On a preserved territory of 47,800 km², Bourgogne-Franche-Comté is a land of industrial activities that are combined with the present and the future!
We have identified no less than 450 companies working for the luxury goods markets: watchmaking, jewellery, leather goods, tableware, writing instruments, perfumery, cosmetics, but also fashion and fashion accessories… These companies employ more than 15,000 people. Alongside these activities, other companies and other talents are the showcases of our French art of living. Because Bourgogne-Franche-Comté is also a land of wines and spirits, gastronomy, culture and hospitality.
The success of the activities linked to the luxury industry is, here, the result of numerous “dynamics marked by previous choices and bifurcations”. Dynamics that have forged the destiny of many companies and of this territory. Thus, the history of men and the history of territories are intertwined. Thus, Man writes the pages of history of the places where he has lived, where he has adapted permanently to survive, thus letting the territory, the geography and the climate shape his activities and his future.
The Bourgogne-Franche-Comté of today is therefore the fruit of a happy mixture: that of the genius and obstinacy of men, of successive generations of entrepreneurs and journeymen, united in the search for quality, progress and perfection. This is what has made exceptional stories possible… That of the “Clos des cinq journaux” given by the Duchess of Burgundy in 1231 to the Benedictine monks of the priory of Saint-Vivant, which became the Domaine de la Romanée Conti, with prestigious wines known to connoisseurs throughout the world, and of which one bottle caused a sensation at Sotheby’s in New York.
Or that of two centuries of technological progress after the Genevan watchmaker Laurent Mégevand and the eighty colleagues who accompanied him settled in Besançon, culminating in the FEMTO-ST laboratory, where one of the only two teams in the world succeeded in mastering the technology of cryogenic sapphire oscillators, with a precision of half a billionth of a second per day.
For the multi-faceted LUXURY sector, this history is one of the key success factors that explains why the major brands come to draw on the sources of regional know-how. It is this history that we wish to write again today by hosting the 17th Luxury and Creative Talents award ceremony, which for the first time will take place outside Paris.
Luxury is much more than a market segment, however buoyant it may be, much more than a price, however high it may be, luxury is an attitude, a search, a kind of quest for beauty, a taste for the ultimate and the rare, which looks towards the infinite… Its history is written with age-old experience, tradition, culture, expertise… with this alchemy present here everywhere… all the ingredients are there. For the talents we welcome, we hope that Bourgogne-Franche-Comté will be more than ever a land of inspiration.