Yahoo Finance Meet the 5 Entrepreneurs That Could Be the Next Big Names in Global Luxury
A few names reign supreme when it comes to luxury—and you know who we’re talking about. They tend to be based in Western centers of commerce and design: New York City, Paris, London, and Switzerland, to name a few. But a new wave of stars across disciplines have honed their talents in more far-flung locales and are on the cusp of conquering the U.S. market. From Mexico to India, China, Lebanon, and Turkey, these five up-and-comers are primed to have a breakout year on the global stage.
Mexico | Olivia Villanti
Olivia Villanti, photographed in Colonia Ampliación Daniel Garza, Mexico City. Opposite: A selection of pieces from her fall 2024 line hanging in the Chava Studio showroom.
“Quiet Luxury” maybe the catchphrase these days, but Olivia Villanti has been crafting her own timeless, high-quality, understated aesthetic since she founded her Mexico City–based womenswear label four years ago.
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After transitioning from dance to a career in fashion—which included stints at a PR agency and the now-defunct Lucky magazine—Villanti began working as a copywriter for J. Crew during the Mickey Drexler days and later became the editorial director at its Madewell offshoot. In 2019, the Rhinebeck, N.Y., native relocated to Mexico City, where her husband is originally from; the couple planned on staying only a year, but then the pandemic hit.
Villanti found herself rummaging through her in-laws’ fabric and shirting studio, Gilly e Hijos, which her husband’s grandfather started after he emigrated from France. “He developed relationships with some really amazing mills,” she says. Now run by Villanti’s uncle-in-law, Bruno Gilly, the atelier specializes in bespoke men’s shirting using textiles imported from Europe. “I was so charmed by the fact that you could walk into the offices of my in-laws as a male client and choose from eight different collars, inner linings, buttons, and cuffs,” Villanti says. “I don’t know many people that are offering this experience to women.”
In 2020, she started sampling patterns and designed a tunic-length tuxedo top that became the jumping-off point for her own made-to-order clothing line, which she named Chava Studio, using a Mexican slang term for a young woman. The online-only brand quickly gained an ardent following for its fresh take on shirting: a juxtaposition of traditional men’s tailoring with a decidedly feminine perspective that results in button-front styles with details such as cocktail cuffs, cutaway collars, and puffed sleeves. Swiss cotton is her go-to fabric, but she also uses silk and linen.
Villanti, 42, has no formal design training, yet she learned the ins and outs (say, how to properly fuse interlining to a collar) under Gilly’s tutelage. His team of four seamstresses help produce the clothes, along with Villanti’s two tailors.
I love the idea of us growing, and it’s scary, but I can see how many more opportunities it would give us to play.
Currently, Chava has seven different styles in its core collection and drops 10 to 12 limited-edition pieces each season. The reason the runs are often in short supply is that, to reduce waste, Villanti relies primarily on deadstock materials the atelier has archived over the years. She buys a few fabrics directly off the line, among them the white twill for Chava’s tuxedo shirt. But others, such as fine Alumo cotton, must be sourced seasonally, and the amount she’s able to acquire dictates how many shirts can be cut. In addition to shirting, Chava offers tailored basics in both ready-to-wear and made-to-measure options, including trousers, blazers, and even hair accessories that salvage fabric scraps. Prices for the fall collection start at $395 for a shirt.
For made-to-order designs, clients can send Chava their measurements, do a virtual session with help from Villanti, or make an appointment at the Mexico City showroom; Villanti also occasionally holds trunk shows in New York City and Los Angeles. For the time being, her focus remains on markets in the U.S. and Mexico, and she has recently started looking at bigger facilities to increase Chava’s output. On average, the company now produces fewer than 20 items per week.
“I love the idea of us growing, and it’s scary, but I can see how many more opportunities it would give us to play and come up with new designs more frequently,” Villanti says. As for where she gets her inspiration, “I’m going to say something obnoxious: me.” Abigail Montanez
India | Vikram Goyal
After quitting his high-finance job in Hong Kong in 2000, Vikram Goyal returned to his native India—and found his calling. The Princeton-educated Delhi native, who’d also worked for the World Bank in the U.S., saw opportunities in his home country as it unshackled itself from longtime economic protectionism. Media and telecoms were booming… until they weren’t. “It was buzzing when I came back here, and then the sector just imploded,” the now-59-year-old recalls. “But, at the back of my mind, I’d always wanted to work with something indigenous.”
