Selling Wine, Flowers, Fashion and Ideas: How a Frenchman Named Louis Has Made a Living in China for 20 Years

"There are just too many opportunities here — a long history, a huge country, a new language, new business openings. It's all of it together."

Louis is a 40-year-old Frenchman who has spent 20 of those years in China. He is tall and lean, and wears round, thick-framed glasses that match his brown hair, a navy ICICLE suit that cost more than 4,000 yuan, and a pair of red straight-leg trousers from GU that cost 80. A small silver suitcase sits by his feet. He looks like a salesman with a clever line ready at any moment.

We first met at the Wagas on the third floor of the south zone of Sanlitun Taikoo Li. He had sent me two Detective Conan stickers on WeChat and written: "Easy to find. Look for an aged-up Harry Potter or Conan. That'll be me."

Louis runs a small branding consultancy called Creative Capital — 40 people, three departments (brand strategy, visual design, interior design), with offices in Shanghai and Shenzhen plus Paris, Jakarta and New York. Just before we met he had finished a business conversation with an executive from Tongrentang, and had not yet come down from it.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing at my iPhone SE.

"A phone."

"No, that's an Apple," he corrected me. "Everyone who sees it knows it's an Apple. You think that's because of a logo? No. It's because of the brand. Is Zara a brand? No. Is H&M a brand? No. Something like Apple is a brand — clear positioning, design that matches the positioning, and no pandering to consumers." He asked his own questions and answered them, warmly but leaving no room to disagree, then let his forward-leaning body settle back a little, as if resting, as if waiting for me to digest what he had said.

Most of the time, Louis is probably in exactly this mode, selling himself to one client or another. His calendar is blocked out in quarter-hour increments; he works more than ten hours a day and likes to have everything fixed a month ahead. In the past week he had flown back and forth between Shenzhen, Shanghai and Seoul, and on his busiest day he had booked meetings with six clients. Every Sunday afternoon he also goes to the Condé Nast training center in Shanghai to moonlight as a brand trainer.

Old-line brands like Tongrentang are Creative Capital's main clients. Its long-standing big accounts also include Goodbaby, which ranked fifth in Taobao sales on last year's Double 11. These are all veteran names in their industries, and thanks to their existing distribution and supply chains, their products still sell well enough. But with everyone talking about consumption upgrading and millennials, they have grown anxious about how to remake their brands and how to attract young people.

Two other kinds of clients: multinationals trying to work out the Chinese market, and startups just getting into the lifestyle business. In Louis's scheme, their problems fall into three buckets — "brand creation," "brand turnaround" and "brand experience." He is confident about his own record: "If you found another Frenchman today to come to China and do what I do, he probably still couldn't compete with me. He'd have to understand China, and he'd have to build up enough clients and contacts. In China you won't find many branding consultancies that can work it all out, from market positioning to retail. Most are either ad agencies or design firms."

He paused and pointed at himself. "I can, because I've done all of it."

1

Louis Houdart married a Chinese woman, but his Chinese is not fluent, and he never gave himself a Chinese name. He says he has no gift for languages, though he does have some ideas about business. He dislikes living like a cog taking orders, and likes "adventure."

In 20 years in China he has been to more than 100 cities, mostly on business. Once the work was done, he would pick a subway line at random and ride it from one end to the other, or wander through the local wet market or supermarket, watching where people liked to go and what they liked to buy.

Louis says he comes from "an illustrious family" — his grandfather ran a chain bank in Paris, his father founded a well-known French conglomerate. "But I can't tell you the name of the group or what industry it's in, or you'd work it out." His speech sped up on the other end of the phone. "I'd rather not bring it up."

His first trip to China was in the 1980s, over a Christmas heavy with snow. His peers studying in Singapore all went to warm Australia for the holidays; he went to Beijing, out of curiosity, to see the Forbidden City. He can no longer remember what interesting people or things he saw there, and offers only a broad explanation: "There are just too many opportunities here — a long history, a huge country, a new language, new business openings. It's all of it together."

