Fendi, Prada, Loewe Take Over Rinascente for the Holiday Season
MILAN — A touch of Rome in Milan, Milanese charm in Rome and Spanish flair in Florence — Rinascente shuffled up luxury brands and served up a new strategy for the holiday season by partnering with fashion houses for its nine units across Italy.
Diverting from the approach of the past few years that saw the department store spotlighting local artisanal ateliers in its Christmas windows, Rinascente unveiled a series of branded takeovers, starting from its jewel-in-the-crown location overlooking the Duomo cathedral in Milan.
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At the flagship, the retailer partnered with Fendi, which leveraged the store’s nine arched windows to further celebrate the 25th anniversary of its iconic Baguette bag. In addition to renditions of the design, looks pulled from the collection that paraded in New York in September were on display, immersed in a special installation. Conceived by Rotterdam-based design studio Odd Matter, the red-tinged setting featured wood structures covered in extra-long fringes nodding to willow trees and intended to evoke “an enchanted forest,” as Fendi’s president for Europe Andrea Rigogliosi explained on Friday when the windows were unveiled.
Flanked by Rinascente’s chief executive officer Pierluigi Cocchini and the event’s godmother Valentina Ferragni, Rigogliosi said the idea was to offer a dreamlike landscape, which extended beyond the windows since the installation also embellished Rinascente’s arcade. The department store’s facade was additionally covered in lights to host video projections of the iconic bag and festive motifs, while inside the Fendi logo covered key design elements, such as the escalators.
Cocchini explained that the first talks with Fendi on the project began in January and that this activation running through the beginning of 2023 strengthens the relationship with the brand, which last year also staged the Fendi Caffè temporary bar on the seventh floor of the store.
Meanwhile, in Rome, Rinascente has partnered with Prada for a takeover of the seven windows of its Via del Tritone location. Black-and-white images of the Prada Holiday advertising campaign framed in red serve as a backdrop to ready-to-wear and accessories displays in the windows, while inside a pop-up in the same colors and featuring a neon-light Christmas tree showcases a special selection of bags and gift items.
Loewe has taken over the Rinascente’s unit in Florence, while in Catania, Sicily, three key fragrances from Parfums Christian Dior are celebrated in the windows. For its outpost in Turin, the department store linked up with Champagne brand Maison Ruinart.
All the activations are part of an overarching seasonal theme dubbed “Believe in Wonder.” This is also the claim of a dedicated advertising campaign conceived by the Wunderman Thompson agency, which includes an animated video produced by Maga Animation Studio that will debut on Italian TV channels on Sunday.
Even with the change of strategy, Rinascente continued to show its support of local artisans as part of its Christmas product offering, such as brands hailing from San Gregorio Armeno, a historic street in Naples known for ateliers specializing in handmade figurines of nativity scenes. Items by Lemax — a Chinese company specialized in music boxes and miniatures recreating enchanted Christmas villages with white slopes, moving trains and carousels — are also part of the Christmas assortment.
This product category flanks a special selection of liquors, sweets and delicatessen, a sector Rinascente has been increasingly investing in. Sales of Christmas objects and food combined are growing between 30 and 40 percent compared to 2019, said Cocchini.
“Christmas shopping here already started in mid-October. We unveil the windows now just to further spotlight this moment but sales are already going strong.…For us [the holiday season] is a key period because we can have new categories compared to other moments of the year,” noted Cocchini.
Overall, the executive was confident about Rinascente’s performance in 2022, as he teased that total revenues will come close to those registered in 2019, a record year for the retailer when it reported sales of 800 million euros, growing double digits compared to 2018. Rinascente is owned by Thailand’s Central Group.
“The first quarter of 2022 was extremely challenging,” said Cocchini, mentioning the pandemic and the war bursting out in Ukraine. “But since May we started to recover very well and perform better and better. And in these past six months we did even better than in 2019,” he added, also crediting Black Friday. “We can’t really compare [this Black Friday] to the one in 2019, which was only a single day. With the pandemic we abandoned that idea to embrace Black Friday promotions for nine days,” said Cocchini.
The profile of consumers has changed as well. Chinese and Russian customers that used to represent the top clients of the department stores were replaced by Americans and Middle Eastern shoppers, closely followed by Europeans, specifically those hailing from the U.K. encouraged by tax-free shopping.
