Lladró appoints Alain Viot as Member of the Board of Directors and C.E.O of the Giftware Business

Alain Viot, Development Director of luxury brands at the multinational Richemont, to join Lladró on September 1st.

Valencia (PRWEB) July 11, 2004 -- Alain Viot, currently Business Development Director of luxury brands at the multinational Richemont, is to join Lladró as Member of the Board of Directors and C.E.O of the Giftware Business on September 1st. Viot is French, married with two children, and will be moving from London to Valencia to start activities as head of this firm, where he will be laying down the foundations for product strategies in all phases and areas: design, production and world sales.

As an executive with the Richemont group since 1987, for the past two years Viot has been coordinating world marketing strategies for highly exclusive brands in the fields of jewelry, watches, accessories and fashion such as Cartier, Baume & Mercier, Van Cleef Arpels, Piaget, Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC, Dunhill and Montblanc, among others.

Only two years after finishing his MBA at the French business school ESSEC, Viot started work for Richemont as a Product Manager for Cartier in the French market.

In 1993 he took over as World Marketing Manager for the jewelry and watch brand, and soon afterwards moved to Madrid as Executive President of the branch office Vendôme LG Ibérica (Cartier, Piaget, Baume & Mercier, Panerai and Dunhill), relaunching their products in the Spanish and Portuguese markets. This destination, dating from 1994 to 2000, gave him a thorough working knowledge of the Spanish market, where he headed a team of 160 persons, increasing Vendôme LG Ibérica sales to 60 million euros.

His next stage in the group took him to the U.S. as Cartier President, where he was in charge of brand operations and economic results as head of a team of 400 people. During this period he remodeled the Cartier store network, increased brand awareness through an extensive public relations program and implemented, among others, a crisis action plan following the fall of the economy after September 11th.

At his latest post in the multinational, he relaunched world positioning of the groups 18 brands in the luxury industry, applying a new brand vision and thoroughly remodeling international distribution systems and structures. His latest action in this field was the opening of a new branch office for the group in Russia.

The appointment of Alain Viot at Lladró is part of the reorganization process initiated in September 2003, when the Board of Directors made significant changes in company management. Viot, as C.E.O of the Giftware Business, will have ample decision-making capacities in the development of the Lladró and Nao brands and will focus on each and every aspect of company management. His incorporation is a clear bid for the future of these brands and shows this Valencian companys firm intention to continue in its search for company dynamics and brand leadership.

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