Louis's first job was breaking ground in Shenzhen, selling wine for Summergate, a wine-trading company a Canadian had set up in Shanghai. In Shenzhen in 1998, almost nobody drank wine as a matter of course; it turned up only in high-end restaurants and import supermarkets. As the only foreigner in the office, and its manager, Louis — who barely spoke Chinese — was the one sent out to deal with restaurant and supermarket bosses.

Xu Xiaoying, who founded the Shenzhen bar Bense, remembers this young, tall, thin Frenchman. "Not because he was foreign — by then Shenzhen's bars already had plenty of foreign artists and house singers. I remember Louis because wine suppliers usually sent Chinese staff who knew the Chinese market to negotiate. Louis was the only foreigner, just past 20, very good-looking, but he couldn't speak Chinese yet and brought an interpreter."

Bense opened in August 1999 and now has more than a dozen locations around the country. Before it opened, Shenzhen had exactly one bar: Chicago, at the Shenzhen Gymnasium. "The crowd there was a mess — beer, sunflower seeds, disco dancing. My partner then, Mr. Chen, and I had both worked at an ad agency, and we wanted to do something cultural, something artistic. So from the start Bense was built around original music, and the drinks had to be a cut above too."

But in early 2000, Chinese drinkers were still unfamiliar with red wine and imported spirits. The only imported spirit you saw much of was Jack Daniel's; red wine drinkers were rarer still. Xu Xiaoying worked with just three suppliers: two distributors of spirits, for Hennessy and Chivas, and one red-wine distributor — Summergate, where Louis worked.

Being foreign, Louis recalls, did not actually help him sell wine. The moment business came up, these shrewd managers would look pained. What broke the ice was drinking culture: "You eat with them, you drink with them, you become friends. Once you're friends, everything is easy."

Next came storytelling. "Say you're selling a wine like Red Devil. It's just a mid-range Chilean wine, but you can make people remember it by telling a story." The story Louis told restaurant managers was that the wine was so good people used to come at night to steal it, so the owner of the winery hid in the cellar with a candle and used his own shadow to frighten the thieves off — hence the nickname Red Devil.

Stories plus friendships worked. It also helped that bars had few large wine distributors to choose from: "Summergate already counted as a big one," Xu Xiaoying said. By the time Louis left, Summergate had several major clients in Shenzhen — the Crowne Plaza hotel, Bense, and chain supermarkets that had only recently entered China, like Carrefour and Walmart.

2

After a year in Shenzhen, Louis went back to Bocconi in Milan for a year of luxury-goods management. Over the next four years, like plenty of other people in their twenties, he took several jobs trying to work out what he was actually good at. The trial and error included brand marketing at Ferragamo, and work as a broker in the Shanghai office of a German shipping brokerage, hunting down and contacting Chinese clients.

Neither job excited him. The first let him do only operational branding inside the boundaries the creative director had drawn; the second paid well but meant sitting at a computer all day doing arithmetic, typing and filling in forms. As Louis puts it, "what I mainly got out of it was a sense of how luxury operations work, and of how luxury consumers think." What he really wanted was to "hold the initiative myself, and deal with people."

In 2006, in Shanghai, Louis started his second venture in China. He still wanted a lifestyle business, ideally one that could use the client contacts he had built up selling wine and brokering deals.

He settled on flowers. "The restaurant business is too competitive, but a flower business is easier to run, and the potential is huge. After all, I've never seen another country with so many holidays in a year."

The first time Huang Yun met Louis, at a café on Central Huaihai Road, Huang was 19 and still an apprentice at a small flower shop called Jiaoshi. A friend of his was then managing a branch of Hibiya, a high-end Japanese flower-shop chain; he had met Louis when Louis came in to buy flowers, and was talked into joining the new venture. With Huang Yun and a lawyer, that made four employees at Louis's flower shop, Secret Garden, which ran its first store in Shanghai's Xintiandi for a year.

Huang Yun did not think about it for long, because Louis promised him a great deal of training — French florists would come to teach him, and later he would study in France. And the new shop looked like a real operation: positioned as "French style," with a blue logo and a pale gray interior done by an Italian designer friend of Louis's; bouquets wrapped in black paper, which stood out at the time; prices from 45 yuan up to 100-200 yuan, cheaper than Hibiya but far more considered than a street-corner stall. Huang Yun thought the Frenchman was ambitious — "whatever he did, he wanted to do it big."

