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NEW YORK -- After just over a year at the helm of Christian Dior Perfumes Inc., Bernard Potier thinks the underdeveloped U.S. business of the venerable Paris luxury goods house is poised for takeoff.
Potier, president and chief executive officer, has a high-profile skin care launch on tap and is still enjoying strong sales from J'adore, one of Dior's best-selling fragrance launches in memory.
His strategy is to accelerate development of all three branches of Dior's beauty business -- fragrance, color cosmetics and skin care -- at once. In the process, he will be reaching for an ambitious 20 percent sales increase. Industry sources estimate that Dior now does in excess of $100 million in the U.S.
Potier, who succeeded Bob Brady in November 1999, has been with Dior for more than 26 years, most recently as international managing director of Christian Dior Parfums in Paris. And now, he finds himself with some challenging goals to achieve.
While Dior's worldwide clothing and accessories businesses generated an estimated $225 million in 2000, the beauty and fragrance end raked in an estimated $805 million in the same time frame, proving that beauty is an essential part of the company's business. In fact, parent company LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton reported a 35 percent leap in sales for 2000 to a record $10.9 billion, with sales of fragrances and cosmetics increasing 22 percent. When it released those numbers, LVMH attributed that growth partly to the success of several fragrances, most notably Dior's wildly popular J'adore -- whose global sales last year exceeded $122.2 million.
In 1997, former president and chief operating officer Brady -- who held the post for two years -- outlined some of the challenges in setting a straight course for the brand, which at the time had a somewhat tarnished U.S. image. Brady decided to steer the business out of the gray market, cut back on distribution, cut promotional spending and channel the money back into long-term strategies, as well as try to put Dior on a healthier footing with its retailers, including opening secondary points of sale within department stores by returning the brand to the fragrance bar. Brady was following the lead of Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH in Paris, who earlier had...