Ba&sh targets 200 directly owned stores with new openings in China, Dubai, Europe

By

Tanissia Issad

Translated by
Nicola Mira

Published
May 28, 2018

Pierre-Arnaud Grenade was appointed General Manager of Ba&sh in 2015 and, working with the French label’s staff and its founders Barbara Boccara and Sharon Krief, he has pledged to open one hundred monobrand stores and department store concessions. In 2017, Ba&sh notably landed in Asia and in the USA, setting up two subsidiaries run respectively by Isolde Andouard and Sarah Benady. By the end of 2017, the label prided itself on operating 130 stores in Europe - 90 of them in France - and another thirty split between the USA and Asia.
 

This was just the start of Ba&sh’s international roll-out. By December 2018, the French label, in which the L Catterton investment fund acquired a 50% stake in 2015, is set to grow its retail network by a third, topping the 200 monobrand store and department store concession mark.

Besides further openings in Asia (three stores in Hong Kong, seven in China and two in Macao), Ba&sh is planning to open another shop in New York. In Dubai, where the label has a distribution contract with Al-Futtaim, a new store is expected to be inaugurated in 2018. In Europe, the label founded by Barbara Boccara and Sharon Krief is expected to land for the first time in Portugal and to strengthen its presence in the UK, its second market after France, by adding to the seven stores it already operates in the country.

Ba&sh has outgrown its original business model, which relied on wholesale distribution, and now 80% of its revenue is generated via department store concessions and its monobrand stores. The wholesale channel only accounts for 10% of Ba&sh’s revenue, though it remains a means for introducing the brand in new, hitherto untapped markets, such as Italy, where Ba&sh is planning to launch.
 
As mentioned in the interview Pierre-Arnaud Grenade gave to FashionNetwork.com, besides focusing on international retail expansion, Ba&sh is strongly committed to developing its online business. The label created a direct-to-consumer team based in New York, working on all aspects of e-tail operations, and launched e-commerce sites in various languages and currencies (nine so far in total) to service its international customers more efficiently. The latest international website to launch will be the Dutch one. Ba&sh also started working with Tmall.com for the Autumn/Winter 2018, to grow its e-tail footprint in China. At the same time, it set up a content production unit in Paris, which creates all of the label’s visual images and video clips, to feed regularly and coherently its social media accounts, CRM tools and fashion influencers.
 
According to Pierre-Arnaud Grenade’s forecasts, Ba&sh could top the €150 million revenue mark in 2018, having reached €115 million in 2017, two thirds of which were generated in France. The label is considering other ways of expanding though.

It strengthened the team working on accessories, which is chiefly focused on the footwear collection, though this doesn’t stop Ba&sh from wanting to develop handbags, small leather goods, belts and scarves, and decided to sign a licence deal for eyeglasses and sunglasses with ODLM Seaport, which already works for Paul & Joe. And while this isn’t one of its short-term projects, Ba&sh said it is not averse to a licence deal for cosmetics and fragrances in the future.