oren meets world: moncler's artistic vision: a luxury brand strategy case study

Today, we're gonna talk about three of the most interesting concepts in brands, marketing, and creativity. Brands as a vehicle for artistic vision, world building, and product as marketing. I've touched on the topic of brands as art before with Gentle Monster, who are the true art as marketing brand, but this video focuses on Moncler, where the art is marketing. They use incredible curation, collaboration, and experience as a vehicle. To sell jackets, they're probably warmer than we need, but sold at the highest level. As many of you know, I've served as a marketing leader and CMO at retail brands, and now I advise large brands on social and world building like this. So I'm blessed to be able to spend my time researching these and get to actually try and validate how it works. And as always, I'm gonna share as much as I can with all of you. So today, we will start with my 45 second version of the insane Moncler near bankruptcy to multi-billion story. We'll touch on Oreo and their trend-setting retail strategy and how this plays into Moncler's collabs. We'll actually walk through my favorite Moncler collaborations and campaigns across auto, sports, cult brands, luxury, discuss their event, campaign, and Gen Z strategies, and take a last look at what does this actually mean for newer brands or people that wanna learn from what they have created. Let's lock in. So Moncler has an insane story. Like any good luxury brand, it was founded in the Alps, making actually high quality products used by cold weather workers and skiers around them. But that wasn't enough of a market, and by 2003, they were in near bankruptcy. So they were bought and moved to Milan by someone who had a significant vision for what the brand could become, and then was able to act on and execute it, and take this idea of luxury and really well-fleshed out products, and then add on the other layers of marketing and bigger applications than just servicing the people with whom craftsmanship mattered. Fast forward into the 2020s, and they've done three billion in revenue, and they actually own Stone Island, who they bought for a billion dollars. It was another brand who has come from pure product of performance, but built a really interesting story and culture around it, but I'll save that for another video. This Moncler story was actually one of the first TikToks I ever did about two and a half years ago. It actually did really well. And part of it is this story is anchored in some of the most interesting marketing of our time. It's wild collaborations, it's unique designs, it's building a world that goes far beyond a cold weather jacket, and ties into something that, no matter what you think of it, is intrinsically interesting, and it goes through a wide range of appeal by going from not just a sporadic collab here and there, but many stories being told simultaneously. So let's break down how this works. It starts with the core product. At the end of the day, Moncler sells puffer jackets, as the vast majority of their sales come from this base-level SKU that helps keep people warm in the winter months. There's some off-shoots, whether it's vests or more pro gear, and then they've branched out into a lot of the lifestyle accessories and clothing and general things that a brand will do, but it's all complemented around this one core hero product, the puffer. But then they've also dove into this idea of product as marketing. They've released a wild amount of collaborations and products that, many of which are almost unwearable. You'll see them be viewed more as art, more as something that's experimental, than something that's being bought. Not just saying, hey, we're gonna go buy big advertising campaigns and put up more billboards with Moncler on them. Instead, it's we're gonna create things that are helping bring creative visions into the world, that help garnish attention, that are going to serve as marketing for our core line. Because while only a handful of people might buy some wild Craig Green or Rick Owens piece, it continues to bring more attention and ideas back to the core Moncler line. Let's look at a tactical example of this same strategy in a different category, with the Oreo approach. So you may have seen all kinds of weird Oreo flavors over time. Peeps, Swedish Fish, the cursed candy corn flavor, Apple Pie. At one point, in the last five years, Oreo decided we are going to radically expand the amount of products we have. And we are going to do it for a few reasons. The first is obviously gain more retail shelf space. At the peak of this strategy, when you walked in, it was no longer Oreos and Golden Oreos and Double Stuff and Thins. Now there's a whole more lineup of just like 10 more intense flavors, occupying a significantly larger amount of space on the grocery store shelf. That leads to sales, more sales of these products. But also the attention driven by just the insanity of this concept of people being interested in that, people picking up one of these crazy flavors on the shelf and not even buying it, but then considering Oreo further, led to a 20% increase in the mainline sales of Oreo, just their standard products. So not only did they get this benefit of the new lines, they rose the main one as well. So when we talk about product as marketing, and we see all