Until recently, I thought Snapchat was an app used primarily by tweens and teenagers to send each other silly pictures. No longer. This week, I interviewed Frederic Cumenal, chief executive of Tiffany & Co, at a Financial Times luxury summit in San Francisco.
During our conversation, Cumenal revealed that Tiffany had recently created a sparkly Snapchat “filter” that communicates the dazzle of a diamond to anyone with a mobile phone. It even allows would-be purchasers to virtually “try on” the rings, without ever needing to go into one of those reverentially hushed Tiffany stores.
Is this a good idea? That is the big question — actually, the $222bn question, if we go by the sector’s annual sales — hanging over the luxury goods world today. One of the reasons companies such as Tiffany are creating Snapchat filters is that they are keen to catch the cyber buzz — and appeal to “millennials”.