Blending The New With The Old

There are people who start brands from the ground up and give them their best shot, and there are fewer who join existing brands and take them to new heights. Ipsita Das, the Managing Director of Moët Hennessy India (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton – LVMH) falls in the latter category.  
“As a physics graduate from St. Stephens, I am attracted to solving complex problems. In 2019, I joined Moët Hennessy and it gave me the unique opportunity to marry the heritage and the new-age with brands that are centuries old but have an ongoing quest for innovation to cater to the evolving luxury consumer in mind,” says Das.

LVMH Moët Hennessy is a French multinational luxury goods conglomerate, headquartered in France. In India, the company is involved in import, sales and marketing of Moët Hennessy’s luxury portfolio of wines and spirits, besides operating the Chandon winery in Nashik. Its source of revenue is through sales and distribution of Moët Hennessy’s luxury portfolio of wines and spirits like Moët et Chandon, Dom Perignon, Glenmorangie, Hennessy and Belvedere among others.

With her pivotal role in the company, she has pushed up the revenue per unit by about 33 per cent in 2021 in comparison to 2019, thus surpassing their profit margin to the pre-pandemic level. All this has been driven on the back of premiumisation, innovation, and fuelled by the higher disposable income of consumers.  

However, Das did face her set of challenges, as she describes, “I was appointed as the Managing Director of Moët Hennessy in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. This meant, we had to innovate not just with our products but also with our way of offering a consumer experience. We used the crisis as an opportunity.” In the long run, they envision leading the luxury wines and spirits market in India, through sustainable innovation, while keeping the consumer and community at the centre.