these out there products from brands like this, they're still getting a sales benefit. Some people are buying it. And even if that sales benefit is a lot smaller than what happens if they introduce a new core SKU, they're also raising the mainline as well. Now at retail with Oreo, what happens is that the product that people pick up first from the shelf is the product they most often buy. So packaging and basically consumer psychology in retail, a lot revolves around getting someone to pick up your product. And then there's the craziness of, hey, I'm picking up my Dunkin' Donuts native body wash. I'm picking up my Sour Patch Kids Oreo. If they choose not to purchase that product, they're most likely to grab the thing that is most next to it or similar to it, which will be the traditional version of the Oreo. Maybe I'm not in for Sour Patch Kids or Candy Corn Oreos. I'll go grab the standard one. So at retail, this makes sense in terms of psychology. Now with a luxury product, it's a bit of a different scenario because now you're talking about awareness that lasts over a length of time. Someone makes a decision to purchase a $900 jacket, winter jacket. They do that once every three years, not even a seasonal purchase. There's a lot of continual touch points with a brand that have to go into what actually makes that final decision. And so what Moncler sees with the sheer amount of campaigns they do, and we're gonna get into my favorites of these campaigns in a minute, is they know that they have to keep up a constant cadence of being front and center in people's minds as a brand of interest. And so they have what's called their genius campaign, which is their collaboration structure, which has about, let's say, a dozen collaborators at any given time, all of whom are releasing continual collections underneath the brand to be able to just have a constant cultural approach to being able to be present inside, top of mind. So when people do finally go make that one decision, they may like a product along the way and get into it, but when they actually go to say, hey, I want that winter jacket, Moncler has been in the back of their minds continually over time. And this decision is also generational. When you look at it from a brand of this size, because you'll get younger consumers who at some point are gonna make their first big purchase like this. You know, if you are under 25, you're probably not thinking about ever buying a $900 jacket unless you absolutely have to. But at some point, you're gonna make that transition. You're gonna have the resources to do it. It's gonna matter enough. And then the years of inundation that you've had to basically make that first purchase, but you know what, I have to have a Moncler, is a really important foundation that brands who are playing the long game think about. So we've talked a bit about the strategy here. Let's actually dive into some of these collaborations and what makes them special. And after that, we'll go into events, campaigns, and talk a little bit more about the Gen Z and younger strategy that they've done before we talk about what brands can learn. So I'm gonna start with the Craig Green campaigns that they've done. So Craig Green is a high fashion designer, and he's created five collections with Moncler, 2018 to 2022, all of whom are sculptural. They are essentially art pieces. These are not things you would see worn on the slopes. They're even complicated to see on the runway. But if you look at the art of presentation, back to this idea of brands as art, each one of these products as seen in the photography that we display here is an art piece. This is not a clothing necessarily designed to be worn and functional. This is clothing designed to be an expression of Craig Green's artistic vision. And he's doing it with the Moncler canvas of winter garb, and has created what is a truly unique slate that makes people rethink sculpturally what a garment could be, and what design literally looks like, and also what its display is like. Because these garments are designed for these photos. They're not even necessarily designed for wear. They're designed for wear, and the one application of when it is perfectly outlined doesn't create a photo like this whose symmetry, whose look is immediately scroll-stopping and look-stopping. And I think this is, of all the Moncler collabs, one of the purest brand-as-art, product-as-art applications of it. And we've seen a lot of brands get inspiration from this, whether subconsciously or consciously, in what we've seen released now, where so many brands will look at, let's make an Instagram perfect piece where its art display is almost more important than its wearability. It owes a lot back to these five Moncler collections with Craig Green. One of the biggest things I like about this and Moncler's approach in general is that they've splayed out from pure clothing and done things that go into automotive. Let's talk about their partnership with Mercedes-Benz. So this Moncler Voyage campaign, the first really impactful Mercedes campaign, involved this concept vehicle launched right before the overtaking of AI imagery. I actually think it'd be a little less impactful in this new era because we see so many things like it now. But they created this massive puff piece G-Wagon, this whole campaign where it's being dropped from the sky, created the real