Samsonite aims to double sales

Samsonite globally plans to double its sales by 2020 to more than US$2 billion, with store roll-outs in Asian markets a key element.

The luggage icon is also planning to acquire more businesses, despite swallowing up five brands over the past few years.

“We look at a number of different things. Not only brands, but retail acquisitions as well,” Samsonite chairman Timothy Parker told Thai newspaper The Nation recently.

In the last few years it has spent $345 million acquiring US backpack brand Gregory Mountain Products, protective case specialist Speck Products and French luggage brand Lipault.

In Thailand, a core part of its strategy is to encourage purchasers of cheap luggage to trade up to its second tier brand American Tourister, sold alongside Samsonite in its network of retail chains and concessions in department stores.

“Our real challenge is to convince these people who buy cheap luggage to pay a little more, maybe 10 per cent or 100 baht more, to get a good brand like American Tourister,” he told rival newspaper The Bangkok Post in an interview.

Samsonite sells about one third of its own production through its own retail network – its own branded stores, concessions, outlet stores and duty free shops.

A key feature of Samsonite’s global approach is a three-brand strategy with Samsonite in the centre as a volume brand, American Tourister as an entry level buffer to protect its core brand and now a luxury range Hartmann with which it hopes to lure sales away from Louis Vuitton and Longchamp.

Hartmann was a 137 year old US brand, made famous in recent times by TV characters Don Draper from Mad Men and James Bond, which Samsonite bought from a private equity company for US$35 million two years ago. Come Christmas the brand will boast 25 stores in the US, with more planned internationally as the brand is rebuilt using Samsonite’s vast distribution network and its production technology.

Another new retail concept for Samsonite is Trunk & Co, a growing network across Europe, the US, Japan, Hong Kong – and now, from early October, Thailand.

A Samsonite spokesman in Bangkok said 25 Trunk & Co stores will open in Thailand within the next 12 months, with smaller cities targeted as well as Bangkok.

Samsonite is strong in most Asian markets, but China remains a challenge where its market share is barely eight per cent. It blames its performance there on cheap luggage.

“We don’t want to go down-market, but to communicate and convince consumers that there is merit in trading up,” Parker told The Nation.

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