So how do you reach out to the kind of people who may be in the market for what amounts to their own private airline? NetJets has run conventional print advertising, featuring happy customers like Warren Buffett, Tiger Woods and Bill Gates. These tend to appear, as you might expect, in quality broadsheet newspapers. But – as we’ve heard time and time again – the luxury business is a people business.
‘More than 70 per cent of our new customers come to us via owner referral,’ says Dranitzke. ‘Our customers talk about us because we look after them. More than that, we spoil them. We deliver on our promises, and then we go beyond their expectations. Being a luxury brand is about taking care of every single detail, from the voice and attitude of the person who answers when a customer calls, to the tiny details that make them more comfortable. For instance, we’ve devised a signature scent for our planes, which is barely perceptible but extremely agreeable.’
He points out that the NetJets service is aimed at society’s elite. ‘And that elite is small. They are on the boards of the same companies, they play golf together and they find themselves at similar social events. This is the most efficient marketing channel for us.’
So what about the future? With environmental issues at the top of the menu, isn’t there a danger that owning a portion of a jet could be considered wildly irresponsible? ‘Well, fractional ownership is certainly preferable to everyone owning a whole plane,’ he replies, not unreasonably.
Of course, NetJets is aware that it operates in a tricky sector and is going out of its way to deflect criticism. For a start, since October 2007 the company has included the cost of a carbon offset scheme in its prices – with not a murmur of dissent from its customers. It has also bought fuel-efficient aircraft. More radically, it is investing in research at Princeton University that should lead to the development of an ultra-low-emission jet fuel. As trends that begin within the luxury sector often trickle down to the mainstream, this is good news for all of us.
NetJets Europe says that 60 per cent of its clients are individuals and the rest are corporations. But the corporations do far more flying – 70 per cent of the airline’s total. While few of us will ever be in a position to regard private air travel as a business tool, we can all appreciate its attraction. Like many other luxury products or services, it makes us dream a little. It’s perhaps not so surprising to discover that the executive chairman of NetJets Europe is Mark Booth, who was previously founding chief executive of MTV Europe. For the lucky few, private aviation is very rock and roll.
7
Super yachts
* * *
‘Pure objects of desire.’
In the harbour at Monte Carlo, the only sounds first thing in the morning are the ping of cables against aluminium masts and the hiss of water as somebody hoses down a deck. It all seems very calm after the short but crowded train ride from Nice and the bustling exit of passengers from the station. Not very many ordinary people live in Monte Carlo, but quite a few work here. They clip hedges and barber lawns, tend bars and wait in restaurants, or work in sleek offices managing other people’s money. And they commute every morning on the train from Nice.
Like commuters all over the world, they are mostly buried in magazines and newspapers, or cocooned by their headphones. They are numb to the view beyond the windows. And yet it is a splendid train ride, with big villas on one side and sparkling blue water on the other. At a little station called Cap d’Ail – which happens to serve one of the most desirable seaside towns on earth – there is a sign that reads, ‘It is forbidden to cross the tracks.’ Clearly, they’ve seen my bank statement.
The uncomfortable feeling of being an interloper stays with me in Monte Carlo. The harbour is guarded by ranks of smooth 1960s high-rise buildings hugging a rocky crag. The Hotel Hermitage rears grandiosely over them like a queen among courtiers, a charming reminder of the Belle Époque. Everything seems dreadfully clean – the harbour appears to lack the oil sheen and flotsam that usually snag at the edges of such places. Beside it are a line of waterfront cafés and a public swimming pool. I sip a coffee and gaze out at the jumble of boats, which range from stubby Bombard dinghies to giant vintage yachts with funnels. I’m reminded of Tony Curtis playing a fake playboy in Some Like it Hot: ‘They raise a flag when it’s time for cocktails.’ Still, I like these nostalgic cruisers rather better than their modern descendants, which are a glaring blend of stealth bomber and yoghurt pot.
