INTERVIEW: Yves at Laurent

Unlike most of his industry contemporaries, Laurent-Perrier CEO Yves Dumont doesn’t come from a Champagne background. What he brings to the house is commercial nous and a refreshing approach, writes Patrick Schmitt

Well-mannered, softly-spoken, immaculately-dressed, one would assume Yves Dumont had spent his life in Champagne, or at least in luxury goods. In fact, his CV reads more like a list for the weekly supermarket shop with soap, biscuits, frozen veg and orange juice featuring, as he’s moved from management roles in Unilever to Nabisco, from Green Giant to Tropicana, before joining Laurent-Perrier in June 1997 as CEO. “Usually people in Champagne have come from Champagne but my background was not Champagne, it wasn’t even wine, or a family-owned business, or a French one,” he says chuckling, adding, “so I brought a fresh look at things.”
That look was not transformed into a major overhaul of Laurent-Perrier, however, a company owned by the Nonancourt family since 1939. While Dumont admits he “introduced some method and rigour, and also probably a sense of brand management, some people say I tried to maintain too much at Laurent-Perrier”.
In fact, in the 11 years he’s managed the company, he has restructured the sales and distribution strategy of Laurent-Perrier, establishing subsidiaries in the US and Belgium, while placing an emphasis on exports and premium products. He has also engineered and successfully led the IPO of Laurent-Perrier on the Paris Stock Exchange, reshaped its overall branding and visual identity and drove the acquisition of Château Malakoff, adding 30% to the raw material supply potential of the company.

Market driver
These accomplishments have been welcome additions to the healthy functioning of Laurent-Perrier, but are merely minor adjustments to the business compared to past achievements of honary chairman Bernard de Nonancourt, who “is in the office almost every day”. For example, Laurent-Perrier under Bernard’s guidance was first to market with a multi-vintage prestige cuvée – Grand Siecle (1958) – and an Ultra Brut (1976). The Champagne house was also the driver of the rosé revolution (LP rosé was launched in 1968), and, Dumont suggests, partly responsible for Champagne’s positioning as a pre-dinner drink. “The Brut NV was the first to have up to 50% Chardonnay in the blend and at the time Chardonnay was 23% of the appellation area. Bernard really broke the code by launching [Veuve Laurent-Perrier in 1949] with twice as much Chardonnay as anyone else – and because we introduced the concept of pure, elegant and not too winey Champagne we participated in one sense in making Champagne an apéritif.”

Nevertheless, while today rosé is a major part of the Champagne category; most houses have an ultra brut, and several brut NVs have a high percentage of Chardonnay in the blend, Dumont is not necessarily planning another imminent groundbreaking product launch. “We have a lot of work to implement the innovations since 1958,” he says.
In particular, he is focused on managing the existing range for greater value creation and, as part of that, the repositioning of Laurent-Perrier’s more premium Champagnes. Whatever the market, “we are pulling out of the supermarket sector with premium items such as rosé and Grand Siecle because the consumer expects to find us in the most exclusive restaurants and bars and it is very difficult to deliver 100% of the demand of let’s say The Dorchester if you are distributed everywhere.
“Also, we’ve learnt from the consumers of high quality cuvées, who tell us that the purchasing experience is almost as important as the consumption experience and that we should focus on the channels where you have a person on hand to explain and guide the consumer. Of course that’s not the case in supermarkets, but in the independent wine merchant, or those places with a sommelier.”

The repositioning will also extend to pricing as well as distribution when it comes to Laurent-Perrier rosé, Grand Siecle and Alexandra. Prices are being raised because “over time we realised we were lagging behind,” and secondly because “we are reflecting the imbalance between supply and demand in Champange which is causing an increase of grape prices of about 10%.” (The Brut NV will also be putting its prices up between 10% and 15% depending on the market, but there will be no major changes in distribution).
Interestingly, as part of this strategy, less focus is being placed on rosé in the UK, where pink Champagne is almost synomous with Laurent-Perrier, while elsewhere more emphasis is being planned for the Champagne style. “Five to six years ago we joked that if we let things go the way they are going then all the rosé we produce could be sold in the UK. Now that’s true – the demand in the UK is so much larger than what we can supply. However, we cannot sell our rosé in just one country and it has taken the emphasis away from the rest of the range.” And Dumont is keen to point out that Laurent-Perrier is “very different from others because brut NV represents a little over 60% of sales, whereas in most houses brut NV represents 90-95% of sales.”
As for the supply-demand imbalance in Champagne as a whole, Dumont is convinced it will continue. “Total supply at the highest yield is estimated at 350 million bottles and last year we sold 340m. Of course there is the project for revising and reappraising the appellation area but it is a long process that will have no effect before 2020 or even 2025.”