version of it and anchored an event around it in one of the most kind of staggering looks and feels of anything. And also a real stretch for Mercedes, who we'd never seen go full science fiction in the same way with such cultural resonance, creating a vehicle like a future art vehicle for the snow. And I wanna do a whole video at some point on art vehicles in general and people that take art vehicles seriously, but this is some perfect application of a campaign that really brought both brands out of their comfort zone. But they didn't do that on just this campaign, they kept it going as well. So I wanna talk about the Nigo collaboration here. I'll do my brief Nigo rant, where you've seen now with Pharrell at Louis Vuitton, a influx of some of these 2000s hip hop personalities, whether it's the clips being on the runway or Nigo being part of the creative process. But this presence of the people that like that era, the fragment design era, the bape era, comes to a nostalgia of a class of people who now have resources and money, of that 45 to 55 year old person who worked at an agency or in whatever job, who grew up in this hip hop era, who now has the resources with which to make luxury purchases. That is what that whole demographic appeals to. And Nigo is like the embodiment of this, even better because he goes cross-cultural. He's just as impactful to US hip hop as he is more Japanese, as he is in Europe. He's able to kind of transcend a purely American ideal of what that demographic looks like. So the Mercedes that he did with Moncler is a much more streamlined, approachable, you may even drive it, takes some of the ideas of that first Moncler Mercedes, but then strips it down to something that is actually very much a vehicle that you would drive and use. And I like this combination of this kind of hyper-modernism that you saw in that first application to this kind of 80s, 90s driven design that we see here that is actually very drivable, but carries on this like extension of the brand story and like the puffer iconography and feels kind of very uniquely Moncler. Going back to the brand is our concept. Cars are a vehicle for this kind of thing. You see brands do concept cars a lot. You see brands collaborate or do vehicles with people a lot because it is a great canvas to be able to put expression on and it's a better canvas than purely an item of clothing or a retail store because vehicles have that same aspirational and shareable quality because people are so into them. But their partnerships also branch into sports. So Moncler sponsors the football club, which makes sense as a Milan-based brand. For those who are not in the football world, this is a pretty prestige application to be a sponsor on and they basically do the kind of non-active wear, off-pitch kind of clothing for this with a kind of like a nice refined approach for that. But this is that continual branch of how do we as a company, again, selling that core puffer branch into these different parts of culture? We've got this high fashion approach with Craig Green. We're getting into the auto enthusiast, into the hip hop culture with what we're doing with Mercedes, with Nigo. And then we have, we're actually applying to the kind of the football fan, a more refined approach. You see everything that's done here is pretty straightforward. And when they do try to break this out of the mold a bit, this kind of Arsham collab that they have here, again, is very like stripped back for any of the Moncler campaigns. Not my favorite of the work here, although it's totally fine. But they are, again, they're able to keep it very streamlined and normal, quote unquote, in what they're doing with Inter while pairing that right with like this hyper modernist approach that they're doing with Mercedes. All because they have a brand world that can live within both. And then we'll talk about the cult design aspect of it with what they've done with Rick Owens, my favorite designer, where they've actually taken both a fashion and interiors approach here, which is something that I'm really interested in. So the Rick collections that they've done are a perfect encapsulation of like what any good Rick application is. So Rick will have these viral items, right? Someone's wearing a body as a backpack. Someone has some kind of crazy look. He's only using models that look like they aren't from this world. But at the same time, we'll also have some just like extremely wearable black items that can become a wardrobe and a staple for anyone who understands kind of the Rick canon. This is the same thing they do inside the Moncler universe, where there are these kind of insane puffers, also then this very wearable applications of the exact Moncler styles, where they're bridging that really good gap of attention and sellability. And this is of all those kind of collaborations has morphed into one where I feel like they probably sell the most of inside that kind of straightforward application. What also they've touched on here is futuristic living. So now we see Moncler move from auto, move from sport into interiors and spaces as well, using kind of Rick's love for that, his kind of existing template of how he's continually working spaces into how he's marketing. And now put that into how these collections come together. And you'll see the core of it is where fashion meets architecture. And they're