No move away from ‘full luxury’, Burberry insists
Burberry chief executive, Joshua Schulman, is preparing to celebrate a year in the role; he relocated to London from New York to take up the top job at Burberry on July 17 last year.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal to mark his first anniversary in the job, he said he had no intention of moving Burberry into “affordable luxury territory”. Mr Schulman insisted full luxury positioning remained central to his strategy for the brand.
The point arose because the new chief executive wasted no time in criticising and seeking to halt a previous company strategy of pushing prices of bags and other products upward. He believes the increases went too far and that Burberry had begun to pay too little attention to products it is most famous for among high-end consumers around the world, such as its scarves and trench-coats.
His assessment was that Burberry had narrowed its appeal too much, focusing too keenly on people he called “opinionated customers” and paying too little attention to more conservative and aspirational consumers.
For its profile piece, however, the WSJ also spoke to two former Burberry executives who suggested that the company’s attempt to move to the higher end of the luxury market would have paid off in time.
The newspaper quoted one of these representatives of the former Burberry regime as saying: “It takes years to elevate a brand. Burberry started that process, but it is very hard to achieve when you are a publicly listed company. Shareholders want results.”
But Joshua Schulman said he still believes Burberry can be one of the top five luxury brands in the world, although he said it was not an ambition for the near future. “That is the North Star for this business,” he insisted.
