Louis Vuitton Handbags

from purchase-designer-handbags

Established since 1854, Louis Vuitton has successfully emerged as a renowned brand par excellence, manufacturing high quality luggage, travel and leather items. It is a subsidiary of the French Holding Company, LVMH ( Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) , the first global group to specialize in world class luxury goods and is named after it’s founder Louis Vuitton who used to design and manufacture luggage during the late nineteenth century.

From its humble beginnings as a low profile trunk maker to a world famous brand with branches spread across Europe, Asia and America, the transformation has been phenomenal.

The company manufactures, designs and markets luxury leather goods, fashion accessories and jewelry. Louis Vuitton handbags are available in a wide variety of designs such as agendas, city bags and briefcases, clutches & pouches, wallets and small leather goods etc. Priced moderately to suit your pocket, it gives a facelift to your wardrobe by adding style and substance.

The company markets its products through its own stores across the globe so as to have absolute control over the pricing and quality of every item manufactured under its label and to prevent replicas and counterfeits from being marketed and sold in the flea market. Decades after its establishment by the late Louis Vuitton, the brand still maintains the same level of quality shows the same zest to excel in the chosen field, which is why carrying a Louis Vuitton Handbag is considered a status symbol, a luxury for the rich and the famous and for all those who have an eye for beauty and class.

The Louis Vuitton clutches and pouches are available in an astonishing range such as: Monogram Canvas, Monogram Denim, Monogram Multicolor, Monogram Vernis, Damier Canvas, Suhali Leather, Onatah Leather, Epi Leather etc.

All the Louis Vuitton products are manufactured in its own workshops located in France, Spain and the United States and the materials used in manufacturing of these products are of the finest quality and worked on by the finest craftsmen who excel in their work. These products can be ordered online and can be customized according to the customer’s individual choice and specification, by the craftsmen at Louis Vuitton. The Louis Vuitton Monogram Mini Sac is a petite, easy to carry evening hand bag / accessory bag. Its monogram canvas is neatly trimmed with natural cowhide and has two artistically designed rolled leather handles.

The Louis Vuitton Mini Lin Croisette is one of the most exotic handbags launched as the winter collection & contains an amazing variety of handbags and fashion accessories to suit all tastes. It is a part of the traditional MINI LIN LINE. The CRUISE COLLECTION is now launched in two cool new colors, red and blue and is has subtle stripes on the straps which further adds to the beauty. These new handbag collection, are beautifully trimmed in gorgeous white pebbled leather and is a perfect choice for evenings and vacationing while on a cruise.

The Multicolore Line, the Cherry Blossom Line, Panda and Cerises – all the works of a Japanese pop artist Murakami, are some of the most popular and commercially successful Louis Vuitton Collection.

Designer handbags? Sorry, there's a limit.

Hermes Birkin Bag carried by Celebrities Worldwide

by Eric Wilson
International Herald Tribune

NEW YORK: For products that are truly in demand, like Wii game consoles, tickets to the Super Bowl or cans of corn on double-coupon day, it may seem reasonable to limit the number a customer can buy at one time. But readers of the fine print on the Web sites of luxury retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman may be surprised to discover that such a policy also now applies to designer handbags. These include Prada's latest ruched nylon styles, which cost $1,290; Bottega Veneta's signature woven leather hobos, at $1,490; and the new rectangular Yves Saint Laurent clutch that looks like a postcard addressed to the designer (with a $1,395 stamp).

"Due to popular demand," potential shoppers are warned, "a customer may order no more than three units of these items every 30 days." Popular, the bags may be. But how many of the customers who can afford them really want more than one, or for that matter, three? On its face, the policy sounds odd; that is because it really does not have anything to do with popular demand. Rather, it is the fear that foreign buyers, taking advantage of the severely weakened U.S. dollar, will hoard the bags, then resell them in Europe or Asia, where the same items in Prada and Gucci stores typically cost 20 to 40 percent more.