I’ve seen boats like this before, many times. I did part of my growing up in a town called Poole, in Dorset, where there is another harbour – larger but far less glamorous than this one. (Just beyond Poole harbour, by the way, there is an island called Brownsea, which was once owned by the family of ‘Bentley Boy’ Noel Van Raalte.) The town is the headquarters of Sunseeker, a boatyard founded in the 1970s as Poole Power Boats. It makes dramatic motor yachts with names like Predator 130 or Superhawk 43. It doesn’t take too much imagination to picture them: they have featured in four Bond movies.
Today, though, I’m not looking for Sunseeker boats. In keeping with my search for genuine luxury, I’m here to find a breed of yacht that combines ultimate comfort with a kind of aesthetic perfection. When I was a kid, the word ‘wally’ was a slang term for somebody ignorant and without taste – the kind of person who hangs furry dice from their driving mirror and completes the look with a green windscreen strip that reads ‘Dave and Shirley’. Wally yachts could not be further from this image. With their knifing carbon-skinned hulls and teak-laid decking, seemingly dwarfed by glorious swathes of white sail, they are objects that capture the romance of the sea, even (or especially) for a landlubber like me.
At this point, with my unfinished coffee in front of me, I have yet to set eyes on a Wally sailing yacht in real life. But I know there’s one in this harbour. It should be easy to find. Luca Bassani, the founder of Wally, instructed me: ‘Just look for the black mast.’
A PASSION FOR THE SEA
Roughly around the time I was a small boy eating fish and chips on the quay at Poole Harbour, Luca Bassani was a teenager sailing off Portofino. Born into a wealthy Milanese family, he spent all his vacations at their holiday home, developing an intense passion for sailing and the sea. Today, his boatbuilding business occupies an office suite tagged discreetly onto the end of a luxury condominium in Monte Carlo. He is tanned and craggy, with a bristle of graphite hair, matching stubble, a white grin and a piercing gaze. He looks, in other words, like a sailor.
‘Although I was born in Milan, I spent four or five months a year in Portofino,’ he relates. ‘To a certain extent, I feel as though I grew up there. That was where I got my feeling for the sea.’
Bassani also has a feeling for business – he managed to combine a nascent career as a sailboat racer with an excellent education, leaving Bocconi University in Milan with a PhD in economics. Boats were the real buzz, though.
‘I had some success in my racing career, but I’d never found a yacht that really impressed me. At a certain point, I realized that I would have to build one for myself. The boatbuilding industry was very conservative and old-fashioned at the time. It was mired in tradition. I couldn’t understand why people weren’t using modern technologies to build bigger, faster, more comfortable and yet simpler yachts. Nobody was using carbon fibre, for example.’
Having drafted a concept for his ultimate yacht, Bassani went looking for a marine architect. Most of them, he says, were ‘scared off’ by the project. However, a young yacht designer called Luca Brenta was happy to take it on. The result was the Wallygator – which Bassani named after a cartoon featuring an animated alligator. Despite its light-hearted name, the vessel was no joke. It was a game-changing, 25-metre, 30-tonne yacht with a vertical bow, a hull swathed in carbon-Kevlar and a carbon mast whose aerodynamically swept-back spreaders (the horizontal spars extending from the mast) gave it the purposeful look of a fighter jet. It took to the waves in 1991 and set a template for the Wally look.
Ev
erything about a Wally sailboat is stripped down and streamlined. The anchor retracts seamlessly into the hull. The winches and cables that do all the heavy lifting are concealed below the tan expanse of teak-laid deck. Hoisting the sail, tacking or reefing can be done at the touch of a button from the helm station. Cleats, stanchions and the other clutter of yachting have been dispensed with or smoothed down to such an extent that they are barely visible. This not only leaves the deck safe and unobstructed, but also provides room for luxurious living quarters. The signature black or gunmetal Wally hull adds a final unconventional touch. Bassani was clear from the start that he wanted to combine comfort, performance and jaw-dropping looks to create ‘a pure object of desire’.
‘I was pretty pleased by the first boat, even though it attracted a few raised eyebrows. But I got some publicity, and I was confident enough to start a business to develop my ideas. I commissioned another version of the Wallygator and a third boat called Genie of the Lamp.’
