LVMH appoints new industrial and craftsmanship director

At a time when the luxury goods market is in turmoil, being able to count on an efficient and impeccable production chain is becoming essential for the major luxury groups.

LVMH has recognized this and has created the position of industrial and crafts director, entrusted to Ludovic Pauchard. Trained as an engineer, Pauchard, who has held various industrial positions at Louis Vuitton for over twenty years, has also been appointed executive president of Métiers d’Arts, the division that brings together the group’s suppliers of exceptional raw materials.

Pauchard will take up his new position on September 1, reporting to Stéphane Bianchi, LVMH’s executive vice president. He will “steer the group’s industrial strategy, ensuring operational excellence at every stage of production, in line with LVMH’s commitments to ethics, vigilance, environmental preservation and social responsibility,” said the company in a press release.

His mission will include “mobilizing the industrial directors of the various houses around this common ambition,” by coordinating “major transformation projects aimed at making industrial agility a lever for sustainable competitiveness for the group.”

A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and ENSTA, Pauchard knows the group inside out and seems ideally suited to the role, having spent the last 22 years as a production manager in various sectors, both in France and abroad, at Louis Vuitton, which he joined in 2003, after starting his career at Michelin in 1998 as a production engineer.

In the group’s flagship company, he was successively industrial director for women’s shoes in 2008, general manager for U.S. manufacturing in California in 2012, then production director for leather goods in 2015, until being promoted to industrial director of Louis Vuitton in 2019, overseeing purchasing, development, the supply chain, production, quality, and operational excellence for 33 leather goods workshops and 10,000 people.

“Through the vertical integration of its businesses, LVMH has made industrial and artisanal excellence not only a strategic requirement but also a major competitive advantage. Drawing on his remarkable experience at Louis Vuitton, Ludovic will be instrumental in defining and implementing a cross-functional strategy between the divisions of our companies, thus guaranteeing the continuity of our know-how, the ongoing demand for the highest quality, and the universal desirability of our products,” commented Bianchi.