With news coming from the head of Hugo Boss, the famous German brand has now started a project that drops their luxury branding in order to restore it’s lineage in sartorial refinement for the sophisticated gentleman. At least this was the idea of new CEO Mark Langer’s first remarks that he made to Handelsblatt, that we have gathered from Channel NewsAsia. And we thought to ourselves, why would Hugo Boss drop their luxury branding to take up sartorial refinement? After all sartorial refinement is just another meaning for “luxury”.
Handelsblatt, along with others, have come to all the same conclusion that Langer is in fact referring to the “women’s-wear” part of the business, which grew to an even greater extent under the assiduous watch of previous CEO Claus-Dietrich Lahrs. Langer might also be hinting to the “luxury everyday” type of aspect for the business, like an art mastered by brands such as: Louis Vuitton, Rolex, or Chanel.
Another way to say this using watch analogy, would be like Hugo Boss was trying to use the Rolex approach, but instead went back to it’s Patek Philippe “desired by many, yet owned by few” kind of approach. Relatively speaking, this seems like an excellent opportunity.
At the apex of Lahrs’s expansionist system, Hugo Boss opened over 400 stores worldwide, and presently the fashion brand reportedly has more than 6,000 points of sale in a total of 124 countries. Due to a drawn-out current fall off, the situation became far too much for Lahrs to handle, causing him to resign in February after witnessing sales in the US and China severely decline.
