Word: rosso
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Except Rosso, of course, who for 20 years has remained singlemindedly focused on the development of the brand and fanatically obsessed with the idea that casual clothing could be fashion's long-term winner. Since he bought out his partners, he has grown Diesel from $7 million to $1.4 billion last year, acquiring the small Belgian designer Martin Margiela in 2002 and signing up manufacturing and distribution agreements with the trendy Milan-based DSquared designers, Dean and Dan Katen. Rumors are rife that additional deals are in the works, specifically acquisitions...
...other, you must be successful," says Rosso, leaning across an outdoor table laid out with a country lunch. He has driven up the steep gravel road to the Diesel Farm, an estate acquired as a sort of company retreat in the Veneto countryside, with Stefano, 27, the second of his six children, who is completing a customized M.B.A.-style training course to be able some day to take over the company's management. Rosso's oldest son Andrea, 28, is creative director at the group's surf and street-wear line 55DSL. Rosso is wearing his usual chief-executive attire...
...Rosso credits his hardscrabble upbringing on the farm for his determination and pragmatism, including a meticulous attention to logistics widely admired by competitors. Plus he has a real flair for marketing. Today Diesel is still less than half the size of the Levi's brand (a separate high-end manufacturing division, Staff International, does an additional $114 million in sales), but it's fast growing, highly profitable and so far has managed the delicate balance Renzo evokes when he says his goal is to be the "coolest of the biggest...
Diesel continues to be seen as an innovator (Rosso claims to have developed many of the manufacturing innovations for denim) in one of the most dynamic corners of the fashion cosmos, the jeans bar, where consumers are falling over one another to pay $150 or $200 a pair. That is a recent phenomenon. Jeans were long considered a $30, five-pocket commodity, with connotations of youth, rebels and weekends in the Western world. Periodically, prices spiked for so-called designer jeans (think Calvin Klein in 1980). But those remained a status sell focused on pocket stitching and the tag; most...
...Rosso's big idea was to improve the product and the margins. (He had road tested the first part of that formula as a teenager selling friends $7 jeans he made on his mother's sewing machine.) In 1988 he hired a young Dutch fashion-school grad named Wilbert Das, and they began to experiment with dyes and destruction?all sorts of techniques to age the jeans and give them a more vintage feel. They moved pockets, reshaped the jeans, introduced curves?and then charged a whopping $79. Their look was Rosso's look, a blend of thrift store, Americana...