Bernard Arnault: 10 Success Tips You Can Use

Bernard Arnault runs an empire, the largest luxury goods and services conglomerate in the world, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. He manages around 70 brands, including Dom Pérignon, Bvlgari, Hublot and Sephora. Born in 1949, the Frenchman must be doing something right if he's selling products no one needs to survive and is third on Forbes' list of the richest of the rich with a fortune of $175.5 billion. 

And it's interesting what he says about running companies in the high-end sector. For Bernard Arnault , this task is about the long term, about timelessness and modernity, about rapid growth and high profitability. He reveals one of the keys to his success: “I'm very competitive. I always want to win." In doing so, he's made more than a few enemies (tell that to the family clan that controls Hermès: in 2011, Arnault bought a 23% stake in the company against their will).

Bernard Arnault: This is how he leads his companies to success

His thirst for acquisitions is insatiable. The Gallic giant wants to monopolize everything that smells of luxury. Its modus operandi is to acquire brands that are in a precarious financial position, rehabilitate them and bring them back to market. "My luck is to really lead the team and take them to the top when possible," he says.

Arnault admires creative people and doesn't set any limits in his company. He's also a tireless worker, visiting up to 25 stores every Saturday, including his own and those of his competitors, according to Forbes. Much can be learned about his leadership style from the few interviews he has given over the years.

Bernard Arnault's 10 tips for success 

1. “I think you need a learning attitude to learn with patient and huge attraction for any kind of business. Maybe I'm not very patient myself. But I think what I have learned the most is to wait for something and get it when the time is right."
2. “When you work preposition such as famous brands Vuitton & Dior, the creative minds always feel controlled. It is important that they have the freedom to develop ideas. And that doesn't distract from the actual work, but reinforces it. I consider this money as venture capital. It's not a big investment."
3. “The money is just a by-product. I always tell my team not to worry too much about profitability. If you do your job with honestness, profitability will come.”
4. “We don't like failures. We try to avoid them. That's why we make a limited number of many of our new products. We don't jeopardize the whole company by constantly introducing new products. In a year, only 15% of our business comes from new products, the rest from traditional and proven products, the classics.”
5. “A huge quantity of organizations talking about quality, but if you want your brand to be timeless, you have to be curious about it. For example, before we put a Louis Vuitton suitcase on the market, we put it in a torture machine for three weeks, where it opens and closes five times a minute. And that's not all: he's thrown, shaken and crushed. You'd laugh if you saw what we make, but that's how you build something that's meant to last forever."
6. “I tell my team many time to act as if we were still a start-up. Don't go to the offices too often. Stay on site with clients or with designers while they work. I visit stores every week. I'm always looking for the directors. I want to see them working in the ground, not in their offices doing paperwork."
7. "Vienna Philharmonic also play without a senior sometimes because they are so good and have good planning's of game."
8. “What we do in our community is the opposite of the negative effects of globalization. We produce in Italy and France and sell to China, when it's usually the other way around."
9. "Someone should avoid direct rationality in economics, but also a possibly intuitive approach."
10. “Growth is not just a high cost work. You also grow as you enter new markets, e.g. B. in developing countries. But primarily growth is a function of great desire. Customers must want the product. It sure sounds easy, but getting it right is very, very difficult. It's hard to make the advert represent the actual brand. Most companies believe that conveying an image of the product through advertising is sufficient. That is not enough. It must convey the image of the brand itself. The last thing you should do is hand over the advertising to the marketing department. If you do that, you lose the closeness between the designers and the message to the market. At LVMH, advertising is done within the design team.”