So he ditched his finance career and took a leap of faith, first venturing into an Ayurvedic beauty line called Kama Ayurveda (since sold to fashion and cosmetics giant Puig) and then a design studio in New Delhi. He had no formal training but had been immersed in Indian crafts since childhood, when he took regular trips to Rajasthan to visit his grandfather, an avid collector of Indian miniatures. Goyal wanted his new enterprise to pay tribute to both that tradition and the man who schooled him in it by showcasing the artistry of the country’s metalworkers. His connections (Goyal descends from Udaipur nobility) and unusual approach to materials—swapping in brass for the more typical gold, for example—earned him major commissions domestically.
It’s all to do with control—over your hands, your breath—so you have to be very calm to get it right.
He has since spent more than two decades building his business into a 200-person atelier catering to India’s elite. Now, Goyal is about to make a splashy debut stateside. He has just signed with Los Angeles–based design gallery FuturePerfect, which will spotlight his collection in a stand-alone booth at this year’s DesignMiami in December, while his collaboration with wallpaper specialists de Gournay, taking inspiration from the 16th-century Book of Dreams, housed in Rajasthan, arrives this month.
Goyal, who studied engineering, provides creative direction as well as business acumen, but as he considers himself neither an artist nor a designer, he leaves execution to the dozens of artisans he employs. The studio focuses squarely on metal, whether brutalist objects or welded, sculptural furniture, but it’s best known for expertise in hollow joinery and repoussé, the painstaking technique in which bas-relief-style images are pounded into a sheet of bronze.
“It’s all to do with control—over your hands, your breath—so you have to be very calm to get it right,” he explains. “It’s not like wood, chipping off, because applying pressure in one area will be at the expense of what’s beside it.” The method is time-consuming as well; it might take a team of six workers 10 weeks to finish a single ornate piece. Goyal likens the ancient process to “drawing, but with metal.” No wonder prices for small panels start at $20,000 and can run to $350,000 for a 30-foot-long mural.
Goyal believes the key to his success lies in vertical integration. In India, most craftspeople of this ilk continue to be self-employed, which limits their efficiency and, therefore, their output. Goyal has instead assembled a staff that can handle every stage of product development. “We have designers, engineers, architects, and artisans working collectively, which means we’re able to take risks and push the envelope,” he says of their experimental work: The new wallpaper, for example, is an expression of repoussé-like imagery but in a different material. And that’s not the only distinction between his studio and a traditional workshop. “The bulk of my senior management and designers are women,” he notes, “and I intend to keep it that way.”
The studio’s shimmeringly decorative work is intended to evoke Indian culture while still adopting a modern, international design language. “You see a lot of metal in India—it’s part of everyday life from surface decoration to ritual vessels—but you also see a lot of brass and gold across the Art Deco buildings in Paris or New York,” Goyal explains. “You don’t see that so much in contemporary product design—it’s all just a grayish tone.” He pauses. “That will change.” Mark Ellwood
China | Qin Gan
China has come to dominate industrial watchmaking to such a degree that some collectors dispute out of hand that a Chinese watchmaker, without European training or Swiss-bestowed credentials, is even capable of producing a truly fine timepiece—say, one with mirror-grade chamfered edges that meet elegant Geneva stripes running all the way into tight corners. But Qin Gan, of Chong-qing, an enormous city in the country’s southwest, is creating watches that do precisely that.
Though Qin has crafted highly complicated models incorporating tourbillons, chiming mechanisms, and even automata, it’s his refined time-only designs—the Pastorale I, released in 2019, and especially the Pastorale II, recently revised in 18-karat white or rose gold and priced at $46,000—that have serious collectors adding their names to his three-year waiting list: Many enthusiasts consider time-only watches to be the purest expression of mechanical and aesthetic harmony, to say nothing of dress watches’ growing cachet.
Though he has seen the Pastorale II only in photographs, Paul Boutros, head of watches for the Americas at Philips, says he is “extremely impressed with the overall design, size, proportions, and finishing quality,” from the black-polished components to the champlevé enamel. “That he executes all of the finishing work himself without a support network in China makes the watch all the more impressive.”
The kind of people inquiring about my watches have been collecting for a very long time.