Yves Saint Laurent's Downtown Bag carried by Celebrities Worldwide

The popular Yves Saint Laurent Downtown bag, which is restricted to three per customer at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, costs $1,495. At Harvey Nichols in London, the same bag is £910 (or about $1,796). Foreign tourists who are treating U.S. department stores as if they were a nationwide outlet sale have largely been viewed as beneficial to retailers, and by some estimates those shoppers were the only bright spot in what was otherwise a feeble holiday sales season.

But that spending power has not been so welcome to luxury companies like Gucci and Prada , which have spent the last decade trying to reach those customers in their home countries by opening expensive new shops throughout Europe and Asia. Now those companies stand to suffer a sting from increasingly educated comparison shoppers, if not a more serious blow from a gray market of designer goods resold from U.S. stores.

For now, the policies of Saks, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman apply only to online sales of handbags and shoes from Prada and the Gucci Group labels (Gucci owns Yves Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta), but not other luxury brands like Dior or Givenchy, which are owned by the competing fashion conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

Meanwhile, LVMH sells its Louis Vuitton handbags online only on its own site, www.eLuxury.com, where the policy is even more strict: two of each style per customer, per calendar year. There are no stated restrictions on shopping inside the 39 branches of Neiman Marcus or at the company's Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan, Reeder said. But a sales associate at Bergdorf said this week that employees were instructed to use discretion with customers looking to buy a large number of items. A salesman at the Louis Vuitton store across the street said a customer trying to buy more than two bags would be asked to give a reason.

Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to reporters. None of the makers of the designer brands would speak for the record, but several executives acknowledged privately that they are meant to prevent bags from being resold. During the luxury boom of 2000 and 2001, when shoppers lined up in the street outside Gucci, Hermès and Vuitton shops in Paris, the companies drew criticism for putting into effect bag-per-customer limits that appeared to be aimed primarily at Asian shoppers.

Some Asian customers complained they had been banned from Vuitton stores, and they could be found on the Champs-Élysées offering to pay Western tourists to buy bags for them. What has surprised some retail analysts is how quickly the concept of quotas has arrived in the United States - and not just for handbags . In its online store, Apple limits customers to five iPhones per order. "This is not an unusual situation for designer brands," said Claudia D'Arpizio, a luxury goods consultant at Bain in Milan.

"It's unusual for the United States. What is changing now is the geography of the touristic flows." In the '80s, American and Asian tourists commonly shopped for luxury bargains in Italy, when the lira was weak against the dollar. But since the dollar began its spiraling decline against the euro in 2000, shortly after its introduction as the European common currency, the value-minded tourist tide has shifted to the United States. Travelers who buy multiple items to resell to friends back home are only a small portion of the gray market, said Fred Felman, the chief marketing officer of MarkMonitor, a San Francisco agency specializing in brand protection.

It is more problematic when professional networks resell luxury goods through small shops throughout Asia, or through online retailers like eBay. In December, Patricia Pao, an independent retail consultant, arrived at Newark airport, in New Jersey, from Los Angeles and was approached by a young woman who asked her to help close a suitcase by sitting on it. The woman was returning to Slovenia with what appeared to be 200 pairs of designer jeans, the least expensive bearing a price tag of $228. "She said that by selling the jeans back home she could not only cover the expenses of her trip, but she could also make a profit," Pao said. "The weakened dollar makes everything here look like a bonanza."

As anecdotes about foreign shoppers flocking to buy electronics, toys and Manhattan real estate become more common, analysts are debating the long-term impact of shopping tourism on brands that place a premium on their exclusivity. "Imagine a scenario where you have people buying all your stuff," Pao said. "In the short term you benefit, but in the long term, you don't, because you don't know where the sales are going, and that is very scary to these people."

Facing Growing Pains: Indie Bag Brands Soar, But Tough Road Ahead

from Women's Wear Daily

It's becoming harder than ever for the little guy to survive and thrive in the handbag business.

