BREAKING GROUND: Under pressure to sustain healthy growth for the second quarter of 2024, Louis Vuitton on Sunday went the extra mile in China with an experimental resee livestreaming on Xiaohongshu, bringing the platform’s fashion-loving audience up close with the latest items from the brand’s pre-fall 2024 collection shown days earlier in Shanghai, which included a landmark collaboration with Sun Yitian, a Beijing-based artist known for her paintings of blown-up animals.
The high-production-value session — held at Long Museum, the same location as the show — saw talents such as brand ambassador Elaine Zhong, singer Amber Liu, stylist Lucia Liu, influencer Yuyu Zhangzou, Cece Wang of Christie’s and model Chu Wong interacting with the audience while showcasing exclusive items from the collection.
Most of the items are available for preorder on an online pop-up store on Xiaohongshu. Audiences can also make appointments online to discover the range in offline stores.
The event attracted more than 470,000 unique visitors, setting a record for luxury livestreaming on the popular social commerce platform. The pre-fall 2024 show, the first collection under Nicolas Ghesquière’s Voyager Show format, garnered more than 145 million views online worldwide.
This online experiment marks the first time that Vuitton has opened up the resee experience to a wider audience. Previously only a limited number of high-spending customers were invited to have first dibs on new items the day after the show.
From now until May 17, the date the pre-fall collection officially hits stores, the collection will be showcased in stores in Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Qingdao for affluent local customers to experience it in person.
Louis Vuitton, the anchor brand of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s fashion unit, performed a little better than the division average in the first quarter of 2024, according to the group’s chief financial officer Jean-Jacques Guiony during an earnings call.
The French luxury conglomerate said group sales fell 2 percent at actual exchange rates in the first quarter. Organic sales at LVMH’s key fashion and leather goods division were up 2 percent in the period.
China remained a key market for the group. Guiony said LVMH saw spending by Chinese customers rise 10 percent in the first quarter, though there was a shift to purchasing overseas.
Japan was a popular destination, where revenues jumped 32 percent as tourists took advantage of the weak yen, despite a series of price increases designed to level out price differentials.
While the business might take place outside of China, Chinese consumers still receive, consume and share fashion content on social media platforms like Weibo, WeChat and increasingly on Xiaohongshu, a platform that’s a combination of Instagram and TikTok, with a big focus on fashion and luxury.
Louis Vuitton was one of the first major luxury brands to join the platform in 2019. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the brand was the first luxury one on the platform to create interactive original content in China as a tool to boost its online presence and offset the drop in foot traffic caused by lockdowns.
The brand now has more than 500,000 followers on Xiaohongshu and has received more than 1.7 million likes for its posts. The hashtag LV, and its various forms, have had more than 5 billion views on the platform.