Hong Kong–based financier James Li, who owns timepieces from F. P. Journe and other high-end independent makers, has been waiting for his Pastorale II for three years and tells Robb Report that when he finally saw the prototype sample, “I was blown away. The impression it gives me is very, very high-end—high horology. Every angle you look at it from, you can tell design details have been paid attention to.”
Qin, 55, grew up in a milieu familiar to many master horologists: His father ran a small watch and clock shop, and Qin remembers him working on European models such as Rolex, Omega, and Enicar. “This was in the 1970s, toward the end of the Cultural Revolution,” he recalls, noting that his father’s clients were “mostly the elite people of the society—company managers, army officials, and individual merchants.”
Though Qin studied art history and visual art, he always gravitated back to horology. “But it wasn’t until 2005 that I started making my own watches full-time,” he notes. “That’s when I really began practicing the polishing seriously.”
As Qin further studied the watchmaking process in books and on the internet, he came to realize that the local equipment available to him was not up to snuff—so he built his own. He retired most of those DIY tools a decade ago and purchased “some really top-tier, top-notch machines,” he says, “for instance, the Geneva-stripes machine and some other small, modern machines for polishing.” For cutting gears and pinions, he uses a Swiss gear-hobbing device, which sits behind him as we speak, its familiar industrial-beige paint job and exposed drive belts looking decidedly mid–20th century.
Qin fabricates the majority of the parts himself, but he imports the mainspring, hairspring, and shock-absorption system from Switzerland and Germany and sources cases from China before hand-finishing them; all told, he’s working in the same manner as most individual makers of high-end watches, wherever they’re based. As for the notion that such a beautifully crafted watch could not otherwise be made in China, chalk it up to a long-standing Eurocentric bias within the collector community.
His countrymen in that circle, Li says, “are so proud that finally there is a Chinese watchmaker who can make fine pieces at this level.” For Li himself, he adds, it was “hugely, hugely” important that Qin has emerged in China.
One day, Qin would like to return to building more complicated watches. For the foreseeable future, though, he will be able to produce about 15 Pastorales a year, meaning his client base will remain small by necessity. But his renown faces no such constraint. “The kind of people inquiring about my watches have been collecting for a very long time, and they tend to have a mature aesthetic,” he says. “That’s what resonates with my work.” Allen Farmelo
Lebanon | Joelle Kharrat
Coming of age in Beirut in the 1990s, Joelle Kharrat was surrounded by elaborate gold necklaces and stacks of bracelets. “In Lebanon, there is really a culture around jewelry,” she says. “My mom used to wear a lot of jewelry, like all Lebanese women, so it really influenced me and has always been there.” Nevertheless, her namesake collection doesn’t look anything like the ornate creations typically worn in the region. In fact, you might be hard-pressed to find her pieces in stores there. “I don’t even try too much in Beirut,” says Kharrat, 46, though she remains based in the capital and operates her business there. “I don’t think they can understand the concept, because it’s a very different way of wearing jewelry here.” Abroad, however, her sculptural totem necklaces have been capturing the attention of aficionados in the U.S. and Europe since their launch in 2022.
I love when people call me after and ask, ‘Can I add a piece? Can I add diamonds?’
Kharrat’s breakout success isn’t entirely a surprise. Her fashion-jewelry label, Jojoba, which she ran for 10 years until 2018, was well-received internationally and sold at major global luxury e-tailers such as Net-a-Porter and MatchesFashion. But after a whirlwind of events—from the pandemic to a financial crisis in Beirut to her father’s death—she stopped working for two years. That time, however, proved to be fertile creative ground. “I kept on drawing and drawing, and I don’t know why, but I kept on working on this totem, because I’m very inspired by Saloua Raouda Choucair,” says Kharrat, referring to one of Lebanon’s most acclaimed modern artists. “She did these totems and compilations of elements, and I kept on doing the same thing. I think I was going through a phase, and I was really lost, so I needed something very strong.”
Emerging from a need for an artistic outlet during a time of loss, the totems became symbolic talismans of her own transformation. “I always loved fine jewelry,” she says, “so when my dad passed away, I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to do what I like.’ ”
The pendants are made by local craftspeople and are available either in solid 18-karat gold or a mix of the precious metal with everything from diamonds, mother-of-pearl, and pink opal to turquoise and wood. Each piece of the totems unscrews along a central spine so that owners can connect or remove elements. “I love when people call me after and ask, ‘Can I add a piece? Can I add diamonds?’ ” says Kharrat.
