WANLILU at Louis Vuitton Landmark

It's been a crazy week! Not least because we've got the pedal to the metal trying to get LCB to the printers, but we've also got a lot of summer holiday trips to plan for our clients and we had to prepare a half-hour presentation at the Louis Vuitton store in Landmark yesterday. I'm not particularly a person that likes to get up in front of a crowd and speak, but in this job, you have to get used to it. The Louis Vuitton event has kind of been in the pipeline for a couple years now. We first talked about doing an event around travel, because there's such a long heritage of LV being associated with luxury leisure travel (just think back to the vintag steamer trunks). About 6 weeks ago, SC at LV approached me again about doing an event around summer travel where we would present a few interesting travel ideas and they would select products and fashions to match (for example, the LV ensemble complete with beach bag and sunglasses to be seen in while lazing around on the deck of your chartered yacht while cruising the Greek Islands). We decided to present 3 interesting, and somewhat exotic, itineraries. It was only after I came up with the destinations did I realize how tied they were to LV. For example, the driving tour links to LV's classic car event and the private yacht charters links to the LV Cup, their American's Cup Challenger Elimination series. So subliminally, LV is very much synonymous with luxury travel in my psyche; they put style and glamour into luxury travel. So there's natural synergy between WANLILU and LV!

For the event, we put together a 73-slide power point presentation. And I really have to thank Teresa and Peggy for staying till 1am the previous night working on making it all look impeccable. They did a fantastic job! The presentation illustrated 3 dreamy summer holidays: A gourmet driving tour from Florence to the Lakes (we presented two options: Lake Como or Lake Garda, both of which are stunning) via Bologne (overnighting a little further in Montegridolfo because there's a beautiful 8th century castle property designed by Alberta Ferretti), Modena and Parma. The second featured escapes to private islands or aboard private charter yachts in Fiji (Dolphin Island), Mediterranean (villas represented by Indigo Lodges) and Maldives (Dhoni Mighili and Rania Experience). The third was a golfing and safari tour of South Africa. I chose golfing properties along the Garden Route (Arabella Golf Club and Pezula) while staying at Birkenhead House or The Plettenberg and wanted to introduce safari properties that were not in Kruger National Park: Royal Malewane and Shamwari. During the presentation, models walked around sporting LV's latest summer fashions and accessories to match the feel of the destinations. The models looked great!

The party started at 7pm. I arrived at 6pm to set-up. There was a bit of a scare when nobody knew where the projector was. But in the end, we found it and set it up without a problem. By the time everything was set up, it was around 6:45pm and I was feeling like a drink. So Nadine, ever the life-saver, took me to Fourth Floor at Harvey Nichols for a glass of Champagne. We went back a little after 7pm, and there were already a few people flowing in. We started the presentation around 7:40pm, Nadine was the perfect slide-advancer, but even more amazing was that she also managed to act as official photographer in between advancing the slides! And not once did she miss her queue. All in all, people seemed to enjoyed themselves, with the free-flow of Champagne and talk of stunning destinations with beautiful people and glamourous products to match.


After the presentation, I met up with Corey, Karl and Anne who are in town from San Francisco and Honolulu to research their next film. It's a film about 3 different couples in San Francisco, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Corey and his company Makai Motion Pictures have previously produced the award-winning, The Land Has Eyes. Karl is a novelist (his first novel, The World of Normal Boys, is currently being worked into a film) and is working on the script with Corey for their current project. Anne, who will be in Shanghai for the rest of the month for the Shanghai Film Festival, is co-producer on the film.

I had only met Corey and Karl on Sunday, because a good friend of his asked me to introduce him to some people who could help them get a better feel of Hong Kong. Turns out, Corey knows quite a few people in Hong Kong alreaady and at dinner last night, and it turned out that everyone (including myself and the people I was introducing to Corey) at the dinner somehow knew or had connections to Corey's friends! In Hong Kong, there really are less than 3 degrees of separation. Which made me think that his film should really tie together all 3 of those couples and have their paths or histories cross as well, becuase those 3 cities are really linked in that way.