During Wednesday’s fiscal fourth-quarter conference call, Luxottica Group CEO Massimo Vian was full of confidence and pride, reflecting on past achievements, but more importantly, looking ahead to a very bright future. Technological innovation has kept Luxottica on the cutting edge of customer experience.
“Thanks also to the new technologies, mobile especially, markets and consumer tastes are changing very fast,” Vian said, according to Seeking Alpha. “The time lapse between the moment our consumers see the product, they feel the need, they want to possess … a good is getting shorter and shorter and that goes from product, to operation distribution, to the time they appreciate in the windows of our stores. Our business model is ideal to capture any opportunity out of this acceleration. We can extract value from everything of our supply chain and this, I think, is a beautiful kind of self-sufficiency in terms of business model if we look ahead in the next coming years.”
Luxottica is the owner of Lenscrafters, Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Target Optical, Eyemed vision care plan, and Glasses.com. Its best known brands are Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. Luxottica also makes sunglasses and prescription frames for a multitude of designer brands such as Chanel, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Miu Miu, Donna Karan, Stella McCartney, and Tory Burch.
“Evolving our strategy sits on our vertically integrated model and this is our DNA,” Vian added. “We’re not changing it. Vertical integration helped us a lot, our end to end approach we go from sketches, product design, manufacturing, distribution. Ease of innovation is in everything we do.”
Vian talked about a smarter go-to-market approach.
“We’ve been better in selecting which is the right collection that has to reach the right geographies in the right time,” he explained. “It doesn’t mean at all to reduce the portfolio of brands available. It means that we are going straight to the target every month, every brand. Relying on this pillar, we’re happy to confirm the commitment we gave you two years ago. We said we’re going to double the size of the company in 10 years. The good news is we’re well on track of that so we can confirm, that by 2024, we will be a €15 billion company. We are bringing in the culture of excellence in every corner of our organization.”