EXCLUSIVE: S.T. Dupont Opens Second Paris Flagship, Adds Women’s Leather Goods
PARIS — S.T. Dupont, the French purveyor of luxury pens and lighters, is setting down its bags on Rue Saint-Honoré for its latest flagship store.
Opening on Dec. 13, the 1,200-square-foot unit located at number 414 will be home to an extended leather goods offering that includes women’s handbags — and will be the first where the brand unfurls its revamped identity.
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Exit the cursive house signature in use for decades. Enter a new sans-serif block letter version as well as four new lines called Riviera, X-Bag, Apex and 1872, the year the company was founded by Simon Tissot Dupont.
For all that, “everything changes but nothing has changed,” chief executive officer Alain Crevet told WWD.
Take the current 540-square-foot flagship that will stay put on Rue de la Paix, just opposite Cartier and jewelers Mellerio which will continue to sell lighters and pens, as well as its current leather goods.
But after celebrating the brand’s 150th anniversary in 2022, the executive felt the moment was ripe to revisit a unisex leather goods offering.
“While we trade well on our historical pillar of lighters and pens, and relaunched male-oriented leather goods more than a decade ago, women purchasing gifts for their loved ones would often complain there was nothing for them,” he said. “And it was high time to remember that our first clients were women.”
An early client was France’s Empress Eugénie Bonaparte, a style maven of her time, but closer to our times were the Maharajah of Patalia, who ordered 100 vanity cases — each containing a gold cigarette lighter — for his ladies in waiting.
Trunks and cases were made for Queen Elizabeth II as a wedding gift by the French government, a tradition repeated for the 2011 nuptials of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, now the Prince and Princess of Wales.
André Dupont, the son of founder Tissot Dupont, designed the brand’s first handbag for Audrey Hepburn, which became the inspiration for the new Riviera line, where a lighter-shaped padlock secures an inside pocket.
Meanwhile, the geometric molded leather of the X-Bag range and the three-dimensional surface of the Apex line nod to the signature designs, in particular the “fire-head” guilloche developed by the house’s silversmiths for lighters and pens. A 1950s version is part of the design of the 1872 line. In total, the new lines will span 75 styles.
“Heritage brands are perhaps at time too traditional and overly focused on their brand’s history,” said Pearson Poon, vice chairman of the S.T. Dupont advisory board and son of majority owner, Hong Kong-based entrepreneur Dickson Poon. He said S.T. Dupont’s aim is to combine heritage “with modern techniques and new ideas to create collections that we believe are unique and highly distinctive to consumers today.”
Following this line of thought led to the new signature, which is “no blanding” but “nods to the trunk- and bag-maker spirit of the late 19th and early 20th centuries” the brand wants to bring back for Crevet. Until the mid-1950s, leather goods were a major source of business for the company before the focus shifted to lighters.
“This logo is the one Monsieur Dupont used at the beginning of the 20th century. He wrote the initials small so ‘Dupont’ would be the focus, to avoid confusion with [businesses] that bore the Tissot name, particularly in Switzerland,” recalled the CEO.
Plus it does away with a minor confusion that saw some read its S and T as “saint,” he added.
While the company has set up a design and prototyping workshop in Paris, its leather goods production relies on Italian partners. Crevet hopes to bring this back in-house and in France.
Not fudging what makes S.T. Dupont is also why the company is advancing with caution on collaborations, wary of what Crevet deemed the “hyperinflation of collaborations.”
That said, the ones the French brand has done so far proved satisfactory, starting with Karl Lagerfeld and continuing with lighters and pens with The Row, a “Dupont for Saint Laurent” range at the request of the French house’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello and lighter-necklaces with Amiri. The executive hinted at a new project currently in discussion.
A clear identity and sense of heritage, plus the means to attract a clientele who currently accounts for 50 percent of purchases but only a quarter of end-users, is key to the next step in S.T. Dupont’s growth plan.
The publicly listed company generated revenues of 50 million euros in fiscal year 2022, which ended March 31. For this year, it is on track to see a 20 percent rise, a solid growth rate that Crevet hopes to sustain, with the wider ambition of reaching the 100-million-euro mark in the next five years.
Going forward, the company wants to reduce its dependency on wholesale, which currently accounts for 70 percent of the business, by stepping up its own retail efforts. It counts 1,500 retail points, including 27 stores, both directly operated and franchises, and around 1,000 wholesale accounts.
The Paris opening is a crucial step for this, said the executive, and so is the parallel inauguration of an 800-square-foot store at Harvey Nichols Pacific Place in Hong Kong, where the leather goods line will take pride of place.
Sybarite, the London architecture and design firm best known for its designs for the SKP stores in China, has designed the Dupont Paris and Hong Kong spaces. It is also creating new atria for the historic Fenwick’s building in Newcastle, England and is redesigning the store’s beauty hall and accessories area.
Dupont’s new leather goods line will be progressively rolled out, starting with Japan and South Korea, which are among the brand’s biggest markets. Introduction of the new bags in the U.S. will come later, most likely in 2025, according to Crevet.
The North American market has the potential to be in the top three — if S.T. Dupont opens its own stores, the executive said.
Having the additional retail space to fully deploy the line is therefore essential in his opinion. In Tokyo, where S.T. Dupont currently has a store in Ginza, the company is looking for a larger space, either in the same area or in tony Omotesando.
Plans are already set for flagships in Shanghai and Beijing, where interest in the brand remains strong.
“We don’t have the ambition to compete with beautiful houses like Chanel, Dior and so on. We are more like a Goyard, or Louis Vuitton and Hermès at their beginning — a trunkmaker who went into accessories and tapped its heritage with great product,” Crevet said. “But leather goods will force us to be somewhat faster.”
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