Twenty years ago, when Assouline, a leading distributor of high-end coffee table books and luxury library supplies, opened its first branded store on the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman in New York, the company’s founder, Prosper Assouline, experienced something of a revelation.
“I realized that luxury consumers were willing to spend $650 on a pair of shoes,” she said in a recent video interview from her Paris home. Petite with a penchant for fine tailoring, Ms. Assouline recalled that books, the sort that would sit on a coffee table or on a carefully curated, color-coordinated shelf, sold for the relatively modest price of $60 to $75 at the time. Ms. Assouline immediately saw an opportunity, printing a special edition about the Indian state of Rajasthan on cotton and hand-wrapping it in an antique sari for an astronomical $600 then, or about $2,000 today.
“It was a couture book,” said Robert Burke, a former Bergdorf executive who now works as a luxury consultant and counts Assouline among his clients. “It sold as fast as Prosper could wrap it,” Mr. Burke recalled.
Skyrocketing prices and increasingly extravagant products seem to align with a time-tested retail adage: At the top end of the market, you’re only as good as the people you keep.
It’s still the company’s guiding principle today: In the 30 years since its founding, French husband-and-wife team Prosper and Martine Assouline, along with their 30-year-old son Alexandre, have produced and sold some 2,000 books on a wide range of subjects, including art history, fashion, interior design, travel, society and sports.
The most expensive, the “Ultimate Collection,” is limited edition, the size of a small coffee table, made of leather or wrapped in velvet or pigskin, and sells for five figures. A special edition about the Palace of Versailles comes in a velvet clamshell, sells for $4,900, and includes a private tour of the castle’s interior. (The company says the Ultimate Collection accounts for more than 25 percent of its annual sales.)
To hear the younger Assouline tell it, the brand aims to be nothing less than the Hermès Birkin of the book world: highly collectible, highly coveted and sold at a market-acceptable price point.
But the company’s ambitions seem to go beyond just selling exorbitantly priced reading materials.
“Don’t call us a publisher. We’re a luxury brand,” said Alex Assouline, who runs sales and marketing at the company’s New York headquarters, noting that the company has recently branched out into podcasts (Culture Lounge Podcasts) and is producing a digital magazine. Another component of the company’s business is curating libraries and offering Assouline-branded products for corporate and individual clients.
Assouline, a privately held company in which LVMH holds a minority stake, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month. The Assouline family declines to provide details on earnings or sales but says the company is profitable.
The company’s biggest revenue contributor is its custom publishing division, which accounts for about 25% of its business, producing extensive books for a wide range of brands such as Cartier and Coca-Cola, as well as private clients and governments such as France and the United Arab Emirates.
Prosper Assouline said business volume has doubled over the past five years, in part due to the impact of e-commerce. Consumer spending has increased, with average order value up 13% over the past three years. Online traffic has also surged, increasing by about 250% in 2023-24 compared to the same 12-month period in 2020-21.
“No discounts, no overages”
Since its launch in 1994, the brand has embraced the codes of luxury fashion and secured select retail space: 30 stores-within-stores across Europe occupy ground-floor sales floors. The company also acts as its own distributor, a strategy to maintain an image of rarity and exclusivity. “We don’t discount or oversell,” said Alex Assouline.
Assouline operates 18 freestanding stores around the world, including its gilded flagship Maison Assouline in London and a second flagship store due to open next month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which will be 10,000 square feet and include a fine-dining restaurant. It also has boutique spaces in hotels such as the Plaza Athénée in Paris and the Peninsula in Hong Kong.
The brand’s newest store, an independent boutique on 62nd Madison Avenue in New York City (on the same block as Kiton, Hermès, and John Lobb), includes a small bar and an outdoor cafe. The interior is a colorful yet slightly austere mix of marble-topped consoles, Persian rugs, statues, and towering bookshelves, making it a less-than-casual spot.
The shelves are neatly lined with books from the company’s popular travel series, including “Miami,” “Provence” and “Dubai,” as well as small, relatively affordable monographs on Dior, Alaïa and other big-name fashion brands on which the brand built its early success.
The shelves also feature special editions such as “Rare Cars: The World’s Most Exclusive Vehicles,” a “Golf” housed in a metal clamshell textured like a golf ball, and “Chanel, Impossible Collection ($1,050).”
Customers eager to inspect these rare items are immediately greeted by a sales associate who lifts the item from its resting place and offers white cotton gloves to leaf through its contents, in keeping with the brand’s mission.
“We’re not just about commercial success,” says Alex Assouline, “we bring art and intelligence to shopping.”
It’s an exaggerated claim, to be sure, but it fits with consumer tastes. Illustrated books — publishers’ preferred term for the coffee-table volumes that often hang in doctors’ offices, wealth management firms and corporate libraries — are “cultural eye candy,” says Milton Pedraza, chief executive officer of the Luxury Institute, a New York-based consumer research and consulting firm. Illustrated books “impart an air of prestige to connoisseurs and potential connoisseurs,” he says.
“The study is meant to convey hidden wealth and communicate the type of person the host is, providing visual evidence that the owners are wealthy, cultured and people of good taste,” added Pedraza, who designed Assoulin’s study for a client at Genesis House, a Manhattan collection of showrooms and restaurants.
“These books are a testament to the identity of their owners, not to their intellectual curiosity, but to their social currents and fashionability,” said Charles Mears, longtime publisher of Rizzoli New York and its associated imprints.
Mears recalls that an early icon of this trend was Rizzoli’s “Tom Ford,” with a foreword by Anna Wintour, which came out in 2004 and sold for $140 and is still selling as well today as it did 20 years ago.
“Sales space within hotels, restaurants, clubs and even premium gyms like Equinox have become very important to us,” Mears added. “About 50 percent of our sales come from outside the normal bookstore channel.”
Not to be overlooked, however, are the lavishly produced, illustrated books that take up a significant portion of the stock and sales floor space of some independent bookstores.
“The picture-book section of the market is doing extremely well,” says Mitchell Kaplan, founder and owner of Miami’s Books & Books, which has upscale stores in Bal Harbour and Coral Gables. These art and photography books take up about 50 percent of the store’s sales floor space, he says. “They’re definitely our silver bullet.”
Among the store’s best-selling titles are Assouline travel books, bought as souvenirs and appealing to armchair travelers. “These people want to be part of that world, whether it’s the Sistine Chapel, the Louvre or Versailles,” Kaplan said. Assouline’s limited editions, including a $1,200 tome on motorbikes, remain popular, he added. “People are buying it as a design element for their home.”
Well aware of this growing trend linked to the notion of shelf abundance, Assouline is keen to expand its library services and to move into lifestyle areas such as home fragrances and pricey bibelots.
The company deals in home fragrances and has planned libraries for corporate clients, such as the 277 Fifth Avenue apartment complex and the Caledonia, a luxury apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, but it plans to offer a similar service to private collectors. “We not only plan and design our clients’ bookshelves, but we also work with contractors to design carpets and office tables,” says Alex Assouline, before adding emphatically, “We are interior designers.”
But others say there’s no need to rush. Pedraza of the Luxury Institute points out, “It remains to be seen how the interior design will fit with the brand’s ethos and ambitions. Furniture is a competitive sector, with big risks, production, logistics, etc. For Assouline, this is a Hail Mary pass.”
These cautions are unlikely to deter the younger Assouline: “We want to package culture in a place where culture meets luxury,” he says, “and a well-equipped library is part of that.”
Arrogance or bold, savvy marketing? Assouline skirts such distinctions: “We aim to be the authority in this space,” he asserts.
