Richemont to sell 'soft' luxury brands

Swiss luxury holding group, Compagnie Financière Richemont,

is turning their focus to higher-end ‘hard’ luxury brands and looking to cut off its ‘soft’ luxury brands which have been under-performing, according to inside industry sources.

Recently Richemont reported that they were willing to invest cash into loss making leather good company Lancel and appointed investment bank Nomura to advise on the impending sale. Rumors have been circulating that Yoox Group and Richemont have been scheduling meetings to look into the prospect of merging Yoox.com with Net-a-Porter, although Richemont denies that Net-a-Porter is for sale.

Richemont’s fashion labels appear to be lagging behind the holding company’s jewelry and watch divisions and earlier this year, Johann Rupert, Chairman at Richemont said that the company needed to “cull its bad investments quicker,” and since then experts in the industry have been speculating which brands would be the first to go.

Now it appears to be that fashion labels Chloé, Dunhill and Shanghai Tang, will be up for sale soon, according to WWD, with a number of investment companies showing interest in French brand Chloé. Thoman Chauvet, an analyst at the Citigroup in London, wrote in a recent report that the ‘soft’ luxury brands, Lancel, Chloé, Dunhill, Shanghai Tang, Purdey, Azzedine Alaia and Peter Millar combined could bring in upwards of 1.86 billion euros, while Net-a-Porter is worth an estimated 2.28 billion euros.