SAVELLI: A Luxury Smartphone for Affluent Women with a Passion for Jewelry

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s, established handset vendors like Motorola and LG, handset start-ups like Mobiado, GoldVish, and Gresso, but also watchmakers and fashion houses introduced luxury mobile phones to compete with Vertu, the leader in this segment. Still, most of these firms focused on the development of luxury phones targeted at affluent men. This chapter examines the case of SAVELLI, a Swiss-Italian start-up that with its first luxury phone launched in 2013 aimed to capture a niche previously not sufficiently explored by other competitors: wealthy and sophisticated women with a passion for jewelry. Although SAVELLI phones had a design that was considered by many as really unique and capable of generating and capturing new demand, the start-up never took off. Why did it not work out?

Quotes from interviews with Alessandro Savelli and Enrico Mambelli reported in this chapter were originally in Italian and were translated into English. All quotes reported in this chapter are taken from interviews conducted by the author in 2016 and 2017.