Word: branded
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...Starbucks, which saw traffic and comparable-stores sales in its U.S. business fall for the first time ever. The slip is partly due to softening consumer spending, but Starbucks executives insist that by retraining the company on a coffee-centric customer experience, they can revive sales and the brand. "This is in many ways self-induced," says Schultz. "That's why I feel so confident and optimistic we can fix it ourselves...
...scale of this operation: when it comes to giant single-fashion brands, Hugo Boss AG is huge (although not, it should be noted, as huge as Polo Ralph Lauren). LVMH (the market leader), Gucci Group/PPR and Richemont, which owns Chloé, are also bigger, but they are multi-brand conglomerates. Of the single brands, for menswear only, Hugo Boss is as big as its two nearest competitors, Giorgio Armani and Ermenegildo Zegna, combined. The company still makes 1.6 million suits a year, but that's old news; it now reflects a wider cultural shift and has repositioned itself from a suit...
...palpable at Boss is a forward motion so fast you can feel it. Year-on-year growth is at 15%, which Sälzer equates to the growth of Shanghai, where you blink and another skyscraper has gone up. "You can feel the growth, [whereas] a 5% growth in a brand or a city is more organic," he says, pointing to tonight's audience, which is full of youthful faces. "If you grow, you hire mostly young people, and if you don't grow, your company looks older...
...being shown tonight, designed by Ingo Wilts, a German who has been promoted through the ranks, is sleek and sexy. Boss Orange, designed by Andrea Cannelloni, an Italian who has been with the company in Germany since 1998, is more casual. Tonight's finale showcases the Hugo label, the brand's most avant-garde offering, and marks the debut of Belgian designer Bruno Pieters, the first major creative appointment Boss has made outside the company since the Milan fiasco. Pieters' collection of compass-cut coats, jackets and tunics wows this audience, which rises to give a standing ovation...
...Hugo Boss, Sälzer doesn't collaborate with famous-name designers like Westwood, and some see the lack of a star like John Galliano or Marc Jacobs as a disadvantage because the brand may seem amorphous and harder for a consumer to pin down. On the plus side, shareholders need not fret about atrophying taste or succession. While the company name dates back to the 1920s, the foundations for today's business were put in place at the end of the '60s, when brothers Uwe and Jochen Holy started to manufacture menswear under their grandfather's name. By 1985, Hugo...