Get your groove on

Travel is back and German luggage brand Rimowa is ready with Rihanna, Patti Smith and LeBron James on board.

Rihanna with the Personal Polycarbonate Crossbody Clutch in white

There is a word in German – Fernweh – that is the perfect description of how we have all felt for the past two years. It roughly translates as “farsickness” – the opposite of homesickness and an intense longing to travel to faraway places. After being locked inside our country for so many months, we cannot wait to escape, to wander around a different city, hear a different language and eat different foods.

This is not lost on the man leading one of the world’s most famous luggage companies. As I chat to Hugues Bonnet-Masimbert, the CEO of Rimowa, via Zoom from my dining table instead of in person, he so generously listens to me complain at some length about how desperate I am to get on a plane and travel beyond our borders (it doesn’t help to glimpse Paris outside the window of his office).

CEO of Rimowa Hugues Bonnet-Masimbert

“Absolutely I can empathise – and not just because I am in charge of a company that is selling suitcases,” he says, laughing. “But we have really all gone way beyond a time when it felt like it was a novelty to slow down. Nowadays, for me it is so exciting just to get on a train.”

Bonnet-Masimbert has been at the helm of the German heritage brand Rimowa since January, when former CEO Alexandre Arnault left and took a job as executive vice-president of products and communications at Tiffany & Co. Alexandre, the son of billionaire Bernard Arnault, led Rimowa since it was acquired by the family’s luxury goliath LVMH in 2016 and has rebranded and redeveloped it in the years since.

LeBron James with Rimowa’s Original cabin bag in Silver

“Rimowa was on the path of extreme acceleration, thanks to the great work done by my predecessor Alexandre Arnault,” Bonnet-Masimbert explains. “Until January 2020, we were dealing with the very nice issues of trying to find a way to cope with all the demand and opening new stores in new countries. Then all of a sudden Covid hit and all this came to a grinding halt.

“We thought it was going to last a couple of weeks, but it ended up lasting a lot longer. We had all our stores closed, we had our manufacturers closed, and ever since we have been dealing with different situations depending on lockdowns around the world. We went through a bit of a storm.”

Rimowa has been synonymous with travel since it was started in Cologne in 1898 by Paul Morszeck, who made suitcases out of wood. It was his son, Richard Morszeck, who in 1937 came up with the idea of creating suitcases out of lightweight aluminium and the now distinctive grooved aluminium in 1950 after being inspired by the world’s first metal aircraft. He also changed the company name to Rimowa, which is an acronym of his name and Warenzeichen, the German word for trademark.

The luggage company kept innovating, and in 2000 it came up with the first polycarbonate suitcase, and then the eight-wheel system that has improved the lives of all of who’ve dragged suitcases through airports.

Bonnet-Masimbert spent four years commuting between Paris and Rimowa’s headquarters in Cologne as executive vice-president of sales and client operations, before taking over as CEO. Prior to that he was in Madrid for luxury fashion house Loewe and in South Korea and Hong Kong for Louis Vuitton. He has spent a lot of his career living overseas or travelling. Needless to say, it has been an adjustment to stay still.

The Original Collection in silver

“I have four children and they are all grown up and live out of home, but they moved back during the pandemic lockdowns because they were all in tiny places,” he explains, smiling. “So for a while we had this experience of living together full-time, which was different as they were always used to me travelling around. For them, it was a very interesting experience and they couldn’t wait for Covid to be over for many, many reasons, but among that was wanting me to go back travelling.”

There have been positives for Bonnet-Masimbert out of being stuck in one place and one is that it has forced him to re-evaluate how and why he travelled.

“If I am being totally honest, I look back at some of the trips I did in the past and they probably weren’t necessary,” he tells WISH. “I would fly to the other end of the world to meet a candidate for a position, whereas now we have discovered new ways of working like Zoom that will make these past trips irrelevant.