Even as demand for handbags continues to climb at retail, and scores of new designers flood the market in hopes of becoming the next Kate Spade or Coach, many independent brands are facing an increasing number of hurdles to growing their businesses — from the weakness of the dollar against the euro to the marketing might of major designer brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci or Prada. Then there's the concern of expanding too quickly for fear of becoming too popular too quickly and causing a brand to burn out.

"My competition is the big brands," said Devi Kroell, who designs python and leather handbags for her four-year-old signature firm. "They have advertising behind them and they have the clothes behind them. All of this creates a strong brand identity. We don't have those advantages."

Kroell is slated to open a store in Manhattan this year and opened a boutique in East Hampton, N.Y., in 2006. With so many moneyed, established ready-to-wear brands launching handbag collections in the last two years

— Diane von Furstenberg, Jill Stuart and Elie Tahari among them — independent designers are going up against larger companies with much bigger marketing and design budgets.

Jessie Randall of Loeffler Randall — who last year won the CFDA Swarovski Accessories Award — has also felt the heat in the market, specifically with her materials. Loeffler Randall's leather totes and clutches wholesale from $85 to $385.

"Our leather out of Italy has really affected our pricing," Loeffler said. "We've worked hard to stay within our market, but it's a challenge because the euro has gone above where we'd imagine it would ever go. We try and buy early, but it's still a gamble."

The euro's surge has had similar effects on European designers. Nadine Ferber, who owns Mick Margo, a boutique in New York's West Village that seeks out lesser-known labels, said she is shortening her order of brands she encounters at the Paris trade shows.

"I don't take a chance on the smaller designers anymore," Ferber said. "For smaller French labels, people here aren't willing to pay the up-charge now. I'll go to Paris this season, but if it continues to rise, it becomes less valuable to go over there for us."

The average number of bags the American woman buys annually has tripled, according to Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at The NPD Group, a research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y.: She now buys three every two years instead of one every two years.

In the Nineties, retailers created showcases on the main floors of their stores for innovative, trendy bags priced a level below the leather goods icons such as Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton. Out came lines like Kooba and Botkier, with fashionable leather bags selling for around $375, compared with the top-tier brand's average bag prices of $1,000. The lower-priced bags turned up on the arms of celebrities such as Sienna Miller, whose name was given to Kooba's signature whipstitched style, and Lindsay Lohan, who often wore Botkier's Trigger design.

In this category, Spade is both the benchmark for fledgling bag companies and the warning signal. Started in 1993 by Kate and Andy Spade, the company built its brand based on a concept of handbags as fashion items, opened stores and branched out into multiple categories, from shoes to tabletop. Spade was acquired by Liz Claiborne Inc. in 2006 for $125 million, but many believe the brand's core bags have lost some of their luster in recent years, given the rapid expansion into other categories. Claiborne hired Deborah Lloyd as Spade's new creative director, and has charged her with first reinvigorating the core handbag line.

Spade's presence in the market is an example of how a successful small brand inevitably makes the leap to big business. Handbag brands with strong sales often expand into other categories in a similar effort to expand their company. Loeffler Randall recently added swimwear to its repertoire. But they must be careful not to dilute their brands and weaken their core product.

Many independent labels are sitting on this cusp. Kooba, for example brought on an equity partner through a growth investment from Swander Pace Capital in October. Botkier reported increases of 40 percent. Devi Kroell, another CFDA winner, said her sales have tripled in the last year.

But designers entering the race need to grow their core category brand by pairing up with smaller specialty stores and boutiques. And despite the rising cost the euro is placing on the consumer, firms need to keep their wholesale prices affordable.

"We can't compete with certain big-name stores and neither can our boutiques," said Jeremy Bassan, owner of Big Buddha, a handbag firm based in Santa Cruz, Calif. "So we try to provide [the boutiques] with good individual styles at affordable costs. We treat them well."

According to Emily Blumenthal, who founded the Web site handbagdesigner101.com to guide emerging designers, boutiques are often the better option for independent designers, regardless of department store interest. They often take more chances on lesser-known names.

"The idea of getting a bag into a department store is an aspirational goal, but a whole lot of work," Blumenthal said.

