Building an african luxury brand: the case of Elie Kuame Couture
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2022-08-15
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Pereira, Luís Henrique
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Despite the undisputed importance of luxury as an industry in many economies and societies, the African luxury industry has attracted few academics and little research, especially from the business perspective. Based on Kapferer and Bastien’ assertion that “there is no luxury without brands”, this thesis suggests to start bridging this paradoxical gap in the literature by exploring how African luxury fashion brands are being built. To this end, we compare the attributes and management principles of typical Western luxury brands extracted from The Luxury Strategy by Kapferer and Bastien (2012) with those of a recently established Ivorian luxury fashion brand: Elie Kuame Couture. Thanks to original, qualitative research, we show that the Ivorian brand shares many building blocks with its Western counterparts, but not all of them. While we thus cannot really conclude on whether or not Elie Kuame Couture is a “true” luxury brand, we insist that the Ivorian house develops its own specificities and hence challenges our list of qualifying criteria, as well as the Western understanding of luxury. Overall, this thesis hopes to contribute to breaking the perception that “Africa” is antithetical to “luxury”, to raising awareness about the continent’s multiple creative talents, and to supporting the development of a strong African luxury industry.