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The more than 100-year-old brand wants to be known for more than the Swiss Army knife. So its stores are showing up in only the best neighborhoods, offering an array of elegant fashion.
No matter how Victorinox may slice it, it’s not a well-known brand in the United States. What is well-known is its oldest product, the Swiss Army knife. So making the Victorinox name a true fashion brand in the U.S. is the crux of the company’s new retail strategy.
The Switzerland-based company actually produces a range of high-end merchandise – cutlery, timepieces, travel gear and even fashion apparel. So it’s hewing to the old retail mantra of “location, location, location” by opening four new mall stores in some of the toniest venues: Copley Place (Boston), The Beverly Center (Beverly Hills, Calif.), the Short Hills (N.J.) Mall and The Westchester (White Plains, N.Y.). This year, it will also open streetfront stores on Wooster Street in New York’s SoHo neighborhood and on Toronto’s Bloor Street.
“We saw our retail roll-out as a way to showcase all our product categories under one roof, with a corporate design and a consistent corporate merchandising program,” says Joachim Beer, the company’s president of global fashion retail.
The positions are premium. In Westchester, they’re opposite Michael Kors, Coach and LVMH; in Short Hills, they’re in the Neiman Marcus-Nordstrom corridor; and in Copley Place, they’re in an anchor-like position on the center’s most important hallway.
“We get all the businesspeople coming up from the train station,” says Jason Gallen, vp, retail and e-commerce, of the Copley store. “In fact, our storefront flanks the two-story escalator, so when you reach the top of the escalator, the store emerges with glass curtains.”
Beer adds, “Our products are first-class in quality, function and design. It wouldn’t have made sense to locate our stores anywhere else.”
Once they were in the right locations, Victorinox still had to address the problem of consumer education. Much of the public knows it as the company that’s been making the Swiss Army knife since 1884, in the mountain village of Ibach near Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. Yet, over the years, Victorinox has acquired companies that produced fashion, fragrance and luggage. These areas have been so successful that Beer estimates that knives and cutlery account for only 10 percent of total sales.
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