Miu Miu expanding direct stores

Miu Miu Taiwan

Miu Miu are certainly expanding. This month they opened their first boutiques in China & Turkey to add to their growing range of directly operated stores.

Currently the Miu Miu brand has around 20% of the turnover of Prada but it is growing considerably faster and is now far from a little sister experimental brand. It is a fully fledged luxury brand aimed at a different market to Prada, operated by a seperate team and very much with a different fashion perspective.

The new store in China is around 325m2 on a single level at the MIXZ Mall in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. In Turkey the store is a tad smaller at 290m2 but is over two levels in the Istinye Park shopping mall in Istanbul.

Miu Miu also have announced plans to a number of new stores through the Asia Pacific region including expanding their outlets in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, China, Korea and Australia. This is part of Prada’s strategy to significantly increase the proportion of revenue being derived from directly operated stores. Currently these represent 53% of sales across the group (Prada, Miu Miu, Church’s etc) but the aim is to increase this to 70% by 2011. Prada, as have most luxury brands, found that wholesale sales are the most vulnerable to economic conditions and the vast majority of their losses in the current economic crisis have come from the wholesale area. Hence the big push is toward directly operated stores where they can control stock, merchandising & customer relationships more effectively.