designing atmospheric environments, the Rick Owens Mountain Refuge, a weather steel sanctuary, tying it back to that brand world building of everything has to be in snow. Everything has to be related to the warmth of the core product. That is the through line that you see in all this as a core of Moncler's world building that ties back to their value proposition and is executed so well across every single thing that we've seen here. And I love how they do that both in the clothing and in the actual physical interior and exterior design environment that they've done here with Rick. And really what they're doing is they're giving him a toolkit to say, hey, guess what? We're gonna pay you to design a weatherproof building to your artistic vision and standard. And we're gonna use that to market puffer jackets. And those are gonna be your puffer jackets and it's gonna be our main line. And it's a really interesting and thought through experience that feels executed at the highest level. And the last cloud I'm gonna call out is Palm Angels. So Palm Angels is an interesting brand. It's funny, I rarely see Palm Angels in the wild. But when I do, I'm usually like, whenever I'm staying at like a five star resort, like I was just at Nobu Barcelona, I was at like the Montage and the Waldorf and Laguna a couple months ago. I will see like kids in Palm Angels, like the kids of rich people wearing $400 Palm Angel shirts. It's my main like in real life experience, which I find funny. But I almost look at it as like rich kid clothing as a very flex, like a club flex garment for a certain demographic. And make that distinctly Moncler. So if you look at these light up jackets here, like the perfect extension of what these brands are together of taking this weatherproofed item and then making it into a kind of wild club kids statement piece. Or this collaboration where they're going like full retro racing, and they actually made a working cart track to go with it, which will tie into experiential stuff we'll get here in a second. But they're basically trying to tap into these different elements of culture. This is one of my least favorite is the Moncler racing side of it with Palm Angels, but just to show you the gambit. But this is not even the full extent of the collaborations happening. And this is what I want to impart on everyone is the scale when you're operating a brand at a certain level. And I know a lot of people that follow this channel are at marketing or in marketing at companies that are pretty significant. When you look at the fact that we've barely touched on, let's say a third of the collaborations that are ongoing, like at any given time with Moncler, gives you an idea of the scale with which you need to operate to be generating cultural capital like this. This is not just an internet thing. Moncler has done a good job of bringing this into the real world as well. So for instance, they had a London fashion show really based around the debut of these collabs. And one of the interesting things they did is get very community involved in it. And they've done this both in Europe and they've done it in China. So for this event, for instance, it wasn't just a runway show that was purely for like the fashionistas there. It was a like interactive experience that they invited a huge amount of their community to. Or there ended up being, I think, like 10,000 fan invites that were included in this like massive world that they created instead of a traditional fashion presentation. Now I'm gonna take a brief step over into what they're doing in China, because this is another interesting thought when you look at building a generational brand at this level and really pursuing a brand as art is that it's about all of these markets. When you're really operating in that multi-billion dollar territory, you're thinking through all of these potentials. And so they have been going after the luxury Gen Z market in China. And they've done that by launching collabs specific to them. They have three Gen Z Chinese talent and who were like when they launched this program, got like 5 million views on Weibo, which is a little bit of a different platform. That's a pretty significant. But they basically have launched a specific campaign tapping into that market. And they did that before launching this very prolific City of Genius campaign they did in Shanghai where they debuted this kind of next level collaboration platform that they're doing with a somewhat festival, somewhat art installation. It's also kind of a runway show. It was a major cultural item that they were able to put together in Shanghai as an anchor for what they're doing to really showcase themselves as a global brand and be able to put their collaborations forward to a market that is beginning to understand it. One of the last things I wanna mention to tie into this before we talk about what smaller brands and up and coming brands kind of learn from what they've put together here is all of this still comes with that core of luxury, which is service. One of the most interesting things I like to call out often about the Montclair website is not just this like amazing City of Genius section they have where they're kind of, you can go and explore all the collabs in this interactive environment, but the fact that they have virtual appointments and in-store appointments with stylists to be able to help