Finally, in 1997, he made his first sale – to Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones, then the CEO of L’Oreal. Owen-Jones had been a motor racing enthusiast before turning his attention to yachting. According to an interview in French journal Les Echos, this was partly at the request of his wife, who had grown increasingly nervous about his exploits on the racing circuit. Owen-Jones said he initially found yachting ‘a bit granddad’ – which is perhaps why the dagger-like form of Wally yachts appealed to him. He named his new pride and joy Magic Carpet (‘Lindsay Owen-Jones, 40 ans de passion’, Les Echos Serie Limitée, 11 July 2008).
The decision certainly meant a lot to Luca Bassani – and to the future of Wally. ‘One of the peculiarities of this business is that you can’t simply explain your ideas to people. If you want to innovate in yacht design, the only way forward is to build yachts.’ Similarly, he says, advertising alone is not going to drive custom. ‘You need ambassadors. Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones was important for this company because he enthused about us. His yacht was a beautiful, three-dimensional commercial. This is all the more important for Wally because our boats are so different – they look like nothing else on the sea. It’s a cultural challenge to get people to understand what we’re doing.’
Bassani hints that some members of the yacht-racing community regard Wally with disdain. ‘There’s a reverse snobbery about their attitude. For them, everything has to be about performance. But I wanted to design an object that people could enjoy. I want you to be able to see one of our boats from the dock and gasp. For me this was always going to be a luxury brand as well as a shipyard.’
Wally yachts are literally in a class of their own. The International Maxi Association – which organizes races and regattas for yachts and sailing cruisers of over 24.08 metres – has a separate Wally Class that allows the owners of Bassani’s boats to compete amongst themselves. ‘It was obvious that my clients would want to race,’ he says, with a smile. ‘They tend to be very competitive people. I created Wally Class so they could race against those who shared their passions and values. It also emphasizes the uniqueness of our products. When you see photographs of all these Wally yachts in the harbour together – well, it’s not a bad marketing tool!’
Inevitably, the success of Wally sailboats has led Bassani to expand into other areas. Today, as well as sailing yachts of anything from 10 to 85 metres in length, it makes a range of seven motor yachts that are just as rakish and desirable as their sailing cousins. The 118 Wallypower has become a design icon. Once again, clutter like winches and radar antenna have been magically vanished into the smooth shell, while the vertical bow and side air inlets give the boat a coolly predatory look. It is so futuristic that it featured in Michael Bay’s science fiction film The Island (2005).
Talking of islands, Bassani’s most ambitious project to date is a 110-metre ‘gigayacht’ called WallyIsland. Resembling a designer super-tanker, it has a huge 1,000-square-metre forward deck area that could easily contain a tennis court, a garden with a swimming pool and maybe a helipad or two. With a price tag of €90 million, the boat had yet to be built at the time of our interview – but Bassani was confident that it would find not one, but several buyers. Customers for Wally motor yachts, which usually come in at a more modest US $25 million or so, are vaccinated against even the most virulent economic upsets.
Indeed, the giant yacht sector generally feels little more than a swell when the markets get stormy. The magazine Men’s Vogue compared the situation to ‘an arms race’ in which the stupendously wealthy try to outdo one another with ever-larger vessels (‘Sword in the water’, November 2008). It reported that the largest yacht in the world was a ‘531.5-foot colossus fittingly called the Eclipse’ commissioned by Russian oil oligarch Roman Abramovich. It also mentioned the ‘state-owned yacht’ Dubai, which is 525 feet long. The shipyard behind these giants is Germany’s Lürssen, a 125-year-old business that also builds vessels for the German navy. Its website (www.luerssen.de) includes videos of super yachts carving through the briny.
All of which leads me to ask Bassani what methods he uses to tempt the unreasonably rich to choose Wally and not its rivals.
HOW TO SHOW BOATS
‘The products themselves choose the clients,’ he begins. ‘They are clearly wealthy people, but there is more to it than that. They are unconventional. They see themselves as leaders and trendsetters. They also, I would argue, have taste.’
