By Ruth La Ferla
Two decades ago, when Assouline, a leading purveyor of high-end coffee table books and fancy library accouterments, opened its first branded outpost on the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman in New York, Prosper Assouline, a founder of the company, experienced a kind of epiphany.
“I noticed that luxury consumers were willing to spend $US650 ($950) on shoes,” he said in a recent interview conducted by video from his home in Paris. A compact man with a penchant for fastidious tailoring, Assouline recalled that books — at least the kind that find their resting places on coffee tables or on carefully curated and colour-coordinated shelves — sold at the time for a relative pittance of $US60 to $US75. Assouline was quick to see an opportunity, confecting a special edition on the Indian state of Rajasthan printed on cotton and wrapped by hand in an antique sari. Its price was a then-astronomic $US600, or about $US2000 ($2921) today.
Prosper, centre, and Martine Assouline, the French founders of their namesake business, and their son Alexandre.Credit: NYT
“It was truly a couture book,” said Robert Burke, a former Bergdorf executive turned luxury consultant who today counts Assouline among his clients. “We sold them as fast as Prosper could wrap them,” Burke recalled.
Steep prices and increasingly lavish productions seem in line with a time-tested retail axiom: At the high end of the marketplace, you are only as valued as the company you keep.
It’s a principle guiding the company even now. The Assoulines — Prosper and Martine, the French married founders, and their 30-year-old son, Alexandre — produce and sell titles, some 2000 in the 30 years since its founding. They cover art history, fashion, interiors, travel, society and sports.
The priciest, The Ultimate Collection — limited edition volumes, some the size of small coffee tables and bound in leather or encased in velvet or pigskin — sell in the five-figure range. A special edition on Versailles, presented in a velvet clamshell, and priced at $US4900 ($7109) is offered with a private tour of the château’s interior. (The company said that The Ultimate Collection represents more than 25 per cent of its annual revenues.)
To hear the younger Assouline tell it, the brand aims at nothing less than to be the book world equivalent of an Hermès Birkin: collectible, highly covetable and priced in accordance with what the market will bear.
But the company’s ambitions seem to go beyond selling extravagantly priced reading material.
“Just don’t call us publishers; we are a luxury brand,” said Alex Assouline, who manages sales and marketing at the company’s New York headquarters, pointing out that the company has lately ventured into podcasting, (the “Culture Lounge Podcast”) and has produced a digital magazine. Another element of their business is curating libraries for corporate and private clients, furnishing them with Assouline-branded products.
The privately held company, in which LVMH holds a minority stake, celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. Though the family declines to share the particulars of revenues or volume, it says Assouline is profitable.
‘No discounts, no overruns’
In the decades since its founding in 1994, the brand has borrowed the codes of luxury fashion, holding out for choice retail real estate: Its 30 stores-within-stores throughout Europe occupy ground-floor selling space. The company also acts as its own distributor, a strategy to maintain scarcity and an image of exclusivity. “There will be no discounts, no overruns,” Alex Assouline said.
Assouline operates 18 freestanding stores worldwide, including Maison Assouline, its gilded London flagship, and a second flagship set to open next month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, spanning 10,000 square feet that includes an upscale restaurant. It also occupies boutique spaces in hotels like the Plaza Athénée in Paris and the Peninsula in Hong Kong.
The brand’s latest outpost, an independent boutique on Madison Avenue at 62nd Street in New York, shares a city block with Kiton, Hermès and John Lobb, and accommodates a small bar and outdoor cafe. Its interior, a colourful but somewhat austere amalgam of marble-top consoles, Persian carpeting, and statuary and towering bookcases, does not invite casual browsing.
Its shelves are pristinely arrayed with books from the company’s popular travel series — Miami, Provence and Dubai, among others — and the small, relatively affordable monographs on Dior, Alaia and other household fashion names on which the brand built its early success.
A stack of titles produced by Assouline, a high-end publisher for 30 years that specialises in limited edition photography and art books.Credit: NYT
Those shelves groan as well with special editions like Rare Cars: The World’s Most Exclusive Rides; Golf, housed in a golf ball textured metal clamshell; and Chanel, the Impossible Collection ($US1050).
A customer hoping to examine one of these rarefied objects is promptly greeted by an attendant who heaves it from its resting place and offers a pair of white cotton gloves with which to leaf through its contents, a practice in keeping with the brand’s mission.
“We are not just about commercial success,” Alex Assouline said. “We bring artistry and intellect to shopping.”
An exalted claim for sure, but one in tune with perceived consumer appetites. Illustrated books, publishers’ preferred term for the kinds of coffee table volumes often displayed in the offices of doctors, wealth management firms and corporate libraries, are “cultural eye candy,” said Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, a New York-based consumer research and consulting firm. They confer on “connoisseurs, or would-be connoisseurs, a whiff of prestige,” he said.
Among the stores’ most successful volumes are Assouline travel books, purchased as souvenirs and acting as catnip on armchair travellers. “These people want to be part of the world, whether it’s the Sistine Chapel or the Louvre or Versailles,” Kaplan said. Assouline limited editions, including a $US1200 tome on motorcycles, remain popular, he added. “People are buying them as design elements for their homes.”
Well apprised of this growing trend, associated with the notion of shelf wealth, Assouline is intent on expanding its library services and on making incursions into the lifestyle arena, such as home fragrances and pricey bibelots.
The company — whose wares included home fragrances and which has curated libraries for corporate clients, including the condominium complex at 277 Fifth Avenue and the Caledonia, a luxury apartment building in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan — plans to provide a similar service for private collectors. “We will curate and design not just your bookcase but, working with contractors, your carpet and your office table,” Alex Assouline said, adding assertively, “We are an interior designer.”
But some say not so fast. As Pedraza of the Luxury Institute noted, “It remains to be seen how interior design fits with the brand’s ethos and ambitions. Furniture is a crowded space, with formidable risks, production and logistics among them. For Assouline, this is a Hail Mary pass.”
Such cautions are unlikely to dissuade the younger Assouline. “We want to package culture where culture meets luxury,” he said. “A well-appointed library is part of that.”
Hubris or brashly canny marketing? Assouline evades such distinctions. “In this sphere,” he declared, “we aim to become the authority.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.