“The other thing is that the way we travelled has become obsolete. We were lucky enough to travel to every possible country in the world, but on some of these trips we would land at the airport, go to our meeting, have lunch and then back to the airport and fly away. We would not really meet anyone or get to the see the beautiful natural landscapes of the country.”

The CEO says that he pandemic has “opened his eyes” to all the missed opportunities of properly seeing the people and the places he visited and made him realise that all future travel must be more purposeful. He sees business travel as consisting of fewer but more meaningful trips, especially given the climate change crisis. “As you know, we have to start travelling more responsibly,” he says. “It took lockdowns and a pandemic to realise that not all travelling was necessary.”

The meaning of travel has inspired Rimowa’s latest campaign, featuring Rihanna, Patti Smith, LeBron James and Roger Federer. Like everything in the past two years, it was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and Bonnet-Masimbert had to let go of the creative reins and allow others to shoot the campaign due to border restrictions.

It also took on a new significance, given that no one could travel, and even led Smith to writing a poem about what travel meant to her: “We long to add new pages, we long to explore, we long for new sights, new noise, unknown faces, unentered doors.”

Patti Smith

“It was absolutely not part of the brief, but she sent us this poem she wrote about what travel means to her and we thought it was spot on,” Bonnet-Masimbert explains. “It was starting a conversation, so we decided to make it a significant part of the #neverstill campaign.”

Prior to Covid halting the world of travel and upending Rimowa’s plans to keep growing its suitcase business, the brand had already began pivoting to other products. Bonnet-Masimbert points out that these are simply other travel items, but just for your everyday travel like going to work or friends’ houses or a restaurant. Think an iPhone case or a backpack or a cross-body bag.

“We aim to make the experience of using your Rimowa suitcase a revolutionary experience, because the suitcase is lighter, the wheels last long, the functionality is better and so on,” he says. “So we endeavoured to have the same approach when designing the backpack for you to take on your bike.”

From Rimowa's new personal collection

The engineers at Rimowa’s three production facilities – in Cologne, the Czech Republic and Canada – are obsessed with functionality, and this means it can take up to two years to create and perfect a new product. It also means that updating an iPhone case, which has been an incredibly successful product for Rimowa, can be a bit of a problem.

“The machinery we use is very heavy so it has been a bit of a challenge, but I believe we have managed to meet it,” Bonnet-Masimbert says.

The upside to this is that the products are immediately identifiable by the Rimowa design language of grooves, whether it be in hard surfaces (the iPhone cases and cross-body bags look like mini suitcases) or fabric surfaces (there are grooves and lines in the backpacks and tote bags).

“The cross-body bag is doing extremely well because it has a proprietary design that instantly is recognisable as Rimowa,” explains Bonnet-Masimbert. “It is super distinctive, and these mobility products are a creative playground that we want to explore much more in the coming years. We will have more surprises next year but right now I can’t tell you anything else!”

Alongside these new product launches, the CEO is confident that the company will be see huge growth in its suitcases sales as international – vaccinated – travel rebounds. Rimowa has already seen a recovery in the domestic markets in Europe, as well as in places such as China and even Dubai.

From Rimowa's personal new collection

“We do see a recovery; that is quite clear. Where the ability to travel domestically is already happening, we see our activity growing very, very fast,” he says. “The moment that borders reopen across the world, we will see a more dramatic recovery. Just as we may have been in the wrong trade at the wrong time last year, now we have a fantastic opportunity. The projections about international travel are very, very impressive and a lot of cities are now trying to cope with the number of people coming in. But we have the capacity to grow and we are ready.”

So are his customers: they are all getting out their suitcases ready to go on their next adventure to the other side of the world. Or as Bonnet-Masimbert discovered, they have actually had a suitcase open in the corner of the room waiting to be packed for almost two years.

“I was speaking to a gentlemen recently, from Japan, and he was telling me that during lockdown he took his suitcase out and started to look at it as if it was a magical object like a flying carpet,” Bonnet-Masimbert recalls, smiling. “He always just thought it was just a product he used, but since all of the lockdowns he realised it was so much more and he couldn’t wait to use it once again.”