THE GIFT of
KNOWLEDGE As the festive season approaches, Gabrielle Lane speaks to the founder of Quintessentially Gifts about shopping for the world’s most discerning customers
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t’s a role that’s part stylist, part matchmaker, part executive assistant and part best friend – Lee Coleman is the go-to-girl. In 2009, luxury global membership service Quintessentially added perfect gifting to the list of life’s little burdens it could solve, with Coleman at the helm, enabling its clients (including the British aristocracy, Middle Eastern Sheiks and FTSE 100 CEO’s) to acquire previously unobtainable items, at a moment’s notice. “They’ve seen it all and had it all, so we’re always having to come up with this one point of difference that is of interest to them,” she explains. Naturally, when she gives me a call from the company’s Marylebone offices just weeks before Christmas, it’s a particularly busy time, but if you were to think that the solution lies in carats, you’d be wrong. Coleman is a lovely, but indisputably no-nonsense, New Yorker (albeit Virginia born) who will tell me more than once during our interview that she ‘couldn’t care less’ about celebrity or that ‘everyone is wearing burgundy this season’. “You still have the conspicuous consumption customer after branded, glamorous stuff – these people are out there and they’re not going anywhere, but now clients want something
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