How luxury powerhouse LVMH coaches its 70 Maisons on the road to Digital Transformation

If the name LVMH Group does not ring a bell, its high-end luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Dom Pérignon, Bvlgary and Christian Dior surely will.  

With 70 of these Maisons comprising the French multinational luxury conglomerate, digital transformation requires a refined approach. LVMH was formed in 1987 under the merger of fashion house Louis Vuitton (LV) with Moët Hennessy (MH). It is the only group present in all five major sectors of the luxury market: Wines & Spirits, Fashion & Leather Goods, Perfumes & Cosmetics, Watches & Jewelry and Selective Retailing. 

The group prides itself on being a decentralized organization. Giving individual Maisons the autonomy to make their own decisions, rooted in their own unique heritage and culture, is regarded as the best route to keep products and services at this exceptional level and to stay extremely close to the customers. However, being part of the larger LVMH Group also allows the Maisons to share central resources and to leverage their combined strengths with other Maisons. This creates intelligent synergies on operational, financial, marketing and corporate levels. 

As one of Europe’s most experienced e-business specialists, SQLI had the pleasure to collaborate with the LVMH Group. By creating a set of e-commerce and omnichannel guidelines, templates and educational materials, we helped LVMH to coach the Maisons to maximize these synergies, while still keeping the broad diversity of heritage. 

In this blog you’ll learn how to approach digital transformation for a family brand that holds a variety of different brands underneath.  

How do you approach digital transformation in such a wealth of diversity?

Go meta!

The first step is to go meta: bring what you know to a higher level and extract the essence of what constitutes a great digital approach.  

There is a vast range of e-commerce and omnichannel topics to take into account. At first glance, you may not see the forest for the trees. To bring clarity into the approach, we clustered those topics into eight areas: 


A cluster such as product, contains topics such as assortment, catalogue, pricing, product content & media, stock, promotions, merchandising, service design etc. We intentionally put market-ambition-strategy at the heart of the model, because we firmly believe that the best digital strategy builds on the overall ambition and strategy of the organization. Market-ambition-strategy strongly incorporates the savoir-faire (French for know how) the company has built in its specific market. 

Create a framework to set your scope

Rather than creating rigid rules and forcing a specific way of working onto our customers, At SQLI we prefer to use frameworks. These sketch the outlines and possibilities of a topic, so that the customer can pick what’s relevant and adapt to their own unique situation. 

Frameworks can cover a wide variety of setups: cross-border and multinational, small, medium or large sized operations, multiple types of products, a range of distribution channels, each with their own set of customer touchpoints. By mapping the scope and alignment, you’ll get a first grasp on your digital maturity.


Value for the customer

Models, clusters and frameworks, of course, aren’t an end in itself, but a tool. By doing the conceptual part of the work for our customers, they can really dig in and apply the new insights in the working field. 

To customize the tools to the customer, we make a SWOT analysis of where they stand within each cluster. Finding the weakest link ensures we can get the basics right and design a pleasant customer experience, by improving where necessary. On the other hand, we pinpoint the strengths to make sure we extend and enlarge them, to translate what makes the brand unique into the digital context. 

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