Comite Colbert Launches Chinese Web Site

France’s leading prestige products federation, Comite Colbert, on Thursday inaugurated a major new website designed to allow Chinese Internet users a virtual tour of French luxury.

Named cColbert the site is billed as a “journey in France,” by the Comite Colbert, a grouping of 70 luxury labels that includes everything from fashion houses like Chanel, Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton and Chloe, haute gamme brands like Hermes and Rochas, hotels such as Le Bristol, Plaza Athenee and George V, to brandies like Cognac and three-star restaurant Taillevent.

“It’s going to be a great promotional tool,” predicted Vuitton CEO Yves Carcelle, who threw the switch to launch cColbert at a reception in the Chinese embassy in Paris with ambassador Kong Quan and Chanel managing director, and Comite Colbert president, Francois Monetanay.

In a joint launch, the federation’s chief executive Elisabeth Ponsolle des Portes, in Beijing, also turned on the site along with Wang Yan, founder of Snia, China’s largest Internet portal, with 230 million users and 600 million daily visits.

“Through cColbert, French luxury and creativity can now directly reach China’s 400 million Internautes. It will be a great educational device to explain true luxury,” ambassador Quan told FWD, using the French term for Internet surfers.

The site is in English, French and Chinese and features a kaleidoscope of glossy images, which one can click onto in order to find out more about any of the federation’s 70 brands.

Take fashion house Chloe, whose presence is featured in ads, historic images and several making off video clips. cColbert does not contain an ecommerce element, but visitors can surf through to the sites of various brands which etail via the web.

Above all the site is intended to be an elegant manner for Chinese consumers to discover French “art de vivre.”

Guests at the launch had to put on glasses, in order to appreciate the 3D’s effects on a giant LED screen in the embassy, which had the bizarre result of causing the assembly of some 40 CEOs to look faintly like gangsters.

According to the Comite Colbert’s estimates, French luxury brands currently have over 1,600 sales points in 69 Chinese cities.

The federation is named after Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister for two decades, whose market reforms led to the foundation of the Manufacture royale des glaces, that produced the glass in the Hall or Mirrors, and the founder of the royal tapestry works at Gobelins.

This workaholic Mercantilist created the first “dirigiste” policies of fostering manufacturing by direct government involvement, an economic strategy that distinguishes France right down to today.

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