continue to showcase in key cities around the world.” Earlier this month, the brand’s first pop-up installation, The Cartier Box, made its global debut at Westfield Sydney, where it unveiled its new Objects and Accessories range and showcased several “experience displays and tactile moments” for customers to enjoy. Visitors can also get up close and personal with items from Cartier’s most covetable collections including the Love, Juste un Clou, Panthère de Cartier, Tank and Ballon Bleu ranges. It will run until February.  According to du Mesnil, the brand hopes these kinds of physical events will allow the brand to forge even deeper connections with Australian customers.  “Our ambition is to become closer and more relevant to Australians, reinforcing the relationship we have with our clients through exclusive events; through our ‘Into the Wild’ cultural pop-up in Melbourne earlier this year, where we hosted our clients and Australian audiences celebrating our iconic Panthère collection. Even during Covid, we produced our first-ever digital event in Australia to engage and entertain our clients while in lockdown,” du Mesnil told Inside Retail. “Bringing a unique experience like The Cartier Box to Australia for a global debut, allows us to tell our story through our iconic creations, and we believe it’s really a way for us to further develop bonds with Australian audiences.” It’s no secret that experiential retail has been on the rise in recent years, and since Covid, savvy brands like Cartier are continuing to create immersive moments to lure customers in-store.  According to Deloitte’s Global Powers of Luxury Goods report from this year, bricks-and-mortar stores remain vital to engaging customers, as online retail focuses on transactions and convenience. “The role of the store will evolve from a simple point of sale to a touchpoint for consumer engagement: less tied to sales and more to attracting customers through measures such as introducing entertainment into the experience or through one-to-one personalisedshopping expeditions,” stated the report.  “The store will then become a critical touchpoint for offering exclusivity to the customer.” Apart but together Like many luxury retailers, Cartier’s bricks-and-mortar stores play a pivotal role in its personalised customer experience and at the peak of the pandemic, it introduced a “distant sales process” to help maintain relationships between its sales staff and customers. The new service allows sales associates to offer customers the same one-on-one service that they did in-store, regardless of their location. “At the beginning of the first lockdown, all of our boutique teams were connecting with clients to check on everyone’s health and well-being and bring some joy to their days. From this, we saw that there still was a strong appetite to purchase our creations during lockdown,” explained du Mesnil.  “So, we developed a distant sales process, something entirely new for us – a new challenge and opportunity, as we needed to quickly adjust to our client’s needs – in order to connect with clients virtually to preview collections, place orders and have creations delivered directly to their homes. We see clients still utilising this process even after social distancing restrictions lift.”