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RAPAPORT... Tiffany & Co. plans to open an innovation center in New York that will help it get new collections out faster by putting most of the
production process under one roof.
Key staff involved in research and development, design,
manufacturing and the supply chain will be together in the new facility,
Tiffany spokesperson Nathan Strauss told Rapaport News on Wednesday. It
will open later this year.
“If we put our expert minds together and foster a
collaborative energy among them, we’ll be able to move faster, be more
innovative, and produce even greater designs, and to embed sustainability
considerations throughout the process,” Strauss said.
The center was an initiative of Frederic Cumenal, the New
York-based jeweler’s former CEO, in a bid to speed up the release of new lines,
according to a report in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend. Cumenal
left the company abruptly in February, with chairman and former chief Michael
Kowalski taking over in the interim.
New designs represented less than 10% of jewelry sales last
year, with two or more years sometimes elapsing between collection launches,
the newspaper cited Kowalski as saying. In the past, designers would sketch
their designs first, before passing them on to the production team, the report
said, whereas the new hub would see the two teams working more closely from
the beginning.
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