Yves Carcelle

Although Alexander McQueen once dismissed him as “so boring”, Carcelle was no faceless CEO. He could claim to have Madonna, Steve Jobs and Francis Ford Coppola on speed dial. One advertising campaign he oversaw featured Mikhail Gorbachev in a limousine in front of the Berlin Wall, a Louis Vuitton holdall open beside him. The suitcases were beloved by celebrities; stars from Angelina Jolie to Sean Connery appeared as the label’s face. David and Victoria Beckham had matching Louis Vuitton designer suitcases — worth £700 each — which were famously stolen on a flight in 2000.

Softly spoken with salt and pepper hair, he looked the conventional businessman — he had begun his career selling sponges door-to-door — in sensible shoes and suits. In fact he was tailed by a crowd of fashionable PR girls and admitted to dreaming of expensive handbags at night: “It never stops.”

He estimated that he travelled 200 days a year. When he wasn’t at a store opening in Istanbul or watching Jennifer Lopez shoot a campaign (in 2003), he was jostling at the start line of the brand’s sailing cup. Ideas often came to him at 2am, and he would find a store that was open somewhere in the world and give them a ring. He managed his staff of 22,000 from his Paris office, where he said he was at work by 6am as the sun rose over the Seine.

Yves Carcelle described himself as a “pure Parisian product”. Born in 1948, he grew up in the Latin Quarter. His father was a civil servant and it was a modest, if stifling, upbringing that triggered his early desire to travel (he went backpacking in Cameroon). A keen mathematician, he studied at Paris’s École Polytechnique, soon realising that it was not engineering or physics that interested him but marketing.

His friends were surprised when he took a job selling cleaning products, including sponges, from the back of his car. For Carcelle it was “excellent training” for his later role: “You have to be a good salesman, if nothing else. And you have to know how to deal with people.” He later liked to recall — over a glass of champagne — how he would persuade his girlfriend of the time to go into a store and ask for a product. Ten minutes later he would knock on the door and offer to supply it.

He then helped to turn around the French textiles company Descamps, where he was spotted in 1989 by the French billionaire Bernard Arnault. Arnault was building up his luxury goods empire LVMH, which owned Louis Vuitton. Carcelle was made CEO of Louis Vuitton in 1990. As Arnault’s right-hand man, he remained in the post until he retired in 2012, enjoying a spell in overall charge of LVMH’s Fashion Group — comprising Céline, Givenchy and Donna Karan — in the 1990s.

Louis Vuitton had been founded in the mid-19th century by an enterprising Frenchman who spotted an opening for flat trunks among the wealthy travelling by steam train and ship. A century later, however, it was seen as “a tired house”, Carcelle recalled. Among his early tasks was to open the first store in China, at the Palace Hotel in Beijing in 1992. The distinctive LV monogram (introduced at the end of the 19th century) and the old-world style of the leather was a hit. Over the next two decades he set up shops from Lebanon to Poland and the Dominican Republic.

However, the lucrative Chinese market remained his obsession: “There are 1.4 billion people there who suddenly want to treat themselves and it will continue,” he believed. He travelled with neatly wrapped gifts of small leather items to present to receptive mayors and their families in towns and cities across China.

In 1997 Carcelle hired Marc Jacobs as creative director to make the label’s first ready-to-wear clothes: “Arnault had the idea. My reaction? He was known for the grunge collection.” However, the pair worked closely, discussing ideas over bowls of fried noodles in a Chinese restaurant on the Boulevard Saint-Germain — sometimes jumping straight afterwards into a car to the leather manufacturers. Carcelle agreed when Jacobs suggested putting designer graffiti on handbags and scarves — the results were a sell-out.

Carcelle often appeared behind-the-scenes at a fashion show to congratulate a designer personally. He remembered the names of even the newest young journalists, and could be found dancing on the tables with his workers at parties. He could, however, lose his temper on occasion. He fought a constant war against counterfeiters and once shouted at a French government official who attended a store opening in Bangkok carrying a fake Vuitton bag.

“He really gave his life to that place,” Jacobs said. “But while he knew it was a huge business and he was building it, he never forgot it was also something he enjoyed, and it was fun.” His second wife, Rebecca, an interior designer, whom he married in the mid-1990s, often travelled with him. They had two sons; he had three children from his first marriage.

Carcelle was a bon vivant and owned a vineyard in Languedoc, where he produced a wine — Sarus — named after the bird symbol of longevity in China. His other passion was sailing. He restored several 1920s gaff-rigged boats — handpicking sail fabrics — and was closely involved in Louis Vuitton’s sponsorship of the America’s Cup and its own regatta. After he had kidney cancer diagnosed in 2012 he kept a low profile.

Carcelle once said he never worried too much about the global financial turmoil of recent years: “The great thing about our business is that our consumers are very rich — and then they are a bit less rich, but still rich, right?”

Yves Carcelle, CEO of Louis Vuitton, was born on May 18, 1948. He died on August 31, 2014, aged 66