WILD GEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD:Helen Kennedy Lambert: Owner and managing director of Paris-based Lambert & Associates
SEAMLESS AS it may appear when the strands of her story are laid out in retrospect, Helen Kennedy Lambert is alive to the vaguely improbable quality of her route from a farm in Co Tipperary to the rarefied world of the Parisian luxury goods business.
“Now and again, I’ve had people say to me, ‘that’s a big change’,” she laughs, “but it has really helped me, because it has kept me so grounded.”
Lambert, one of six children who grew up on the family farm outside Nenagh, is the owner and managing director of Lambert Associates, a Paris-based international buying office that employs 50 people in five offices in France, Italy, England and the United States.
The company sources products for high-end retail clients such as Nieman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Holt Renfrew and Fenwick.
While fashion and accessories account for about 70 per cent of business, its portfolio spans the luxury goods gamut, from cosmetics to tableware.
Like many others who left Ireland in the 1980s, Lambert would not have thought of herself as an emigrant when she first left home.
The then 20-year-old came to Paris in 1986 to improve her French, with the firm intention of returning within a year, but a lucky break through a temping agency landed her a job selling advertising space at the International Herald Tribune, where English was the lingua franca.
“It was quite comfortable, because I thought I was quite fluent when I came to France, but in actual fact when you arrive in the country and people are speaking away at you, you realise you’re not fluent at all,” she recalls. “So I was able to continue to learn French, but everybody spoke English.”
After several advertising jobs in radio and publishing, Lambert moved to the Hachette group – one of the biggest magazine publishers in the world – where she was eventually appointed to the role of international advertising director.
With responsibility for all 34 Elletitles around the world, as well as Elle Decorand Paris Match, she credits the job with getting her to where she finds herself today.
It was also her luck to be at Elleat a time of rapid expansion and, for someone who, as a 16-year-old, had been reading French Elle"whenever I could get my hands on it", it was an exhilarating time.
"It was a successful time for Elle," Lambert recalls. "Every year a new magazine would launch. ElleAmerica was launched in the mid-1980s and the others sprouted up little by little. There were launch parties we went to. We had big seminars every year where all the people would come together. It was very international, and it was very interesting.
"Of course, Voguehas a name in France, but Elleis so much bigger, so it was a door-opener."
In 2004, Lambert was approached by the luxury buying office AGA – what would later become Lambert Associates – and she was asked to become its managing director. She jumped at the chance.
“They needed an Anglo-Saxon, they needed someone who spoke perfect French, they needed someone who had a flair for fashion, who knew the players of the industry – the presidents or the number twos of all the big companies, whether it be Dior or Yves Saint-Laurent,” she says. “I knew all those people.”
In 2005, about a year after she joined, Lambert took up an offer from AGA’s American owners and bought the company. She now runs it with her French husband Stéphane. After a period of intense restructuring, they are now planning to open their first office in Asia and to build a consulting side to the business.
Having spent all her working life in France, Lambert cannot easily compare the business culture here with Ireland’s, but she believes many of the stereotypes about France – that bureaucracy is inordinately cumbersome and that it can be difficult for start-ups – are largely true.
"It's complicated," she says of the famed administration, "but I always believed in being well surrounded by professionals – having the good lawyer and the good accountant."
If she were to offer advice to young Irish emigrants today, Lambert would stress the importance of immersing oneself in the new culture and the language, as she feels having complete command of French was vital for her in earning people’s respect.
And then, “really and truly, there’s hard work and tenacity”.
When Lambert got through the “nine months of hard labour” involved in buying her company and overseeing its restructuring, she thought the rest would be easy. “But that’s when it really started. If I’d known it was going to be so difficult, I don’t know if I would have done it. But now everything is going well and the hard work has paid off.
“And that’s something I tell my children every day: hard work pays off. There’s a bit of luck involved, but you really have to go for it.”
