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Cartier sees a sparkling future in India

By FashionUnited

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Luxury brand Cartier sees India as a favored destination.

The second Concours d’ Elegance will be held in Delhi (the first one was held in Mumbai in 2008) to showcase rare and unseen automobiles. The Travel with Style event is meant to expand the brand’s network of clients in India. Cartier’s association with India started in 1911 when Jacques Cartier, a member of the Cartier family, visited India in pursuit of fine pearls and persuading a number of royal families to reset their jewels using Cartier designs. The famous Patiala necklace that Cartier crafted for Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala in 1928 is now part of the jewelry history of the world and consequently many urban legends. The necklace had five rows of diamond-encrusted platinum chains with the world’s seventh largest DeBeers diamond as the centre piece. It weighed almost a thousand carats with 2,930 diamonds.

While, traditionally, India has been a difficult jewelry market to crack given the prevalence of the family jeweler, Cartier believes there’s enough space even though there aren’t enough suitable retail destinations in India to market luxury. Cartier opened its first boutique at Delhi some three years back and wants to move to other major cities, slowly but surely.  It’s right now concentrating on reinforcing distribution across all major cities of India be it Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, or Mumbai. Cartier has opened five new boutiques in the Middle East region, and counts UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon among its important markets. India’s luxury market is expected to grow almost 12 times by 2015 to a $30 billion market. Cartier has been a relative late comer to India — luxury labels like Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Christian Dior and Chanel, to name a few, have long preceded it. But it is counting on its high brand recall with maharajas of yesterday to seduce the billionaires of today.
Cartier