How Tiffany is being reinvented for Millennials
On Reed Krakoff's first day as chief artistic officer at Tiffany & Co, a colleague handed him a paper cup of water. "I took a photo and had this brainwave," he says. "It was Tiffany blue, and just … so perfectly Tiffany. It felt luxurious, even though it was paper. It was functional and also really beautiful."
That simple paper cup was the catalyst for Krakoff's first major collection for the company, Everyday Objects, and a clear indicator of what was to come from the-then 181-year-old brand. The cup, rendered in both sterling silver and bone china, is the hero of the collection, which also includes a sterling silver peg, a tin can, a golf tee, Lego-like building blocks and a set square and protractor.
"For me," says Krakoff, "Everyday Objects is a real touchstone of what Tiffany can be. Everything here is about design first; even the original Tiffany setting was really created out of functionality – it was about the way the light caught the stone."
Actor Elle Fanning, 20, is the new face of Tiffany & Co, a 181-year-old brand.
Fresh air
That's a good thing for Krakoff, who has no formal training in jewellery design, and hence whose appointment at Tiffany came as something of a shock when it was announced in January 2017. The long-time creative director of Coach was given a mandate to breathe fresh air into the heritage brand and court a new, younger audience.
In a little over two years, he's given it a red-hot (or maybe Tiffany blue) go. To celebrate the launch of Paper Flowers, his first jewellery collection for the brand, Krakoff gave New York's taxis and subway stations a Tiffany blue makeover, and handed out Tiffany-hued, limited-edition metro cards and Tiffany-branded coffee and croissants all over the city.
Krakoff also named 20-year-old actor Elle Fanning as the face of the brand; together, they released a remix of Moon River (made famous by the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's) with rapper A$AP Ferg. The accompanying video shows Fanning in a Tiffany blue hoodie, messy hair pinned back with a jewelled clip, gazing longingly into the windows of the NYC flagship store just as Audrey Hepburn did (by way of Brooklyn).
Krakoff gave the go-ahead for Best Actress nominee Lady Gaga to wear the Tiffany yellow diamond to this year's Oscars – the first time it had made a public appearance since 1961 – and he also opened the Blue Box Cafe at Tiffany's 5th Avenue store (so now you really can have breakfast there, and, of course, Instagram it).
For Christmas 2018, he engaged director Mark Romanek, best known for his work on Beyoncé's Lemonade album, to film actress and singer Zoe Kravitz as a Tiffany salesperson lost in the company's workshop. When you're the creative director of a $US11 billion ($16 billion) company, you can afford to go large.
"Tiffany is the iconic American luxury brand," says Krakoff. "My story is the next chapter in a very long history. The ideas of luxury, quality and craftsmanship – I want to show that these can be modern, playful and surprising."
Attitude over age
It sounds like a play for the coveted Millennial customer, and Tiffany is widely seen as having made a big shift towards a younger mindset. But even if the imagery of a WASPy lady wearing an Alice band receiving an engagement ring has been radically updated by having Zoe Kravitz show off her tattoos, Krakoff won't be drawn on issues of age.
"I look at it more as an attitude," he says. "We have traditional customers, we have non-traditional customers. Yes, doing things in a more surprising way is a way to reach younger customers because they want luxury to be less formal, but so do a lot of our older customers. It's not really an age issue, it's about reaching a different sort of customer."
Before Krakoff arrived in January 2017, and before the arrival of Tiffany's new CEO Alessandro Bogliolo 10 months later, the company had been losing heat. In 2016, US sales shrank while growth in Asia-Pacific had slowed. And while the strong sales of the first collections issued under Krakoff and Bogliolo led to a 34 per cent spike in the share price in the first half of 2018, by October the shares had lost those gains.
Which is all to say that capturing a new market – as well as keeping their all-important base – is a tightrope walk. The strategy now appears to be less overt targeting of Millennials, and more focus on how "Millennialisation" has changed a wide range of customers.
"It’s not really an age issue, it’s about reaching a different sort of customer”: Reed Krakoff, chief artistic officer at Tiffany & Co.
As Bogliolo told Business of Fashion in June last year: "The biggest challenge for jewellery is the fact that it, traditionally, has been associated with formality. Today's lifestyle is not formal, and I personally think formality is not going to come back – you see it first and foremost in fashion."
Ethical cred
The Tiffany chief has also overseen a big push on the brand's ethical and sustainable credentials, recently announcing that customers will now be told where their diamond has been sourced. From 2020, there will also be information on where the stone was cut, polished and set. The company isn't afraid to get political in the name of climate science, either: in 2017, it placed an ad in The New York Times, calling for the United States to remain in the Paris Agreement.
Injecting new life into a well-known luxury brand is challenging, and there's a temptation to revisit the archives to invoke a sense of nostalgia. While Krakoff did his homework on the company's history (which, incidentally, includes supplying the Union Army with swords during the Civil War and creating the New York Yankees logo), he has his sights set on the future.
"The heritage has to be in the back of your mind but at some point, you have to start fresh. You can reinterpret things, but you never want to do the same thing again."
Lego bricks in sterling silver and walnut from Tiffany's Everyday Objects collection.
As chief artistic officer, Krakoff is also responsible for the revamp of the New York flagship store, reopening in 2021, and the Sydney store, one of the company's top 10 performing shops worldwide and reopening in April.
The renovations will mirror Krakoff's vision for a "brighter, more playful" Tiffany. New internal areas featuring visual merchandising, art installations and archival collections aim to replicate the feeling window-shoppers like Breakfast at Tiffany's Holly Golightly experienced when peeking in.
"Tiffany windows are the most famous in the world," says Krakoff. "They carry a real sense of magic. I want people to be excited in the store. Buying jewellery is very personal, it should feel good."
The Fashion issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday, April 5 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Twitter and Instagram
The Fashion issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday, April 5 inside The Australian Financial Review. Cybele Malinowski