PARIS — When luxury consultant Natalie Bader Messian was approached to affix the board of the Ritz Paris with a mission to burnish its brand and diversify its revenue streams, she decided to go to the hotel incognito to get a way of what challenges she might face.

The French executive, who has helmed brands including Clarins and Fred, was met on the door by a staff member who politely inquired about her reason for coming to the hotel. She was initially denied access after which chaperoned by one other staffer during her visit — giving her the impression that the Ritz had something of a fortress mentality when it got here to non-guests.

“I saw a superlative hotel, remarkable service, but I also saw that the Ritz was relatively closed in on itself,” she recalled over a soft drink on the hotel’s plush Bar Vendôme. “Actually, I believe Parisians had been barely forgotten on the Ritz.”

Since she joined the board in 2020, the hotel has undergone its biggest transformation since reopening in 2016 after 4 years of renovations.

Helmed by general manager Marc Raffray since 2019, the Paris institution took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to open a second entrance on Rue Cambon, as a part of a broader technique to turn into more accessible to locals. That pivot took on added urgency when lockdowns brought global travel to a halt, turning luxury hotels into ghost ships.

In parallel, Bader Messian has led a drive to rev up the Ritz brand with the launch of a recent entity charged with product development and licensing, in addition to a division that can open local and international branches for its Ritz Paris Le Comptoir pastry shop, run by François Perret, the star of the Netflix series “The Chef in a Truck.”

Amongst essentially the most visible signs of the branding drive is a collaboration with Los Angeles-based lifestyle label Frame on a capsule collection spanning from $140 baseball caps to $2,200 varsity jackets, all featuring the brand of the Paris hotel, which is able to rejoice its one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary next 12 months.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A recent Switzerland-based entity, Ritz Enterprise SA is developing a number of Ritz-branded products, starting from tableware to toys and gourmet food, and on Oct. 6 opened its first shop-in-shop on the Galeries Lafayette department store in Doha, Qatar.

With experience working for the world’s leading luxury groups, Bader Messian knew that she had gold in her hands. “The brand is insanely powerful,” she said, noting its ubiquity in popular culture, including “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” the classic song written by Irving Berlin within the ’20s.

“The word ‘ritzy’ is an element of the American vocabulary,” she marveled.

Nonetheless, she felt that the brand was underdeveloped. “The Ritz is all the time delightful, but we’ve got to maintain delighting and offering recent experiences and recent venues to maintain it within the conversation. Competition is fierce, unfortunately, and there’s a variety of noise around us, so we’ve got to chop through that,” she said.

Although she was a newcomer to the hotel industry, the manager was undaunted by the challenge of tackling a recent field.

“In my profession, I’ve had the chance to work in beauty, in high jewelry, which was also recent to me on the time, in fashion and even in pure retail, because once I left Chanel to affix Sephora, it was an enormous shift in culture. But I like discovering recent worlds,” she said.

“And clearly I also love drawing inspiration from my previous experiences to usher in recent ideas to different sectors,” she added.

“Once I was at Sephora, my job was to remodel a retailer right into a brand. Once I was at Clarins, the brand was very well-known but it surely was getting a bit of dusty, so we needed to modernize it. Fred was a brand that had lost its identity a bit of bit, so we needed to bring it into focus and relaunch iconic products just like the Force 10 bracelet,” she recalled.

“So I’ve all the time felt obsessed with working on brands and that is one in every of the world’s most beautiful brands,” Bader Messian said.

Next to its recent door on Rue Cambon, considered less “intimidating” than the hotel’s grand revolving entrance on Place Vendôme, the hotel last 12 months unveiled a recent concept: Ritz Paris Le Comptoir, a street-facing pastry shop selling treats including 3-euro croissants, and cake-infused milkshakes in takeaway paper cups.

“It was right when Chanel opened its recent offices across the road and the planets aligned,” Bader Messian said. “It’s performed beyond expectations and we’re especially pleased since we achieved those results during a period when tourism was still below average in Paris. Asian visitors have yet to return, so we all know we are able to do even higher.”

In June, the hotel hired Damien Couliou, an executive who previously headed French chef Alain Ducasse’s chocolate division and spent a decade with high-end caterer Fauchon, as managing director of Ritz Paris Le Comptoir, a separate legal entity that can oversee the food and beverage store’s international expansion in partnership with chef Perret.

“From 2023 onward you’re going to see recent Comptoirs open outside of the Ritz,” said Bader Messian, adding that the hotel has fielded requests from the Middle East and Asia.

Among the many other recent hires is Philippe Margueritte, a former Coty Inc. executive who took over as chief executive officer of Ritz Enterprise SA in May, charged with developing products.

“The brand is so aspirational and so strong that we picture all types of things,” Bader Messian said. “We would like to deploy this in a really chic, elitist way, without trivializing the brand. It’s a difficult but interesting exercise.”

An enormous a part of the job has been to trace down and eliminate unauthorized uses of the Ritz name. For historic reasons linked to the founder, César Ritz, the brand is legally utilized by several separate entities. The Ritz-Carlton, owned by Marriott International, licenses the name for its chain of luxury hotels.

The Ritz London belongs to Qatari businessman Abdulhadi Mana Al-Hajri, and there may be a Mandarin Oriental Ritz in Madrid, Spain, and a 4 Seasons Hotel Ritz in Lisbon, Portugal. However the Ritz Paris, which was acquired by Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed in 1979, is where all of it began.

“The brand was not sufficiently protected prior to now,” Bader Messian opined. “Some people took advantage of that to place a foot within the door and have opened locations or registered the word ‘Ritz’ for product categories, so we’re doing an enormous cleanup and we’ve began taking legal motion to guard our brand, which had turn into a bit of diluted.”

It has also hired a director of heritage, Arnaud Leblin, who’s charged with structuring and expanding the hotel’s archives and shaping its legacy for the longer term.

Also this summer, the hotel unveiled the renovated Ritz Club & Spa, with a separate entrance directly on Place Vendôme. “It’s a part of this same strategy of opening the Ritz to local life, to Parisians. The Ritz doesn’t belong simply to its clients. It belongs to everyone,” she explained.

Under the direction of Nathalie Delclos, who joined from the Hôtel George V in July, the spa offers Biologique Recherche facials from 240 euros and signature Ritz Paris massages named after flowers from 220 euros.

On the food and drinks front, following the opening last fall of its recent Ritz Bar, with a menu of zodiac-themed cocktails, the hotel is preparing to reopen its gastronomic restaurant L’Espadon next 12 months under recent chef Eugénie Béziat.

“We’re in revolution on the Ritz,” Bader Messian summed up. “And we’ve got a bit of surprise in store for next 12 months, which is able to open in September 2023. It’s an enormous project that’s already underway, and that can bring more life to areas of the hotel which might be less visible and fewer animated today. So there may be all the time something happening on the Ritz.”