An Arnault Works His Millennial Edge

To know Alexandre Arnault, you first have to find Alexandre Arnault.

And because Arnault, 26, is (despite being 26) the president and chief executive of a luggage company with nearly half a billion euros in annual revenue, he may be in Cologne, Germany, where that luggage is made and where he briefly relocated; or in his hometown, Paris, where he has returned and opened an international sales and marketing office; or in London, where he often has business to attend to; or New York, where he recently hosted a dinner for 120 to celebrate the new look of said luggage; or in Los Angeles, where friends like Evan Spiegel, the 28-year-old chief executive of Snap, parent company of Snapchat, are based.

So to cross his path requires a fair amount of commitment, not to mention a travel stipend. He is well positioned to observe what he calls “airport market share,” which a layman might call hanging out by the baggage carousel, just watching the wheels go ‘round and ‘round.

“If you follow me on Instagram, you see that,” he said last week. “Just a lot of stories of suitcases everywhere.”

Arnault is the driving force behind Rimowa, the German suitcase company that, as he put it, is “a 120-year-old company that was owned and run by the same family for 119 years when I got there.” Arnault, barely out of university, persuaded Rimowa’s then-chief executive, Dieter Morszeck, grandson of its founder, to sell, and his father, Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, to buy, an 80 percent stake in the company, and in 2016, Rimowa became the newest addition to the LVMH luxury group.

Arnault, whose fairly moderate youthful rebellion had included buying a Rimowa suitcase, to his father’s consternation — “It wasn’t Vuitton, and we didn’t own it” — had come full circle. Rimowa has “everything we seek for in brands,” he said. “Craftsmanship, quality, DNA, design, creativity, everything.”

Suddenly, the turn-of-the-century suitcase company was collaborating with the New York skate label Supreme on two instantly sold-out suitcases, and with Fendi, a fellow LVMH brand, on leather-trimmed ones. The French streetwear label Nasaseasons was making Rimowa caps. Virgil Abloh, a friend of Arnault’s, had clear Rimowa cases made that then were worn as backpacks at his Off-White men’s show during Paris Fashion Week in June. Arnault loped backstage to have a closer look, and Abloh, who also is the men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton, broke through a crowd to say hello.

“We’re changing the game,” he said to Arnault. “Day by day.”

Eighteen months into the job, Arnault, with his chief brand officer, Hector Muelas, has overseen a rebrand and a redesign of Rimowa’s logo (while keeping, of course, its famous ridged suitcase design), introduced a new website, brought on the likes of Roger Federer and top model Adwoa Aboah as brand spokesmodels and so far succeeded in making the unsexy category of luggage into something that seems very nearly hip.

Tall, trim and rangy, Arnault has a shy, serious way about him, and his demeanor leans more toward the efficient management consultant that he recently was than, say, that of his older half brother Antoine, who has a supermodel partner, Natalia Vodianova, and a slightly roguish air. His hobbies include running and listening to tech-geek podcasts. He isn’t particularly interested in being hip personally. “Takes too much time,” he said. “You can’t work if you do that.”

He was sitting, as he said so, in view of his baby grand, in his palatial apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, expansive enough to have views of both the Grand Palais and Invalides. The family, and the group, are evident everywhere: in the piles of LVMH coffee-table books and in photos all around, staged and candid (here on a shelf is Arnault at 13 with his brother Frédéric at their half sister Delphine’s wedding in 2005; except in this case, the wedding photographer was Karl Lagerfeld).

He has lived here, off and on, since his college days, before which the apartment was his brother Antoine’s. It is not the typical college apartment, of course, but then again, the three framed Basquiats above the piano are only posters — “Can’t afford Basquiat yet” — and well, yes, that is a Lichtenstein in the other room, but only a lithograph. “I’m only 26, you know,” he said. “I just sell a few suitcases. So you have to start somewhere.” Arnault graduated from Télécom ParisTech, moved on to École Polytechnique, his father’s alma mater, for a master’s degree, and to internships in business before joining Groupe Arnault, the family holding company. He was seen as a digital reformer, someone in touch with a younger generation — naturally enough, being part of it. So it was that he became the third (and not last) of Arnault’s children to join the family company, one whose reach is enormous and whose success makes its scions nearly royals in contemporary France. (Arnault père, 69, is the country’s richest man.) Delphine, 43, is the executive vice president of Louis Vuitton; Antoine, 41, is the group’s head of communications and image as well as chairman of Loro Piana and chief executive of Berluti.