people wear these things that they're creating and decide what's right for them. And that idea that you can have that same personalized luxury experience to be able to go engage with them is something I feel a lot more brands at this level should be considering because when you have so many products and so many SKUs like they do, so many collaborations, you understand how to wear them, how to use them, how they fit you, what you look like, and that is something a brand can come in and solve and then establish a relationship that allows you to kind of form a real connection with the brand that's gonna be long lasting. And I love that that is something that they offer and is available. But obviously, most of us aren't running $3 billion brands, aren't thinking like this in that same way, but I would encourage you to look at the foundations of what's put together here. Basically, the saying that instead of running all these traditional advertising venues, instead of this TV budget, et cetera, like how can we engineer cultural capital? And can we do that while also generating sales of product? And so at any level, I do feel that brands who have vision, if you are an artist at the end of the day, or you have artists on your team, enabling them has the exponential potential to do better than just purely buying eyeballs for dollars. And it becomes a question of are you willing to take the risk to invest in that and to carry it through to where it needs to be. And I would highly encourage in this era of brands where things are less measurable than ever, when people want return on ad spend to fit in a really specific bucket that actually doesn't work and attribution doesn't work that way. If you have the ability to take the risk and push for it, then you do it. But then to get more tactical, a few things we can learn from them that I love and think can apply to smaller brands is first is in sports with what Claire did with Inter. I think niche sports is a great opportunity for brands, whether that's local, like small leagues, whether it's rodeo or go-karts or bowling or women's soccer or local college teams. What's opened up with NIL. Partnerships with sports are as much about the content as the exposure. But when you do get exposure, even to a small audience, there's an audience that really cares at that small level. There's fandoms in those sports who support the brands and support their athletes. But there's also the ability to create content around those niches as well. Really, I feel like it's an underutilized tool by small and medium brands. And with NIL, the name image likeness, kind of opening up college sports to be able to kind of spend money like this, I actually feel like we are having more of a monetary conversation than ever around sports. And there's more opportunities to get in at lower price points than ever. And then back to my point before, look at your top of funnels, Art. One of the biggest conversations we're gonna have in 2025 for medium and larger brands is we need to do more on top of funnel, right? Everyone's kind of identified. If you are a medium-sized brand or a large brand, you are digitally savvy. You have kind of figured out how you're hitting the top of your meta, app-loving, TikTok, YouTube, and Google scalability in terms of your spending dollars to getting dollars back. And what a lot of people realize now is we need more top of funnel. We need more brand marketing. It's gonna be the hot conversation of all year. Then how can that make a bigger audience for us to then spend our new kind of direct generation engine underneath? And having that top of funnel be Art, or product as Art, and collaboration as Art, is one of the most redeeming ways to do it, that your team will be most excited about, that your fans will be most excited about. And I would lean into that. And then last, I would call it that initiatives have power, both internally and externally. So when you see, you hear Moncler Genius, or Moncler City of Genius, or Young Icon, when you actually name your projects, brand your projects, it gives it power. It gives something to be proud of. It gives something that's resonant. And when it's put out there publicly and externally, and people kind of hear about it and know about it, it's the same power as having a good brand on your actual company. It can apply to the individual things you're doing. That's something I think should be considered more by smaller brands as well. If you do have an ambassador program, or an influencer program, or whatever it is, brand it, call it something. Give it some life and some personality. It is something that this, that Moncler does extremely well, I think smaller brands would be able to learn a lot from as well. So I mean, that is a Brands is Art, Moncler case study video. I appreciate y'all watching and diving in. If you have questions on this, let me know. Obviously, it's a passionate topic for me to talk about. We'll be back with some more case studies. I'm gonna go a little more in depth on these, if these do well. I've been thinking about doing a video about Rick Owens. I think we're doing a video about the world of Travis Scott, which is actually a really interesting one, and about Off-White. A few others are kind of floating around in the back of my head. So if you do like these, please comment, let me know, and we will keep them coming. Thank you so much.