The supposed vulgarity of super yachts is a touchy area, and one that the designer Philippe Starck has addressed in his characteristically outspoken style. Starck was asked to create a yacht at the beginning of this decade. ‘They are not designed for their owners’ comfort or pleasure, but only exist to show off money’s vulgarity and money’s power... On top of that, as the market grows, more of these boats pollute the landscape,’ he said in an interview (www.luxuryculture.com, 22 May 2008). Starck relented when his client insisted that a yacht need not be vulgar, especially with the right designer at the helm. The result was an elegant, almost classical vessel called Wedge Too (2001). Starck has since taken on other maritime design projects.
Bassani, too, feels that the aesthetic quality of his boats is a defence against accusations of vulgarity. He also believes that they move the industry forward. ‘One of our roles is to innovate – and our clients see themselves as innovators with us.’
His potential customers do not live in a bubble, he says. Yachting enthusiasts read yachting magazines. ‘When I first became interested in sailing I bought every magazine available. At about 15 years old I was subscribing to 20 or 30 magazines. I pored over every image. Pictures of boats filled my dreams. So as well as learning a lot about boats, I learned how to show boats in a way that was seductive.’
Wally has run a series of advertisements in yachting magazines using the slogan ‘Thinking Wally’. The images are not conventional side-on shots of boats, but close-ups of different aspects of the vessels, often repeated in a collage effect so that they resemble eccentric, alien craft. Bassani likes to confound readers by providing teasing images: he might simply show the stern of a boat and the foaming white trail behind it. Even standard shots have a hidden message. One shows Bassani, alone at the helm of a 24-metre yacht, sailing it at full power just five metres from some rocks. To an enthusiast, this is a clear demonstration of the boat’s easy handling.
Bassani maintains a close relationship with the yachting press and often invites journalists aboard new boats for sea trials. He also ensures that Wally is present at international boat shows, although he adds that ‘there are too many of them.’ The biggest and most influential in the world is the Monaco Yacht Show, held every September. It is not just the relaxed tax regime that has lured Wally to the principality. ‘Monte Carlo has become the capital of big yachting. Here I am close to my customers.’
Wally’s offices look out onto a small harbour and are almost opposite the heliport where well-heeled visitors arrive from Nice.
But Bassani sees Wally as a global brand, and for that he ne
eds the internet. ‘The very wealthy have different attitudes to the web. There are some who don’t like writing e-mails and say that they don’t have time to surf the internet. But our younger clients, obviously, appreciate the web a great deal. Luxury brands can be dismissive of the internet because it is a mass communications tool. But that’s what gives us a global presence. It puts us on stage and lets people admire and aspire to our products. Today, I can’t imagine a marketing strategy without the web.’
I suggest that luxury brands are wary of the web because they believe it makes their designs too accessible to counterfeiters, adding that it would be pretty difficult to forge a Wally boat. Bassani shrugs, ‘Of course people have borrowed some of our ideas, which is very flattering. But it’s difficult to copy when you don’t own the soul of the concept. And I believe that’s what separates Wally boats from many others – they have a soul.’
8
Haute property
* * *
‘Luxury becomes beautiful and almost real under the sun.’
When Philip Weiser first came to the Côte d’Azur, he thought he would stay for three years. That was 30 years ago. Like many Brits who venture west of Nice, Weiser had found a little slice of paradise. And more to the point, he found that he was skilled at selling it to others. His company, Carlton International, sells luxury property ‘at the highest end of the market’. These are not just retirement homes for baby-boomers. They are also oases on the Riviera for the super rich.
It’s true that the market for hot property cooled dramatically as the recession took hold. Manhattan was hit particularly hard. The former masters of Wall Street were humbled. Even though bricks and mortar are far more secure than the stock market, investing in property was no longer an option, at least for the time being. The very word ‘property’ caused hackles to rise, because the economic downturn had been blamed on the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe – in short, the granting of hefty bank loans to those who could not afford to repay them – and the manipulation of highly complex financial instruments linked to the insurance of those mortgages. As the economy collapsed like a punctured soufflé, sellers of penthouses on Central Park West were forced to slash their asking prices by millions of dollars.
Luxury World: The Past, Present and Future of Luxury Brands Page 10