Baccarat

Baccarat came to me through Berexia, which employed me in 2023 to carry its Crypto, NFT, SBT and Metaverse work for clients. From the first meeting I worked directly with Stéphane Cordier.

Baccarat is a crystal house with more than two centuries behind it, and its value lives in objects you hold in your hand. In 2023 the question on the table was what Web3 and digital experience could mean for a name like that, and how far the house should go.

The brief covered seven fronts. A Web3 strategy. Community. Digital innovation. Luxury positioning in a new environment. Tokenomics, pricing and sales mechanics. Partnerships, artists and introductions. Launch and communication.

Several of those pull against each other. Web3 sales mechanics reward openness, speed and volume. Luxury positioning depends on restraint, selection and time. A house of Baccarat's standing cannot simply adopt the mechanics of the market it enters, and it cannot ignore them either. Most of the decisions sat in that tension.

I started with the evidence. In April 2023 I put the first direction into a deck, Baccarat into Web3: Breaking Metaverse Boundaries. By June the research had grown into a 77-page volume on the metaverse market, built to educate the house with data and tangible examples before asking it to decide anything.

The research looked at how a digital-world experience, combined with new rules of participation, could build an engaged community and give the house a dynamic knowledge of its customers. I presented the work in two parts: the research that justified the direction, and the strategy that followed from it.

That is how I framed Web3 for Baccarat: less a product to sell than a way of knowing who cares about the house, and of giving those people access in return. A luxury client is usually known through a purchase history. A community member is known through what they choose to take part in, which tells a house far more about desire than a receipt does.

I set out the Web3 vision and positioning, recommended the technology partners, and wrote the launch strategy and the communication and storytelling. I designed how the physical and the digital experience would connect, so that the crystal stayed at the centre and the digital layer gave people reasons to come closer to it.

Around those pieces sat a broader innovation and Web3 roadmap for the house, meant to outlive any single launch. A heritage brand that treats Web3 as one campaign tends to disappear from it when the campaign ends. The roadmap was built to avoid that.

The engagement ran from February to June 2023, and the core intervention took a few weeks. The house did not need a long presence from me. It needed a complete direction, with partners, mechanics, story and sequence decided, that it could carry forward on its own.

Baccarat adopted the roadmap. A concept I recommended launched, and the work shaped the digital projects Baccarat took on afterwards: community and access programmes, a Web3 event activation, and a metaverse and digital experience. Execution was Baccarat's. The direction came from those weeks.