Christian Louboutin: An international payments strategy, step by step

2021 marks 30 years of the Christian Louboutin brand. Created by the eponymous designer, Louboutin started as a shoe brand targeted at discerning female shoppers. In recent years, the luxury brand has diversified to incorporate accessories and beauty products while growing globally. It now has a presence in around 30 countries and 160 stores worldwide.

As the company's Group Treasurer, Chloée Daullé takes care of internal control issues relating to cash flow activities and procedure monitoring across all Christian Louboutin subsidiaries. In this interview, she walks us through the ways Christian Louboutin and Adyen have optimised the brand's payment strategy in the face of new retail and ecommerce challenges.

When it comes to fraud management strategy, maximising revenue while minimising declines is Chloée Daullé'sraison d'etre. Like most luxury brands with high average transaction value (ATV), authorisation rates are a significant metric for Louboutin.

Our risk management tool, RevenueProtect, helps Christian Louboutin customise its fraud rules and manage outstanding payments. This means their team gets a cross-channel, global view of payments:

"We want to move to exception-based risk management so that, as much as possible, we can limit the number of transactions that require review. If we compare to before, when we had multiple payment service providers in each country, the fact that we have all the chargebacks held centrally adds real value."

When choosing a payment service provider, Christian Louboutin acknowledged the need to develop omnichannel customer journeys. Our international footprint plus Magento and Cegid plugins for ecommerce and point-of-sale (POS) were important factors in their decision.

Related: Payment methods around the world

Chloée adds, "We use insights from payment behavior to gain a better understanding of our customers." With its payment system, Christian Louboutin can use a wealth of data to build its sales strategy. With our ShopperDNA tool, Chloée's team links transactions to build profiles around shopper behavior.

Our team worked closely with Christian Louboutin to integrate retail and ecommerce solutions from the partnership's earliest days. The project began by integrating Adyen's POS solution in its European boutiques and then the United States. By the end of 2020, the company had integrated our solution for its European ecommerce sites too.

"As well as an innovative tech solution, we wanted to choose a partner that offered support before, during, and after projects going live. Adyen provided that throughout the retail and ecommerce implementation. Your team was always ready to help."

With 2020 turning the retail world upside down, we were able to support Christian Louboutin as its boutiques temporarily closed. Louboutin implemented Pay by Link in May. This meant that Louboutin could continue offering a secure and contactless payment method across channels without the need for shoppers to enter their payment details manually.

"Adyen's Pay by Link technology made it possible for our shoe repairs department to send payment links to the customer once the repair is complete: an innovative way to build customer loyalty."

Our status as an acquirer with a banking license has also greatly helped developments during the crisis.

"Before Adyen, our previous setup required various local acquirers. We don't think we could've been as responsive or achieved such high sales volumes as we've done with Pay by Link, without your help. And that's regardless of the lockdown." - Chloée Daullé, Group Treasurer.

The team at Christian Louboutin continues to innovate. There are numerous ongoing projects relating to payments. In-store payments are getting the luxury treatment with the implementation of our fleet of modern terminals in all of their stores worldwide. The next step will be to roll out integration with Cegid's POS systems. Christian Louboutin will also continue developing internationally by integrating the Adyen solution into its ecommerce sites in the United States and Asia.