This Saturday at 11 am, the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann will reopen their doors to their customers after a historic closure. A closure not without consequences for the group led by the Houzé family. Alexandre Liot, director of the flagship boulevard Haussmann (IXe), answered our questions.
What sanitary measures are in place to allow you to reopen?
ALEXANDRE LIOT. It is already a joy to reopen, a relief. Now, this health dimension is our top priority and the new standard for the future, at least for the coming months. There are many things. We have put in place rules of social distancing where that could pose a problem. At the level of the boxes, we put protections, marking on the ground, messages reminding barrier gestures, we spray customers' hands with hydroalcoholic gel when they enter the store, and the wearing of the mask is compulsory for all of our employees and our customers. These are the measures that can be found in all serious businesses.
Other things ?
Our teams were entitled to "e-learning" on barrier gestures and all of the systems. There will also be training modules every morning. We will also have sanitary relays, one person on each floor. She is there to check that all the products are in place, that sanitary procedures are respected, but also to reassure both employees and customers.
What is reopening or not this Saturday?
All of our three buildings (Coupole, L'Homme and Gourmets) reopen, except the one dedicated to international customers. Restaurants will remain closed for all seating and lunch, but we will do takeout. For our terrace, we will study this in the coming days for an opening the second week of June.
Have you calculated the loss of turnover for the two and a half months of closure?
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It is in the hundreds of millions of euros for Haussmann's turnover and the loss of results in tens of millions over this period. In 2020, across the Galeries Lafayette group, we are experiencing a loss of more than one billion euros in turnover.
Consequences on employment?
Today, the priority of priorities is to maintain all jobs. Between the demonstrators and the Galeries Lafayette staff it represents a little more than 4,000 people. On the other hand, we have cut all requests for reinforcements, fixed-term contracts or temporary workers. The important thing was to reopen, although we are aware that this recovery will be extremely slow.
International customers represented what proportion of your turnover?
It was more than 50% of our activity.
With this huge loss, how do you see the future of Galeries Lafayette?
We must already ensure that the basics are in place and at the same time reinvent a model. For this, it will take time to see the behavior of our customers. It takes time to observe and make the right decisions. And finally, all that made us humble, we know that such a crisis could happen again. We are therefore looking for new ways to serve our customers to generate turnover. We launched exclusive live shopping a week ago. On the Galeries site, now, luxury brands like Louis Vuitton or Prada, Gucci, Chanel, are accessible from your home. Before the confinement, it would have taken eight days to find a date to set the first meeting on this project (laughs), there we launched it in eight days! There, a sales consultant welcomes you and does your shopping on video or not. We must keep this chance to learn to work differently.