Her inventive formula quickly took off. The hip Parisian boutique By Marie was the first to embrace her designs (she jets to her apartment in that city about once a month), and her necklaces can now be found in a few select retailers around the globe, from Tiny Gods in Charlotte, N.C., to Aubade in Kuwait. Three more will soon carry the line in the U.S., and a major online retailer is expected to follow. For now, she’s sticking to her singular style, with plans to introduce earrings and a bangle. “I just want to do it the way I’m doing it nowadays because it makes me happy,” she says. “I don’t want to push it, and I don’t want to be everywhere.” Paige Reddinger
Turkey | Ali Sayakci
By the age of 26, entrepreneur Ali Sayakci had already carved out a successful career exporting marble from his native Turkey. Less than a decade later, he decided to dive headfirst into the marine industry. The self-described ideas man, who studied abroad in the U.K. and had extensive family connections to yachting, attended a maritime conference in England in 2011 that inspired him to create a new type of explorer yacht.
“At the time, explorers were highly functional vessels but were rather ugly,” the 46-year-old tells Robb Report from his new 90-foot model in Bodrum. “My goal was to make one that was sexier, and slightly faster, than the others on the water. I thought we could use the curves of the new Range Rover.”
Sayakci enlisted Dutch studio Vripack to make his dream of a sleek SUV for the seas a reality. “They were—they still are—the best at designing expedition vessels,” he says. Senior designer Robin de Vries finished drafting the first iteration in 2013, and Sayakci began building the inaugural hull in 2016, wrapping construction in 2018. He christened the 85-footer Rock. The name was a nod to not only his marble enterprise but also his family’s roots in mining—his grandfather was one of the world’s biggest boron suppliers, he says—as well as the robust nature of the go-anywhere cruiser. Sayakci took Rock to the Cannes Yachting Festival the same year and sold it on the first day. The Swiss buyer wasn’t the only seafarer impressed with its debut: One industry publication called it “a revelation in the yachting sector.”
That success prompted Sayakci’s wife to propose he take over her late father’s company Evadne Yachts in 2020. He obliged but decided to ditch the sailing ships the Istanbul yard had been producing and start an entire Rock line.
In the niche field of explorers, much larger players were operating in Italy, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, not to mention other Turkish outfits that had entered the fray as well, but Sayakci believed he had pinpointed latent demand. “I thought, you know, there will be more need for explorers with a contemporary style,” he says.
My goal was to make one that was sexier, and slightly faster, than the others on the water.
As predicted, the explorer segment has grown exceedingly popular over the past few years, with more yards catering to owners looking to traverse the remotest corners of the globe in the lap of luxury. Sayakci believes his Rock vessels have an edge thanks to the design team’s “very Dutch approach” to maximizing square footage on the steel-hulled yachts and using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to “solve the speed problem.”
Sayakci has also given the fleet his unique stamp while simultaneously putting his quarries to good use: Via a virtual tour of the new Rock 90 beach club, he points out the elegant marble furniture, plus some exterior metalwork inspired by his Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore. The vessel, christened Rock X, with a base price of roughly $7.18 million, was set to be displayed at the Cannes and Monaco yacht shows in September—but he may decide not to part with it. “She was built on spec,” he says with a smile. “I can keep or sell.”
The Rock lineup currently counts five models, ranging from the original Rock 85 to the nearly 138-foot Big Rock 140. Evadne has transitioned from building yachts “one by one” to what Sayakci calls a “production-line model,” meaning it can start turning out standardized platforms at speed. The yard has delivered four hulls in the past six years, with two more currently under construction. High-profile clients include a film producer in Hong Kong and an influencer in China. Sayakci says he hasn’t yet landed a U.S. client because he keeps selling the yachts before they can be seen at the stateside shows—but he’s confident that American buyers will appreciate his designs. “I think the best market for us is the U.S.”
Objectively, Rock’s momentum is a major achievement in an industry that’s slow to change, but Sayakci says that entrepreneurs like him seldom feel successful because they are “always looking forward.” To wit, he has just launched a new water brand. It surely won’t be his last big idea. Rachel Cormack
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