The promise of study in France was never kept, but Huang Yun still admires his old boss. "Strict, but warm, easy to talk to," he said. Louis would scold him when the floral foam in a vase was not fully covered by leaves, and he would also take him to Dongjiadu to have suits and shirts made, "teaching me how to be polished, how to carry myself."

In Huang Yun's view, Louis knew nothing about floristry, but his mind was quick — he could earn someone's trust just by chatting — and he had both taste and drive: "working 24 hours a day." When the shop opened, Louis would donate flowers to high-end events, French-Chinese chamber of commerce functions and the like, on condition the brand's logo was displayed; when designing flowers for an event, he would tell the florists not to use only flowers but to mix in other materials. Most of the time this boss stayed in the shop, talking to customers and using them to build contacts among people living in the wealthy neighborhoods nearby. His laptop never left his side, and when he was not talking to someone he was emailing, looking for B2B clients who might buy flowers year-round. Bouquets and window displays for luxury brands like Hermès and Louis Vuitton, and for some high-end department stores, eventually made up 30% of revenue.

One of Louis's most important decisions was the deal with Carrefour, because around 2007 Carrefour's shoppers were still a middle class with real spending power. He got it by cold-calling. "I just called the switchboard and got through to the manager. Carrefour had a few scattered flower stalls then but no chain. I thought it was an opportunity."

Once it became a chain, though, Secret Garden hit problems Louis had not foreseen. Carrefour's terms were a bundle: to open a store in a prime location like Jinqiao, Gubei or Wulin, you also had to open one or two in Carrefour's suburban stores, and the suburban ones generally lost money. On top of that, "this industry looks enormously profitable, like it prints money, but everything in a flower shop is done by hand, and it's very hard to manage. Once you have a lot of stores, if inventory slips at all the flowers are wasted. Eventually there were more than 30 people on staff, and there was bound to be some pilfering," Huang Yun said.

These foreigners, Huang Yun thought, were naive about certain things. Louis later hired several French executives at high salaries to handle B2B deals. But the juiciest business of all — supplying flowers to five-star hotels — never came through. "Your way works fine in foreign circles, but for five-star hotels you still need people who understand how Chinese people deal with each other."

To grow the business, Louis also went looking for investors in Britain and France. In 2010 a French company called aquarelle.com showed interest, but only wanted to invest in the online side. Taobao had only just opened Taobao Mall, Weibo had only just been founded; Louis thought the online opportunity was not ripe and that logistics could not be relied on, so after a few trips he let it go.

Seeing that flowers were going nowhere, Louis approached Hibiya about cashing out. Huang Yun hesitated for a long time after he heard, then spent half a morning talking with Louis and bought the remaining stores.

"I told him this was years of his work and that I intended to keep the brand exactly as it was, and he agreed. Back when Louis opened the shop, a single Valentine's Day brought in three or four times what it does now — e-commerce has hit the stores hard — but the revenue is still much better than if I'd just taken a job somewhere." Huang Yun and Louis are good friends now, but they only talk business: whenever Louis's advertising clients need flowers for an event, he sends them to Huang Yun.

"I'm grateful to him. He's a man who keeps faith with people."

3

We met Louis the second time at his office, down a long, narrow lane near Lujiabang Road and Shangwen Road in Shanghai. The office hides in a row of houses; without the gray plaque by the door you would walk right past. A neighbor buying wontons at a nearby food stall led me to the entrance. Louis turned up soon after, threading a Mobike deftly through the alleys.

The three-story building does not look much like an office. The inside has never been redone and keeps its original wooden frame; the floorboards creak underfoot. The ground floor holds a big ping-pong table, a small meeting room, a kitchen and a courtyard for gatherings. On the left of the second floor is a small booth lined with white backdrop paper, where two bottles of Uni-President green tea waited to be photographed; along one side of the reception area sit stacks of coffee cans, snack tins and bottled drinks, and beyond them three small booths labeled "Graphic Design," "Interior Design" and "Strategy and Operations." The third floor is a game room and terrace with an Xbox.

