Baccarat

The name Baccarat has become nearly synonymous with luxury. For more than 200 years, this company has produced and distributed some of the world's finest luxury crystal. With a catalog spanning some 2,500 items, Baccarat produces full-lead crystal tableware, jewelry, lamps, vases, carafes, decorative pieces, and home fittings, sold through its own retail stores and through third-party retailers. Among crystal manufacturers, Baccarat has pioneered the incorporation of computer-aided design and manufacturing techniques, as well as modernized production systems, without relinquishing its tradition of hand-crafted quality. Baccarat's artisans, who undergo an eight-year apprenticeship, have won numerous awards throughout the company's history. Beyond luxury goods, Baccarat also produces glass for mining lamps for the coal mining operations of Charbonnages de France. Baccarat operates retail stores in Paris, New York, and Tokyo. In the mid-1990s, the company has begun expanding its retail activities, including opening new outlets--such as its minority position in a partnership with a private investor operating a Baccarat store in Lyon, France--with the goal of doubling its revenues by the year 2000. The company has also created a new subsidiary, Baccarat Pacific Limited, in Hong Kong, with the intent of entering the growing Chinese market. This subsidiary has opened the first Baccarat retail outlet in Peking. The recession in the United States in the early 1990s, the lengthy financial crisis in Europe, and continuing economic troubles in Japan and other Asian countries in the late 1990s have combined to cripple the demand for luxury goods and to slow Baccarat's growth; however, after a number of years of losses, the company, led by its resurgent U.S. subsidiary, has returned to profitability, posting earnings of FFr 11.2 million on revenues of FFr 544.3 million in 1996. In that year, the company added 400 new products to its catalog. Vases and decorative pieces represented some 45 percent of Baccarat's sales; glasses and carafes added another 33 percent of sales, while lamps and furnishings provided 12 percent of the company's revenues. Since the mid-1990s, the Louvre group has been Baccarat's majority shareholder. While much of Europe, including France, was engaged in the Seven Years War (1759-63), chiefly for control of the North American territories, the costs of the war were being felt closer to home. France's involvement in a succession of wars under the reign of Louis XV had left its economy devastated; by the middle of the Seven Years War, joblessness was rampant, particularly among the woodcutters and other craftsmen in the forest-rich northeast region centered around the city of Metz and bordered by the Meuse and Moselle rivers. At the same time, a number of notables had become concerned about the lack of glassworks in France, and especially French artisans capable of producing decorative crystal glass that could rival that of Bohemia--then, even more so than Venice and England, the chief center of fine crystal in Europe. At that time in France, the existing glassworks operations were the province of the nobility; yet, while these operations attempted to mimic the qualities of Bohemia glass, the true Bohemian product remained the preferred choice for glass tableware, windows, and objects. By the end of the Seven Years War, however, the bishop of Metz, Monseigneur de Montmorency-Laval, had become convinced that his region, with the beech forests (for potash) and plentiful pure quartz of the Vosges mountains, as well as a ready supply of artisans, contained the raw materials needed to create a glassworks to rival the Bohemian, Venetian, and English masters. Apart from the need to provide work for the region, the bishop of Metz was also motivated by a degree of protectionism--with the French treasury depleted by the Seven Years War, the importation of Bohemian crystal, and the resulting exportation of French money, had bec