“I was obviously raised to be in the group,” Alexandre Arnault said, meaning LVMH. He is careful to note that it was his choice, not a requirement — he turned down offers from McKinsey, the consulting group, and KKR, the investment firm, where he interned — but it had an air of dynastic inevitability. That cannot be said for following in the footsteps of his mother, Hélène Mercier-Arnault, as a concert pianist, even though he, like his two younger brothers, Frédéric, 23, and Jean, 19, is an accomplished musician. “She always told us if we wanted to become musicians she would support us,” he said. “I’ll never know if my dad would have been happy with it. But he loves the piano.”

If Rimowa is to be Arnault’s proving ground, he will have to show that, at his age, he is capable of running a company as well as his fellow group executives, many of whom have known him since childhood. He is closest to his brothers and a few friends from school, most of whom, understandably, do not entirely relate to his responsibilities, and it has brought him closer to the friends, like Spiegel of Snapchat, who do.

“It was kind of refreshing to go on walks with someone who’s my age and tackling similar problems,” Spiegel said. “He’s a really creative guy. He’s constantly thinking about the brand and how to express that.”

Arnault is running Rimowa in a more startup spirit than many of the company’s longer-ensconced maisons, with a nimble agility, an all-hands-on-deck ethos and a Supreme pinball machine. If his approach is successful, he hopes to extrapolate the lessons for the group at large. He is emerging from the privileged obscurity of his pre-CEO life and meeting regularly with executives throughout the organization. “I’ve been in the business for, like I say, 26 years already, so I try to help as much as I can everywhere,” he said.

The question remains, can he be a youth-whisperer to the millennials who are already 50 percent of the LVMH group’s customers, and a greater percentage still of Rimowa’s?

“I think there’s uncertainty and maybe even anxiety about how a generation raised online and now entering adulthood is going to position itself toward material culture — but Alex just gets it,” said his friend, artist Alex Israel, whose work the family has collected and who met Arnault via Instagram Direct Message. “He understands the power of Virgil’s visibility, and that Supreme suitcases are going to be more emotionally impactful than say, ones with batteries.”

So far, Arnault’s approach appears to be working. Rimowa is on an expansionist path, opening three more stores in the United States before the end of the year (one in Miami, two in Las Vegas), and increasing its presence in Berlin, Tokyo and Hong Kong. After beginning as co-chief executive, he has quietly taken over as sole president and CEO, and he is bullish on its future, which he says need not rest exclusively on suitcases.

“One very frustrating thing for us was that the interaction between Rimowa and the customer is always on the unenjoyable part of the travel,” he said: home to airport, airport to hotel. He aims to have Rimowa more present in customers’ everyday lives. That might mean other bags; it might, one day, mean things you can wear on your travels. Arnault appeared at the Kith show during New York Fashion Week with a little Rimowa pochette, a kind of clutch with the brand’s trademark ridges. (His was an amenity kit that came with the Off-White cases, but similar ones have been given as occasional customer gifts.)

“I think I can double the business in a few years,” he said. “We can easily go above a billion. The potential is enormous.” If realized, that would handily add him to the ranks of potential successors to the LVMH throne when, one day, the elder Arnault steps down, joining a family scrabble that includes (at least as far as industry gossip has it) his two elder siblings. In September, his younger brother Frédéric was promoted to a more public, prominent role at TAG Heuer, the LVMH-owned Swiss watch brand.

Arnault declined to go into LVMH Kremlinology, preferring to focus on his present role at Rimowa.

“I’ve only been there 18 months,” he said. “We’ve built this team, we have a pretty impressive plan, and I just want to make sure that I stay there and I see all the changes that I’m implementing to the end. It’s my first real professional experience.”

He also said: “I’ll have a life beyond it. I don’t think I’ll die as head of Rimowa, but so far I’ve tried not to think about it too much.”