I absolutely adore personalisation. If there is an option to put my name or my initials on something, then put them on I shall. Personalising my new Dior small book tote therefore seemed like a necessity. Dior was set to release this smaller sized book tote in January and within days of the new year rolling around, mine arrived in store. They did not muck around with their deliveries for this item! As I purchased it in Australia and my home store doesn’t do the personalisation, the first option was to send it down to Sydney which would take around four weeks. Then I came up with the genius idea that if I took it with me on my trip to Paris, possibly I could get it done over there and have the added bonus of a cute little memento of my trip.
After having a truly special Dior experience with some staff whose love and dedication to the brand were second to none, we stopped by the Dior that was on the same street as the Plaza Athenee to inquire about having this done. At present, Dior is still completing work on their long established avenue Montaigne flagship store but they advised us the best place to get this done would be the temporary flagship over on the Champs-Elysees. They said we would need to drop the bag off and that it would take around four days to complete. As they often experienced some confusion from tourists about where the flagship currently is, there was a black town car emblazoned with DIOR on the side waiting to ferry us across Paris to the other location.
We jumped in and were taken around the back secret “Kim Kardashian” entrance as we were calling it. The staff greeted us with Moroccan mocktails that they swiftly made behind a bar in the middle of the store and they then sat us down in front of a number of iPads for us to have a play around with an app showing us how our name or initials would look on the bag. I also couldn’t resist taking a look at the mini book tote and seeing what would work on that size (never hurts to be prepared in case I add this micro size to my collection in the future).
I finally settled on my name “ZARA” and nothing else. Short, sharp and clean. I thought it looked great. My Sales Associate informed me that in fact the process took around 25 minutes and that we could be shown around and complete our shopping and then the bag would be ready when we were finished. She then went to process my order and said “on no Madame, there is a problem”. What was the problem you might ask? My name apparently! She explained that “Zara” is a competing brand name and that I would not be allowed to put that on my bag.
I was somewhat taken aback as I would not consider Zara a brand to compete with Dior. I mean I could understand if my name was Chanel or even Louis, but Zara?! I asked if I could have a quick chat to the manager and she brought him over. After I convinced him that it really was my name by showing my passport and a few credit cards, he said he thought it would be ok and gave me the go ahead. It was back in a flash and ready to go home with us. So now my personalisation memento has an individual, funny little story attached to it.
Love Zara
Xx
Read related article:
Investigative Report and Reveal of the Smaller Dior Book Tote
- Stylish Sheba posted 4 years ago
- last edited 4 years ago
