The houses whose names are on handbags and watches now put their names on hotels, and the Introduction to The Luxury of Attention treats that as a sign of what the two trades have in common. The book itself, though, is about hoteliers and chefs. It contains no interviews with store directors and makes no claims about retail. This page is my own argument, addressed to the people who run stores and brands, about what I think the eighty people in the book would say if they walked into a boutique, and where their advice would stop applying.
The standard held in public
A hotel lobby and a kitchen pass have one thing in common with a shop floor that most offices lack: the standard is held in full view. The diner sees the plate, and the customer sees the associate who is looking at a phone. Philip Barnes, then at The Savoy, gave me the rule the general managers in the book live by.
“If you walk by a problem, then you are the problem.” Philip Barnes, then General Manager, The Savoy, London
A store director who lets a display stay crooked until the visual merchandising team arrives has told every associate on the floor what the real standard is. A brand’s regional leadership can write all the manuals it likes. The standard in a given store is set by whoever is on the floor at ten in the morning and what they do about the first thing they see.
The sales associate as host
Every hotelier in the book said, without prompting, that they hire for attitude and train for skill. Emmanuel Stroobant, the chef of Saint Pierre in Singapore, put it in a sentence.
“For me, the right attitude will always trump skill.” Emmanuel Stroobant, chef, Saint Pierre and Shoukouwa, Singapore
Barnes said the one thing a hotel cannot teach is the right attitude, and given presence and manners it can teach nearly everything else. Retail hires the other way round more often than it admits, for product knowledge and sales history, and then wonders why the customer feels sold to. The hotelier’s frame is that the associate is a host and the store is their house. A host does not open with the new collection. A host notices who has walked in, whether they want to be left alone, and whether they are here for themselves or for someone else. Product knowledge can be trained in a month. The instinct to receive a person cannot, and the hoteliers hire for it first.
Noticing
Nicholas Yarnell at Six Senses Douro Valley told me about a guest who was nervous about eating out alone in Portugal because she spoke no Portuguese. A server wrote her a note in Portuguese to hand to any restaurant manager, explaining what she needed. Yarnell said the act cost nothing and brought tears to her eyes. Axel Bethke in Abu Dhabi said conversation is the best way to understand a guest’s preferences, and that he coaches his staff on it.
In a store, noticing is the difference between a clienteling system that is used and one that is merely filled in. The associate who remembers that a customer bought a gift last spring and asks how it was received has done what the hotel does with a guest history. Barnes added the caution that a history is a snapshot and has to be validated in conversation, and that applies to every customer profile a brand holds.
The preshift meeting
Restaurants call it the lineup and hotels call it the morning briefing, and the best of both treat it as the most important fifteen minutes of the day. The team hears who is coming, what is known about them, what went wrong yesterday and what the standard is tonight. Enrico Crippa at Piazza Duomo in Alba told me that each table is a single judge, and that with eleven tables at lunch and dinner his restaurant is judged twenty two times a day. A store with two hundred visitors is judged two hundred times, mostly in silence.
Most stores open with a sales target and a stock update. The hotel version would open with the afternoon’s appointments, what each of those customers has bought before, the customer who complained last week and whether anyone has followed up, and the one standard the manager will be watching for today. It takes the same fifteen minutes and produces a different floor.
Recovery at the counter
The alteration is late, or the item is out of stock after it was promised. Alexander Pichel in Jakarta set out the order the hoteliers follow: hear the complaint fully, apologise honestly, offer a solution the customer did not have to ask for. Anneke Brown in Perth said that when a luxury experience goes wrong you correct it and compensate without question. The hoteliers add authority. The person at the counter must be able to fix the problem without a call to head office, because the wait is a second failure layered on the first. Mariano Silvestri in the Maldives said his most common disappointment is learning of a problem from an online review when he could have solved it on the spot.
The parallel has limits. A hotel guest is in the building for three nights and can be won back by breakfast. A customer who leaves a store unhappy may not return for a year, so the recovery has to happen in the next ten minutes or by telephone that evening.
What guests remember was arranged
The hoteliers in the book describe the experience economy from the inside. Gerrit Graef in Riyadh was direct about what his hotel sells.
“We are selling an experience. If The Ritz-Carlton was merely a hotel, our guests would find the same product for less elsewhere.” Gerrit Graef, then general manager, The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh
The guest remembers what was arranged for them, the note or the balloons, far longer than what they were given as part of the price. A luxury brand’s product is magnificent and the customer can buy it in twenty cities and online. What they will remember about this store is what someone here arranged for them, and no website can copy that.
The Field Guide works through each of these disciplines with the hoteliers’ and chefs’ own words, and the Toolkit provides the lineup format and the complaint log in forms a store team can adapt. That is where the practice begins.