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Brands are no longer confined to their original product categories. Instead, they are increasingly expanding their reach into new brand territories, ranging from additional product categories to sports, culture, and entertainment, redefining not just what they sell, but what they represent. This diversification is not about opportunistic line extensions. It’s a calculated repositioning aimed at opening new revenue streams, for sure, but also deepening consumer engagement and embedding brands into broader lifestyle ecosystems. Whether through launching cosmetic lines, furnishing homes, associating with sports performances, staging cultural experiences or producing films, brands are reimagining their roles in consumers’ lives, moving from product providers to curators of aspirational living.

From that perspective, Louis Vuitton, a critical brand for any luxury department store, is probably the most striking example, ticking all the boxes of a brand that has transformed into a lifestyle ecosystem. While many other brands are expanding their territory, department stores need to adapt to welcome these new brand expressions.

Lipstick logic: When brands turn to beauty

The most usual way to expand brand territory is to venture into new product categories. At a time when the beauty and wellness industry has been booming, brands have recently ventured into the coloured cosmetics category. Hermès is a significant example in the luxury price bracket. While they first launched fragrances in 1950, the Perfume & Beauty ‘only’ represented 3.5% of the brand’s total revenue in 2024 (in comparison, Chanel’s beauty business is estimated to represent 35% of the total revenue in 2024). It took Hermès 70 years to initiate a careful foray into colour cosmetics in early 2020 during Covid, with disappointing results. Since then, the Perfume & Beauty division has built up, doubling from €263 million in 2020 to €535 million in 2024, growing 9.3% YoY. While it’s a very significant achievement, it represents limited growth compared to the rest of the business. In 2024, Hermès achieved a consolidated revenue of €15.2 billion, marking a 14.7% increase over the previous year.

On its side, Louis Vuitton began by relaunching its perfume division in 2016. This initiative marked a return to the brand’s historical roots, as Louis Vuitton had released its first perfume in 1927, though it was quickly discontinued. After fragrances, Louis Vuitton will debut colour cosmetics in fall 2025 with the British makeup artist Dame Pat McGrath as its creative director. The line, which will be called La Beauté Louis Vuitton, is the fashion house’s first foray into cosmetics since the 1920s, when it offered a range of powder compacts, brushes and mirrors.

The market is crowded with prestige and luxury brand new beauty lines: Prada, Celine, Rabanne and Dries Van Noten have all debuted cosmetics in the past years. But not only does luxury follow this trend. In 2023, Ecoalf’s founder, Javier Goyeneche (a guest speaker at one of the recent IADS CEO meetings), expanded into sustainable beauty products, seeking to bring its environmental ethos to everyday personal care with Ecoalf Wellness. Assuming customers would be seduced by the brand’s circular principles applied to skincare and hygiene, the brand eliminates single-use plastics and drastically reduces water-heavy formulations, delivering powder-based shampoos, deodorants, and more enclosed in reusable aluminium containers that can last over twenty years.

Not all ventures are successful, though. In 2019, Birkenstock launched a skincare line including eye cream, anti-wrinkle cream and more. While Birkenstock’s surprising move into the beauty sector could represent a natural yet bold progression from its DNA of wellbeing to a broader vision of self-care, these products didn’t sell because offering products such as eye cream was probably too far-fetched. Closer to its DNA and core business, Birkenstock ventured again into beauty in 2024 with Care Essentials, a short and focused foot care line that aligns more closely with the brand ethos. Overall, this transformation highlights a broader trend in which heritage labels utilise their domain expertise to expand into adjacent lifestyle categories, hoping to deepen consumer engagement and open new revenue streams.

Living the brand: How fashion brands furnish everyday life

Brands are not only venturing into beauty but also embracing home design. The first brand to truly venture into furniture, lighting, and home accessories is Armani, which introduced the Armani/Casa label in 2000. This strategy to integrate domestic life continues with the Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades collection, introduced in 2012. Initially conceived as a series of travel-inspired furniture pieces, the collection has since evolved into a substantial home design portfolio, featuring collaborations with recognised designers such as Patricia Urquiola, India Mahdavi, and the Campana Brothers. These limited-edition objects are presented as collectables, elevating Louis Vuitton from a fashion house to a purveyor of high-art domestic experience.

Fast fashion brands also account for successful forays in the home categories. Zara, H&M, and more recently Primark have each undertaken significant strategic expansions into home products to capture a rapidly growing homeware market shaped by post-pandemic lifestyles. Starting in 2003, Zara Home leveraged the same fashion calendar and just‑in‑time logistics that made apparel successful, but uses relatively low discounting compared to apparel, maintaining a premium feel. Financially, the division has matured into a significant revenue driver, with 2018 figures reaching approximately €830 million out of the €16.62 billion total revenue.

