LVMH officialises transfer of Dior eyewear licence to Thélios

Paris, September 25 2019 (AFP) - International luxury giant LVMH announced on Wednesday that it will take over, through its company Thélios, the eyewear production for Christian Dior, once the licence deal with Italian group Safilo will expire in December 2020, officialising news reported this summer by FashionNetwork.com.

In partnership with Marcolin, another Italian eyewear group, LVMH set up a joint-venture company called Thélios in 2018, with the goal of controlling its eyewear supply chain directly by internalising production, a break with the long-established practice of licensing - the manufacturing and especially commercialisation of eyewear by third parties.

Thélios operates a factory in Italy, north of Venice, where it already produces eyewear for many LVMH labels, like Celine, Loewe, Fred, Kenzo and Berluti.

On Wednesday, Thélios announced the signing of “a partnership deal for the design, production and distribution of Dior eyewear worldwide.” Within LVMH, Christian Dior is the most important label, in volume and value terms, for the sunglasses and eyeglasses category.

“The first Dior eyewear collection developed with Thélios will be presented in January 2021, with the spring/summer season, and will become available at Dior stores worldwide and at select retailers belonging to Thélios’s network,” indicated the press release.

The name ‘Thélios’ is a contraction (in French) of ‘Théia’, the goddess of sight, and ‘Hélios’, the sun god. The factory has an output capacity of up to 1.5 million pairs of glasses per year. A second, adjoining plant, currently under construction, will enable Thélios’s capacity to increase to over 4.5 million pairs.