Luxottica Travel Retail is to host the second annual Sunglasses awards, to take place during the TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes on Tuesday 23 October.

 

The global leader in premium fashion, luxury and sports eyewear will bring together fellow sunglasses suppliers Maui Jim, Marcolin and Safilo at an awards ceremony designed to recognise and reward the best and most progressive travel retailers in one of the channel’s consistently fastest-growing categories.

 

Award categories will include Best New In-store Environment for Sunglasses, Sunglasses Retailer of the Year and Best Standalone Sunglasses Store.

 

New categories for 2012 include: Best Off-airport Retailer of Sunglasses, Best Dedicated Sunglasses Sales Team and the Innovation Award.

 

[Above: Luxottica Workshop 2011]

 

LUXOTTICA WORKSHOP

The nominations will be considered by five judges; Francis Gros, Group Travel Retail Director, Luxottica; Chiara Polverini, Duty Free & Travel Retail Manager, Marcolin; Giles Marks, Director Duty Free Sales, Maui Jim; Chiara Milani, Area Sales Manager Travel Retail Europe, Safilo and Martin Moodie, Founder and Publisher, The Moodie Report.

 

The Sunglasses Awards forms part of Luxottica’s fourth Sunglasses Workshop, which will take place at the TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes next month.

 

Topics to be covered in the workshop this year include a category performance update from Generation Research and best-in-class case-studies from partnership initiatives over the last twelve months. In addition, Luxottica Travel Retail will unveil a special category project developed in partnership with Boston Consulting Group and retail design firm Lightfoot Space, a division of the specialist travel retail agency Lightfoot Marketing.

 

‘FASTEST GROWING CATEGORY’

Francis Gros, Luxottica Group Travel Retail Director comments, “Sunglasses has been the fastest growing category in travel retail across the last 3 years, growing +26.7% in 2011.

 

[Left: Francis Gros, Luxottica]

 

“This means travel retail now generates sunglasses sales of over US$1.25 billion a year.” Gros continues, “We’ve nearly hit our objective of doubling the category, and this has been due to the effort and investment that everyone associated with our category has been putting in. I look forward to welcoming the industry to our workshop, and to continued collaboration and innovation to sustain our category’s current growth path.”

 

The Sunglasses Workshop and Awards will take place in Cannes on the afternoon of Tuesday 23rd October 2012. For more information, please contact: [email protected]