H&M adopted a similar but later strategy, first entering the home arena in 2008. Initially sold online and later in stores, the business rationale for H&M Home followed a clear logic: leverage a trusted mass-market retail infrastructure to capture lifestyle spend while maintaining price accessibility, mirroring its “fashion for the many” ethos. In doing so, H&M strengthened its omnichannel ecosystem, using home products to increase basket size and frequency of visits.

Finally, Primark’s entrance into homeware has taken a different trajectory, rooted in physical retail dominance. The retailer began testing its homeware range alongside clothing before making a decisive strategic shift in 2025. The retailer opened its first dedicated Primark Home store in Belfast, showcasing small furniture, bedding, ceramics, and travel essentials in a standalone environment.

Temporary territories: When department stores catch the zeitgeist

There is also an agile way to catch customers’ attention and a share of their wallets. Selfridges and Le Bon Marché offer vivid examples of how department stores have opportunistically tapped into lifestyle trends by temporarily expanding their product ranges to capture additional revenue streams. Following Covid, Selfridges identified an unexpected yet powerful consumer behaviour toward nature, gardening and wellbeing. By mid-2021, its London, Manchester, and Birmingham stores had introduced pop-up garden centres offering a variety of plants and tools, compost, and related apparel. The effort helped Selfridges capture a surge in “green-fingered” spending, translating consumer leisure budgets into in-store impulse purchases on plants and horticultural expert consultations. While Le Bon Marché had the same initiative, this pivot exemplifies how a temporary trend can be monetised through short-term, high-impact product ventures. These initiatives were also incredibly smart in attracting more local consumers, especially at a time when tourism was halted.

Le Bon Marché took an agile approach to pet products in early 2025 by transforming its permanent pop-up spaces into a canine playground under the exhibition banner “Je t’aime comme un chien!”. The initiative mixed dog-centric products, from designer collars, bowls, bespoke toys, treats, spa and grooming services, to a café, workshops, personalisation and photo booths, with immersive visual installations such as big prop bones throughout the store. This thematic takeover capitalised on a widely observed surge in pet spending. Generating high traffic and engagement, Le Bon Marché found the right way to bring dogs and their owners into the shopping journey, strategically steering discretionary spending toward products that align with a momentary yet powerful cultural obsession.

These initiatives are less about permanent transformation and more about momentary alchemy. Selfridges’ plant pop-ups and Le Bon Marché’s dog-themed extravaganza both illustrate a modern department store strategy: not just selling things, but staging culturally resonant experiences that trigger new purchasing behaviours. By reading the zeitgeist and moving fast, with highly curated inventory and thematic environments, these stores created agile revenue plays that capitalised on emergent consumer trends at just the right moment.

Gold, speed, and symbolism: Luxury meets global sports events

Brands venturing into sports is nothing new. Yet Louis Vuitton’s involvement in Formula 1 and the 2024 Olympic Games reflects an increasingly assertive strategy to position the brand at the centre of contemporary cultural spectacle. Over the last decade, Louis Vuitton has steadily moved into the realm of global prestige events, not as a traditional sponsor, but as a supplier of symbolism. In 2021, the brand unveiled a bespoke monogrammed trophy trunk for the Formula 1 World Championship. Its repeated presence on the podium reinforced the brand’s authority and symbol of positive rituals and victory. The move into Formula 1 coincided with a generational shift in the sport’s audience, the sport’s blending of technology, drama, and internationalism offering the brand a stage that mirrored its own values: precision, control, spectacle, and heritage. In early 2025, Louis Vuitton announced a new 10-year significant partnership with Formula 1, beginning with the title sponsorship of the March 2025 Australian Grand Prix. This initiative capitalises on Formula 1’s growing popularity, which attracted six million race attendees and 1.5 billion TV viewers last year, with particularly strong growth among women and youth demographics. The partnership will enable Louis Vuitton to offer unique hospitality experiences for top clients while reaching new audiences. It’s a compelling example of the brand’s broader transformation from a traditional luxury retailer to a cultural powerhouse.

But Louis Vuitton’s ambitions in the sports ecosystem are not isolated. In 2024, the brand expanded its reach further by becoming an official partner of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, joining LVMH’s broader role as a premium sponsor of the event. As part of this engagement, Louis Vuitton designed and produced custom-made trunks for the Games medals. Similar to Formula 1, this foray signals a brand strategy anchored in recruiting new middle-class consumers. In both cases, the brand builds the physical artefacts through which these moments are staged. By embedding itself within the most visible and emotionally charged moments in sport, Louis Vuitton has redefined the boundaries of luxury participation. No longer solely anchored to the runway or its store network, the brand now lives elsewhere, and (already) everywhere.

