Today is Boxing Day. One more reason to drink and be merry! Champagne will be a great choice for you AND your shoe. That's a new discovery for me after reading an article titled Walking Legend featured in The Australian covering Berluti.
I'm intrigued by the creation of The International Swann Club - a yearly by-invitation only event where Berluti devotees get together to polish shoes and talk shop. Yes! Polish shoes. It sounds like an overkill for most but I guess its a tradition the Berluti upkeep since the early 90's. I think its a great way to foster brand loyalty in my opinion.
It's a pretty lengthy article. So here's an excerpt. So, the next time you are drinking champagne, save some for your shoe. A Berluti that is :)Read on....
...While there are no immediate plans for Berluti, which since 1993 has been owned by the French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, to open a store in Australia, Berluti’s comments about forming a club for shoe appreciation should not be taken as fanciful. Every year around 30 Berluti devotees, calling themselves The International Swann Club (named after Marcel Proust’s dandy from the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past) meet to talk about shoes and to polish them. To be part of the Swann Club you need to be invited by Olga Berluti. “There’s only one rule,” she says about how she chooses members. “No boring people admitted.”
The first Swann Club gathered at the Hotel de Crillon in Paris in 1992 and, since then, has met every year at a different but similarly special venue. “We discuss the aesthetics of shoes from a standpoint of pure reason and we polish them,” she says.
The polishing of the shoes is the most famous – and at first blush bizarre – part of this annual ritual. Berluti shoes, according to their creator, are best polished with Dom Perignon champagne – chilled, of course. The initial polishing is done with traditional creme polish and Venetian linen cloths and the final, extravagant gesture is with the champagne. “The alcohol makes the shoes shine,” she says. “Dom Perignon is perfect as it is not too sweet; sugar will make your shoes dirty. And it must be chilled because the low temperature fixes the wax on your shoes. I have also tried to polish shoes with cognac, the honey-coloured shoes, and it’s fantastic.” The shine, according to Berluti, can be enhanced by polishing the shoes while exposing them to the first quarter of the waxing moon.
Despite the growth of the company that Berluti joined in 1959, she leads a comparatively modest life. “There was a time when we had 3000 customers and I knew all of them,” she says. “But after 50 years, we now have 300,000 customers and I don’t know all of them. But I have the same lifestyle. I live modestly, I don’t drive a car, I take the Metro and I live in the same apartment and everything I do comes from the heart.”...
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