Kering has poached from Louis Vuitton. On Thursday, April 11, the French luxury goods group announced the appointment of Stefano Cantino as deputy director general of Gucci, its subsidiary chaired by Jean-François Palus. In the summer of 2023, this close associate of François-Henri Pinault, CEO and Kering majority shareholder, had been sent to Milan to “strengthen Gucci’s teams and operations, prepare its management teams and organization” following the departure of Marco Bizzarri, its CEO since 2015.
Cantino is yet another Italian in the organizational chart designed by Pinault to restructure the brand, whose sales represent almost half of Kering’s business worldwide (€19.5 billion in 2023). After a 20-year career at Prada, where he was strategic marketing director, this experienced executive was vice president of communications and image at Louis Vuitton, the world’s leading luxury brand owned by the LVMH group.
He will be under the direction of Italian Francesca Belletini, promoted in Paris in July 2023 to the position of deputy director general for Kering Group brands. He is due to take up his new post on May 2 and was immediately replaced at Louis Vuitton by a publicist, Blake Harrop, a social media specialist.
Severe transition crisis
In tandem with Palus, Cantino will be “responsible for defining and implementing the brand’s strategy,” said Kering, in a press release. The situation is urgent, the task is great and the operation will be costly. Kering hopes to revive Gucci’s sales, which peaked at €10.3 billion in 2022, after 15% growth over 2021, thanks to Alessandro Michele’s collections.
Artistic director between 2015 and the end of 2022, the Italian designer became the darling of young fashion consumers, particularly the Chinese. So much so that, without disclosing a deadline, the Kering subsidiary claimed to achieve sales of €15 billion and an operating margin of 40%.
However, since Michele’s departure and his replacement by Neapolitan Sabato de Sarno, an unknown from Valentino, the Italian brand has been going through a very severe transitional crisis. In 2023, Gucci’s business contracted by 6% to €9.9 billion. Its fall is now vertiginous. In a statement issued at the end of March, a month before the official first-quarter sales report, the group warned that sales “were down by almost 20%” in the first three months of 2024.
Gucci boutiques are clearly suffering from very unfavorable timing. The Italian brand, which had embarked on a move upmarket in 2022 to appeal to more affluent customers than in the past, has not yet been able to generate sufficient traffic in its outlets. This is particularly true of the new items being added each season to a collection that is still on sale.
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