SHANGHAI – To celebrate 60 years of diplomatic ties between China and France and reiterate the luxury mega group’s unwavering commitment to the market, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton has launched the inaugural edition of the Show Me initiative in Shanghai.
The Chinese edition of Show Me included initiatives introduced within the group and by its Institut des Métiers d’Excellence — a vocational training program focused on promoting, enhancing, and preserving artisanal craftsmanship, as well as creative and retail expertise. Since it was founded in 2014, the program has trained over 3,300 people that excelled in 280 professions across eight countries.
The launch, held inside the historic Cathay Cinema in downtown Shanghai on Wednesday, is an off-site event for LVMH’s CIIE Expo program this year.
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“The program includes employees that work across the value chain of LVMH; it’s the people who create, build, and sell the products,” said Alexandre Boquel, who heads up the Métiers d’Excellence project.
The China program, which was initiated three months ago, has already awarded its first class of 12 star employees with the “Virtuoso” badge of honor. These employees serve across job functions, including retail managers, product repair technicians, and personalized letter painting.
“As you know, we don’t create products in China, except for Ao Yun, our wine venture in Shangri-la, but we do have a lot of artisans that work in repair services. For example, we have watchmaking technicians, we have people that have been trained in Hong Kong to paint letters on our trunks. So the first thing we did was to map all the professions we have in China and see what we can do to develop their competencies and skills.”
The Show Me program has also launched master classes with the houses’ artisans in Europe and forged partnerships with local vocational schools. So far there are four schools involved, which will build training programs for Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, Moët Hennessy Diageo, and Make Up For Ever.
Bulgari, which works with two schools in China, including Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Polytechnic and Shanghai Jianqiao University, has developed a two-and-a-half year, six-step program to train jewelry technician apprentices.
“Unlike very small schools in Italy, the schools are very big here — one of the schools has 1,000 students in jewelry, which for me, it’s like a dream, a miracle, it’s impossible in Europe,” said Jean-Christophe Babin, chief executive officer of Bulgari.
To celebrate the initiative, LVMH hosted a series of talks among a full-house of local press, employees and company executives.
“The theme of today’s event is Show Me, but more importantly, what we need to do is work together, working together to build a connection with the market, with our consumers, with young people,” said Andrew Wu, LVMH Greater China president in his opening remarks.
“Craftsmanship is our language that can connect the world,” Wu concluded.
