have done?
It’s really been about refocusing on our DNA and values
and bringing forward the uniqueness of Piaget. We always had a fusion of sorts
between jewelry and watches and that’s what I’ve found very interesting: The
brand was not saying we’re going to approach jewelry as jewelry, and watches as
watches, it was always a fusion between the two worlds, which is very unique to
Piaget, and this really what my team and I wanted to focus on, and bring this
back again to the surface. For women, historically, Piaget has also been about
trying to find new ways to wear jewelry, with the sautoir watches, the cuff
watches and bracelets, and so we’ve brought those back, and recently we’ve also
introduced the ear cuffs. This is the pioneering side of Piaget, its more
audacious side.
I had a clear mission to balance our business and
accelerate the development of our jewelry segment. So we decided to re-launch
and focus on our jewelry icon Possession and we are enjoying very successful
results with that.
Q. Are you focusing
more on the high end of the market?
No, it’s really about finding a balance between the haute
joaillerie, the high end exclusive world, and fine
jewelry. They are complete different worlds, with different creations,
different people working on these products and selling them, and different
types of clients. So you need to engage clients via specific channels. For
example, for high jewelry it’s more one-on-one in terms of engagement and
communication, while for fine jewelry it will be more about digital campaign.
Two complete distinct business models, low volume versus high volume.
Q. Going forward, what is your vision for Piaget?
The priority is really to raise the awareness of the rich
assets of this maison; it has a very unique personality and we want to make
that known much more. We have a very interesting balance between elegant and
audacious creations, and going back to the origin and our DNA, it’s a brand
that has always been driven by a very positive energy, a shared joy and
audacity and that’s really want we want to bring forward, what I called the
sunny side of life.
Q. On the watch side, Piaget has been increasing its
collaborations with artisans, bringing out collections with micro-mosaics,
feathers and other unusual craftsmanship on dials. Do you see this continuing?
Absolutely. Since the beginning we’ve tried to work
differently on the dials, and we’ve been able to unleash our creativity because
our ultra-thin movements take less space. In the 1960s, the 9P ultra-thin
manual-winding caliber opened up all manner of possibility for ornamentation
and colour using hard stones like malachite, lapis lazuli, jade and tiger’s eye
on the dials. What’s interesting is that we’ve reached out to artisans that
were usually not working on dials and asked them to interpret their own work in
a smaller space; and I think it has been exciting for both sides. Most
recently, we worked with feather artists Nelly Saunier and Emilie
Moutard-Martin, and we presented in January some new jewelry watches working
with an artisan using an unusual gold lacework technique that she’s developed.
Q. Last year, Piaget introduced its first steel model,
the Polo S. What was the thinking behind that decision?
Today we have a very large offering of very elegant
watches, but more for eveningwear watches and special occasion watches and we
wanted to have a day watch that would be more casual wear, though it’s still
very thin and elegant. Of course it also allows us to talk to a different type
of clientele. We need to expand our offering if we want to appeal to a wider,
younger and diverse clientele.
As first written for The New York Times
As first written for The New York Times