THE CHOICE OF HISTORY

REVIVING ‘HERITAGE BRANDS’ STARTED AS A CHALLENGE AND IS NOW AN INDUSTRY. BUT WHETHER IT’S AN ICONIC FASHION HOUSE OR A SHIPPING LEGEND, REBUILDING A HISTORIC BRAND TAKES CARE AND JUDGEMENT.

- DAVID WALKER

Karl Lagerfeld may have started the heritage brand revival trend. The German-born designer took over the quintessentially French brand Chanel in 1983 and carried off one of the first modern revivals of a declining brand.

In the early 1980s, old brands were often seen as simply destined for extinction. “Everybody said: ‘Don’t touch it, it’s dead, it will never come back,’” Lagerfeld told The New Yorker in 2007. “But by then I thought it was a challenge.”

As a company, Chanel never died. Yet after World War II it lacked the fashion cachet of its pre-war heyday. (Founder Coco Chanel’s rumoured Nazi collaboration didn’t help.) By the 1980s, Chanel was ripe for resurrection with new designs, created by the hard-working Lagerfeld. The company also carefully fostered distribution of its established fashion, cosmetics and fragrances through its own boutiques.

Thirty-six years later, Chanel has moved from aged to iconic. The home of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5 now ranks number 79 on the 2019 Forbes list of World’s Most Valuable Brands, with a reported US$6.5 billion (A$9.66 billion) in sales. That’s the power of heritage brands.

MANAGED WITH CARE

Corporate heritage expert John MT Balmer of London’s Brunel University says brand heritage has received more attention in recent years because it gives special qualities to everything from Chanel dresses to Bentley cars. Consumers seek authenticity, marketing researchers argue, and brand heritage is an important element of that authenticity. If branding explains what a product or service stands for, nothing backs up the claim better than a long history of delivering.