Elie Saab

Elie Saab positioned itself as one of the few remaining established brands in haute couture. Its core business value is to creating high-end, one-of-a-kind designs made from the finest fabrics and materials, while having its competitive advantage of competitive pricing and impeccable services of close interactions with customers in order to fulfill every needs of their customers. Through the change of time, ES enhanced its position as the luxury brand for celebrities and royalties, meanwhile its strategy remained high-end, super-wealthy market and avoiding emerging into the affordable markets. It has four primary product lines: Haute Couture, RTW, accessories and wedding dresses.

There are multiple strengths of ES, it starts by it was one of the few remaining established brands in haute couture, which reflects its strong established brand image and reputation. Not every designer is qualified to entitle with the “couture”, being one of the few certified couture house is also one of its strength. Its impeccable services provide to its customers with its core of exclusivity masterpieces. Their clientele are mostly famed celebrities and royalties, which helped the ES to establish further brand image into customers’ mind.

Its weakness would be lack of diversifications and lack of distribution channel among global, for example, in the case, it indicates that RTW line production were limited to only certain areas mainly in Italy and France, which inevitably reduces the efficiency of distribution. As for lack of diversification, I mainly put it is because of as the time changes, the haute couture is gradually decreasing as people are willing to wear more casual as compare to what is used to be of having wearing formal in most circumstances. The company needs to expand its products into more diversified by having more stores in different countries and having the preferences changed accordingly.

The opportunity I would suggest would be emerging into new markets by creating a sister company that produces high-end, exclusivity products for men’s clothesline. Also there is the opportunity of expanding its brand in Asia, according to the case, that 37 percent of luxury products were being purchased in Asia, while based on exhibit 5, even though its sales based on region in Asia was increased from 0 percent to 1 percent in a year. This indicates that there is the opportunity for ES to emerge into Asia’s luxury market because Asia has the great purchasing power while ES didn’t have enough stores opened in Asia.

Lastly, the threats of ES are the change of culture, change of the preferences of the customers. As in the case mentioned, that nowadays, people are willingly to wear more casual style clothes rather than formal dressings. Also, nowadays people were more into the styles and designs, people would match high-end luxury tops with lower or semi-luxury pants which has great impact over the industry of haute couture and top tier level of clothesline industries. Also, there is the threat of the semi-luxury brands, those who are increasing their quality while improving their design as well which causes certain threats to ES that ES has to generate more exclusivity ideas and designs.