Beyond commerce: Art as identity

Over the past three decades, luxury groups have moved far beyond fashion and retail to establish a lasting presence in contemporary art and culture. Similar to sports, this shift is not simply an act of sponsoring but a repositioning of luxury as a global cultural force. LVMH, Kering, and Richemont have each established cultural ecosystems to give their brands artistic legitimacy. For LVMH, this began with the 1990 creation of the Prix LVMH des Jeunes Créateurs, followed by the launch of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2014, which has become a cultural landmark in Paris. The Fondation has hosted major exhibitions drawing over a million visitors annually and positioning LVMH not just as a backer of the arts, but as a producer of major cultural events on par with the world’s leading institutions.

On its side, the Pinault Collection, distinct from the Kering group, represents one of the most ambitious private interventions in the contemporary art world. Long before the 2021 opening of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, Pinault had already established two major cultural outposts in Venice, marking a sustained engagement with art. The Bourse de Commerce not only embodies a private collector’s vision but also illustrates how the resources of the luxury sector can be redirected to create enduring cultural institutions that have a lasting impact far beyond fashion.

Richemont has taken a more classical route, yet no less ambitious. The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, established in 1984, predates most other luxury group initiatives and stands out for its consistent, long-term engagement with artists across disciplines. Located in Paris, it recently announced plans to move to a larger site near the Louvre, underlining its institutional ambitions.

The logic here is not transactional but foundational: art and culture are not marketing vehicles but narrative extensions of what luxury is presumed to be: timeless, intellectual, emotional, and transformative. In embedding themselves into art, luxury groups are not just financing creativity, they are quietly recasting themselves as cultural institutions in their own right. This repositioning elevates their brands beyond fashion cycles, resonating long after a runway show ends.

Fashion cinematic turn: there’s no business like show business

As the boundaries between fashion and entertainment continue to dissolve, a growing number of luxury houses are entering the film industry not as sponsors or costume collaborators, but as producers and curators. Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, and AMI Paris have each taken distinct yet strategically aligned steps into the film industry, using cinema as both a storytelling device and a cultural amplifier. In 2023, Louis Vuitton launched 22 Montaigne Entertainment, a dedicated production entity. Unlike earlier iterations of fashion-film collaborations, which often blurred into extended commercials, 22 Montaigne Entertainment aims to finance and develop projects. In partnership with Superconnector Studios, this division will be responsible for identifying opportunities for LVMH brands to collaborate with entertainment entities to co-develop and co-produce entertainment properties across film, television, and audio. However, it is likely that LVMH also has an eye toward producing larger, more mass-entertainment offerings, such as The House of Gucci movie, which grossed $166 million worldwide at the box office.

Saint Laurent, by contrast, has made the most direct and structurally ambitious move into filmmaking. In 2023, the house launched Saint Laurent Productions, becoming the first luxury brand to create a registered film production company. Its debut collaborations with auteurs such as Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg made immediate headlines at major festivals including Cannes and Venice. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez movie was a particularly striking example: it co-produced the entire feature, collaborating closely with the other movie-producing companies. The result is not mere branding, but active, creative authorship, with Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s creative director, serving as a credited producer on the project.

AMI Paris’s entrance into the cinematic world took a more institutional turn in 2024 with the creation of the Grand Prix AMI Paris de la Semaine de la Critique, an award presented during the Cannes Film Festival that celebrates emerging filmmakers. Founded by AMI Paris’s founder and creative director Alexandre Mattiussi, the prize is designed to support the kind of filmmaking that aligns with AMI’s cultural positioning.

Together, these three brands represent different yet converging models for how fashion intersects with cinema. Louis Vuitton approaches it as a narrative architecture surrounding the brand’s universe, Saint Laurent treats it as a parallel industry in which to operate and AMI Paris uses it to enhance the brand’s emotional temperature. Each strategy points to the same conclusion. In a saturated visual economy, luxury no longer communicates through clothing alone. With its emotional depth, films offer a medium through which to project identity, build mythology.

As brands move beyond their traditional domains, a clear ambition emerges: catching all consumer life moments. Louis Vuitton’s ventures outside of its traditional categories are more than secondary revenue streams. They are expressions of the brand’s DNA and values, only reinforcing its position as a global cultural arbiter. Collectively, these moves signal a profound shift in the role of brands, from product makers to global cultural forces. In extending their territory, brands are not just chasing growth, they are shaping the consumers’ lives, raising questions about their cultural and emotional dominance.

For department stores, these new brand territories certainly require adaptation, but they also represent unprecedented opportunities to attract new consumer groups, making stores more exciting and livelier. Boring retail is, more than ever, dead!

Credits: IADS (Christine Montard)