Earlier this Feburary, Lacoste inaugurated its first everlasting Café Lacoste in Paris’s eighth arrondissement. Positioned a brief stroll from its Champs-Élysées flagship retailer, the 100-square-metre area with 65 seats marks the newest hospitality activation for the model inside its dwelling metropolis. The Café Lacoste Paris follows a profitable trial in Monaco and is developed in partnership with the Giraudi Group — based by Riccardo Giraudi — which has constructed worldwide restaurant ideas for greater than 20 years. The collaboration pairs Lacoste’s French sporting codes with the group’s operational and culinary experience, positioning the café as a thought of life-style extension to the posh model.
The inside set-up and furnishings of Café Lacoste are aligned with the Maison’s id. The inside revisits core model codes — deep inexperienced and off-white tones, touches of terracotta, noble supplies and architectural traces impressed by the geometry of the tennis court docket. The impact reinforces Lacoste’s hyperlink between retail, sport and hospitality. The venue is designed across the up to date city rhythms of Lacoste’s prospects, providing dine-in and takeaway — with supply deliberate. Its proximity to the flagship strengthens the ecosystem of vogue, sport and now gastronomy working inside the identical neighbourhood footprint.
From Pop-As much as Everlasting Presence
Lacoste has been testing the hospitality marketplace for a number of seasons. Via Le Membership Lacoste, it has staged non permanent ideas round main tennis and golf occasions in Paris, Melbourne, New York, Deauville and Miami. Through the Australian Open, the model took over Afloat on Melbourne’s Yarra River. At Wimbledon in 2023, it activated Alto in London. In Deauville and later New York at Dumbo Home, comparable initiatives introduced collectively athletes, cultural figures and VIP shoppers.
Lacoste had additionally beforehand collaborated with Shangri-La Paris throughout Roland-Garros and piloted its first café idea at Le Méridien Seaside Plaza in Monte-Carlo. These earlier tasks might have been seen as one thing of a managed market take a look at to see how Lacoste’s codes might function past vogue attire. The Parisian cafe opening consolidates this life-style experimentation right into a everlasting format.
Crocodile on a Plate
Beneath the course of Thierry Paludetto — chef of the Giraudi Group — the menu reinterprets acquainted staples together with membership sandwiches, recent salads, seasonal dishes and signature desserts. Among the many core choices is the signature inexperienced Polo Cake which is a not-so-subtle reference to the model’s emblem in edible type. The beverage choice centres on artisan-roasted specialty coffees and flavoured lattes together with pistachio, vanilla and chai. A signature drink — L’Eau de Croco — blends coconut water, matcha and ginger. “Le Selected” — a cocktail initially invented by René Lacoste in 1967 — reinforces the historic hyperlink.
Past foods and drinks, the café incorporates an idea retailer retailing nice grocery gadgets, Lacoste-branded French porcelain and a devoted textile capsule. This hybrid mannequin displays a wider technique that sees the model extending its product classes by experiential environments.
Why Luxurious Is Transferring into Hospitality
Lacoste’s transfer is in step with a broader recalibration throughout the posh sector. As product cycles speed up and digital channels dominate transactions, bodily area has change into a strategic asset for differentiation. Cafés, eating places and lodges provide manufacturers management over environment, service and dwell time — parts that deepen emotional engagement in ways in which retail alone can’t.
Hospitality additionally permits homes to articulate their values in a lived context. In Lacoste’s case, the emphasis on sport, group and on a regular basis class interprets naturally right into a café atmosphere. It reinforces the model’s positioning as an artwork de vivre label fairly than solely a vogue firm.
Comparable initiatives embody Ralph’s Espresso by Ralph Lauren and Café Kitsuné by Maison Kitsune, which have demonstrated that hospitality can function as each income stream and model amplifier. For Lacoste and the Giraudi Group, the Paris opening establishes a scalable blueprint — with future areas anticipated.
A Strategic Extension of Identification
As Éric Vallat — CEO of Lacoste — notes that the café extends the model’s universe right into a shared dwelling area anchored in its sporting and cultural heritage. For Riccardo Giraudi, the partnership merges gastronomic rigour with the enduring enchantment of the Crocodile. By transferring into hospitality, manufacturers create lower-barrier entry to their universe, attracting customers who could not decide to high-priced ready-to-wear but are snug partaking by reasonably priced life-style choices like espresso and desserts. The debut of Café Lacoste — a 65-seat café in a Haussmannian constructing in central Paris — represents the multidimensional layer of what a vogue home can obtain by curating a whole life-style ecosystem the place its codes will be included and skilled in a single’s each day life.
For a model based in 1933 that made its identify on the reinvention of the tennis polo, the transfer into hospitality looks as if a logical development to make sure the Lacoste Crocodile occupies not solely the wardrobes, but additionally the tables of its different clientele.
Café Lacoste is positioned at 16 avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt 75008, Paris and is open Monday to Saturday from 7.30am to 7.00pm.
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