4 August: Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton, founder of the designer luggage company which bears his name was born on this date in 1821. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. Louis Vuitton was the son of a farmer, Xavier Vuitton, and a milliner, Coronne Gaillard.

2. His mother died when he was 10 and his father remarried. Louis didn’t get on with his stepmother and when his father died, Louis left home and walked to Paris, 292 miles away. He was 13 at the time. The journey took him two years as he took odd jobs on the way to support himself.

3. By the time he reached Paris, he was 16. He became an apprentice to Monsieur Maréchal, who made luggage boxes. Vuitton worked for Maréchal for 17 years.

4. In 1854, at age 33, Vuitton married 16-year-old Clemence-Emilie Parriaux.

5. After leaving to start his own business, Vuitton came up with the innovative idea of making luggage boxes flat instead of rounded trunk shapes, so they could be stacked. The demand for these was such that he was able to open a larger shop.

6. He made bespoke travel boxes, the height of luxury at the time. One of his customers was Napoleon III’s wife, Eugénie de Montijo, the Empress of France. Needless to say, that cemented his reputation even further.

7. The famous LV monogram didn’t exist in his lifetime. It was created after his death by his son, Georges, as a tribute. In Louis’s time the bags were covered with the checkerboard pattern, the Damier print, which is still in use by the brand today.

8. The company introduced a pick proof lock. Customers registered their Locks with the workshop in case they ever lost their Keys. Georges Vuitton had such confidence in the locks that he challenged Harry Houdini to escape from a locked Vuitton trunk. Houdini didn’t even bother to reply. The company still uses the same design today.

9. Louis Vuitton never made handbags – they were introduced years after he died.

10. In 2006, the Louis Vuitton company filed a lawsuit against Manifest Information Services Ltd because they wanted the company to transfer the domain name LV.com to them. The legal action failed and the domain was subsequently acquired by Liverpool Victoria (LV=), a British insurance company (with whom, incidentally, at time of writing, I insure my car).

Character birthday

Corolla, aka Carole Tyler, who was a criminal groupie, hanging around and flirting with big names in the criminal circuit. Her turning point came when she seduced the man known as the Fox, a reformed bank robber. The Mindstone had come into his possession and was influencing him and tempting him back into crime. She soon realised that the stone in his possession was far more valuable to her than any fee she would charge him for her services. She mixed a strong drink to knock him out and stole the stone. The stone gave her psionic powers which made her a force to be reckoned with in the criminal world. She appears in the short story, The Mindstone, in the collection Settling the Score.

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.

Available on Amazon:

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