Louis has no booth of his own and sits with the staff. After we sat down on the sofa in the reception area, he pulled a laptop out of the canvas tote on his shoulder and showed me the latest samples they had designed for a client.

After selling the flower chain in 2011, Louis met Ada, a buyer from Shanghai and Kunshan, at Paris Fashion Week. One dinner was enough for the two of them to decide to set up a menswear brand together, 16N, with Louis doing the brand consulting. He proposed positioning this Shanghai label as "menswear with the style of Paris's smartest neighborhoods," and invented a backstory for it about an aristocratic adventurer named Pierre Blay. To fit the story, the store was furnished with vintage steamer trunks and a wall of old photographs, and a 1920s Citroën was parked beside the runway at launch shows. Louis showed up as the brand's ambassador, still in the 80-yuan red GU trousers and the 4,000-yuan navy ICICLE suit, introduced as "a descendant of French high society."

None of these ideas sounds especially new, but to Louis they are far more creative than what other outside agencies turn out. Jing Daily is a publication that mainly explains the Chinese consumer market to Americans; in an interview with it, Louis described the market as it used to be — especially for luxury — as "too easy. A lot of people thought their marketing was great, when all they were doing was calling up some media and VIPs for coverage, or spending money." Now, he said, "none of that works. You have to know what consumers are thinking."

16N was acquired by Septwolves last year. It has since closed all its Shanghai stores and turned itself into a streetwear label, opening stores instead in second-tier cities like Xi'an and Chengdu. The store design has become plain and clean, and hoodies and T-shirts have been added to the line. Ada would rather not talk about the old brand story. "The market changes fast. Now we need to tell a new one."

After 16N, Louis founded Creative Capital, doing full-service brand consulting for lifestyle brands, with helping traditional brands remake themselves as a large part of the work. On the day of our second meeting he pointed at the Hisense air conditioner on the reception-room wall above him and launched into another round of debating himself: "What comes to mind when you see Hisense? Nothing, apart from air conditioners, right? That's because they never built the brand. A lot of Chinese companies got their start through distribution, but competition is so fierce now that if you aren't a good brand, the distributors and the malls won't take you. That's my opportunity."

Li Xiaofeng was originally one of Goodbaby's suppliers in Sichuan. In 2016 she and Goodbaby jointly founded Good Baby Home, a chain of children's goods for ages 0 to 6 built around "French style" and "lifestyle." Before that she had tried building her own retail brand, and had also tried licensing characters like Doraemon and Hello Kitty to make her products more appealing, only to find she had no chance in distribution with the first and no advantage in product design with the second.

When I went with Louis to meet her one Sunday afternoon at the Shuangfeng Villa on Central Huaihai Road, she could not say clearly what "French style" was. But she was clear that she wanted a team that could deliver everything from brand planning to store design, ideally one that could "understand what Chinese consumers want, and still use a more experienced foreign team for the visuals." Because Louis had done design work for Goodbaby's apparel division, Li Xiaofeng saw the partnership as the obvious move — "less trouble, less worry for us."

Judging by the renderings, the store design shows no obvious "French style" at all. The colors are simply light and clean, and the space is clearly divided into an eating area, a play area and a merchandise area. The walls carry cartoon versions of fables — the tortoise and the hare, the crow and the pitcher — which is where Li Xiaofeng finds Louis original. "Fables like these resonate in China and in overseas markets, and they can also become an IP we work into future products."

"Consumers now want personalized, younger design. We need to sell them a lifestyle, not just goods. That's the reality today," Li Xiaofeng said. Louis nodded along beside her. Diagonally across the room, a Singaporean businessman was on the phone talking about how to buy traffic on Tmall.

A week after that meeting, Louis sent me a location pin on WeChat. The map showed Jakarta, where Creative Capital had just opened its newest office.

"Why Jakarta?"

"Because it's exactly like China 10 years ago."

Cover image from thatsmags.com