Chanel has acquired a stake in Italian tannery Samanta, a specialist in printed leather, as it continues to secure its supply chain in the face of a growing shortage of high-quality leather.

In a rapidly changing luxury market and leather industry, the two companies have decided to join forces to help Samanta further develop its unique offering, recognized by the biggest names in luxury. For Chanel, Samanta’s expertise and technical know-how represents a real added value for the leather industry as a whole.

Samanta’s expertise in printed leather will be especially useful for Chanel, which announced last year that it would no longer use exotic skins including crocodile, lizard, snake and stingray, and would instead rely on the know-how of its in-house ateliers to create high-end products. Continue reading →

Casting a wide net, Chanel has lined up 10 celebrities for its new J12 watch campaign that launches Monday. The approach is intimate, however, offering a peek into their personalities through snippets of conversation about time and life moments punctuated with the occasional flash of the latest version of the ceramic timepiece.

“It’s all about seconds,” is the catchphrase. Nine women are featured Keira Knightley, Carole Bouquet, Liu Wen, Anna Mouglalis, Ali MacGraw, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Vanessa Paradis and Lily-Rose Depp and one man: William Chan.

“A second is a second and a minute is made up of 60 seconds and an hour is 3,600 seconds so it’s something that is very objective and universal. Yet, we have all had extremely different, personal and unique experiences with time,” said the executive, swiping through images and films of the stars on a tablet screen. Continue reading →

The luxury brand, which fired its shot across the bow of sophisticated resellers of designer goods last year by accusing The Real Real and What Goes Around Comes Around of selling counterfeits, is keeping the fight alive.

In its New York federal suit against The Real Real Inc., Chanel Inc. disputed the reseller’s assurances that it carries only authentic labels verified by a crack team of gemologists and other experts. Chanel had claimed that only Chanel itself can know what is genuine Chanel, while The Real Real panned the suit as little more than an effort to stamp out competitors in the secondary market.

“Simply put, [The Real Real] cannot hold itself out as an expert authenticator and seller of “100 percent real” Chanel-branded products and then, after advertising and selling counterfeit Chanel-branded goods, claim that its advertising claims are merely ‘general expression[s] of opinion’ that are ‘immune from challenge,’” Chanel’s lawyers argued in the brand’s filing Wednesday. Continue reading →