Cynthia O'Connor, whose New York showroom COC + Co. represented Kate Spade, Kooba and Isabella Fiore in their early years, found that since the luxury handbag boom, bigger stores are less inclined to pick up contemporary or independent labels.

"Right now, we're battling the issue of 'luxury is what sells,'" O'Connor said. "The more luxury bags stores have, the more sales per square foot they get. And as long as designer product blows out of stores, dollars will close on contemporary."

Cate Adair, a costume designer on "Desperate Housewives," is well known throughout fashion and Hollywood circles but has had a hard time selling her namesake fledgling handbag line at Bloomingdale's. The retailer picked up the line from the get-go, but the brand was getting lost among major designer brands. Adair has had more success at smaller stores such as Kitson and Fred Segal.

"It's hard because you have to build a name and brand [yourself]," Adair said. "You really do need to build your brand in smaller stores first."

Tim Schifter, chairman and chief executive officer of Schifter + Partners, which produces and distributes L.A.M.B., Jill Stuart and Kid Robot handbags, emphasized the importance of having strong brand awareness before shopping a label to a big store.

"When retailers see a brand's rtw line doing really well, they're going to take the chance on the handbags," Schifter said. "It's about having an emotional connection."

Kassidy Babcock, buyer for Shopbop.com, scours the New York trade shows — like the recent Accessorie Circuit and AccessoriesTheShow — for independent labels, where her budget for emerging designers is about 31 percent of her open-to-buy, compared with 23 percent last spring. Babcock said in 2007, handbag sales grew 222 percent, and projects 125 percent growth this year. She encourages those designers to stay under the $400 retail price tag and find their own niche.

"The market is tough," Babcock said. "I like seeing individuals do their own thing and not knock off higher-end designs, which is a challenge. Those people are doing extremely well, though."

Babcock noted the Foley + Corinna City Tote has an almost "cult-like" following. Other strong sellers are Lauren Merkin clutches and any bag from Marc by Marc Jacobs.

Sandra Wilson, accessories fashion director for Neiman Marcus, said the store "is always looking for fresh new talent, new ideas and great product that would appeal to our customer. We are just beginning the process for this fall."

Most independent companies are still seeking editorial coverage from magazines and celebrities to endorse their brand.

Loeffler recalled the impact bloggers had on her launch. She attributed much of her start to fashion sites such as refinery29.com and racked.com.

Celebrity power in building a brand hasn't declined either. In the last three years, handbag firms such as Kooba and Bulga have exploded thanks to paparazzi and red-carpet coverage of such stars as Jessica Alba and Cameron Diaz.

"I'm happy celebrities are wearing the bags," said designer Monica Botkier, whose label is a Hollywood favorite. "But they're also real women. We have a great following with Angelina Jolie. She's a mom of four and running around. It's great to see her using her bag with her kids."

Botkier acknowledged such celebrity snapshots have sparked consumer demand at retail. Jolie's Sasha Duffle is a top seller.

Some independent labels are playing to a broader customer base by creating capsule collections with big-name retailers. Rafe, Loeffler Randall and Devi Kroell are three firms that have stretched their brand awareness by partnering with Target Corp.

"For us, the main benefit was to get the brand name out there," Loeffler said. "We're fairly new and people know us, but I don't think people in Middle America know about our brand. It's a great way to get it out. Plus, the marketing money Target put behind the campaign was incredible. We don't advertise, so for us to have an ad in the back page of the [New York Times'] Sunday Styles section is huge."

Kroell said her partnership with the retailer helped her see how to eventually start a secondary line to her designer bag collection, which wholesales from $300 to $7,000.

Showroom operator O'Connor said independent handbag designers must start branding themselves from the moment they complete their first sketch and that the issue is not whether it's a bad or good time to enter the race, but whether it's a good time for a particular designer.

"Ninety percent of the people who design have no clue where the money is coming from, it's all a pipe dream," O'Connor said. "I look for people who know where their next $3 million is coming from. If they do, and if they know where their next $3 million will come from after that, it's a good time."