Apple Hires Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts to Head Retail Efforts

http://allthingsd.com/20131014/apple-hires-burberry-ceo-angela-ahrendts-to-head-its-retail-efforts/?mod=atd_homepage_carousel

by antr • 13 years ago

32 45 13 years ago

allthingsd.com

TheBiv6• 13 years ago

"...in this newly created position..."

I always love this corporate ploy bc we never know if they created this position to fit the candidates ego, or whether the company wanted this position to happen regardless of the person appointed to the role.

My guess would be it is the former, but it's kind of like commenting on bird migration patterns bc I don't know anything about bird migration patterns!

dajohnson89• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's also interesting that she is effectively taking a demotion, from CEO to "senior vp". Burberry is a prestigious brand, and I'm very curious what factors led to her decision.

TheBiv6• 13 years ago

For sure! It's like a head coach of a small school going to be a co-offensive coordinator at a major school: like Texas A&M :) (shameless former student analogy)

sksksk• 13 years ago

Whilst being the CEO of a FTSE 100 company is very impressive, Angela is going to head up the retail division of the world's largest company.

I'd take a guess that if Apple Retail was a separate company from Apple, it'd still be worth more than the whole of Burberry.

antr2• 13 years ago

Not that different from startups. It's not the first time startups make up titles to satisfy hires. Still, I don't think it's an ego thing. If all positions remained constant forever one could argue that that company is not thinking about change, innovation, etc.

TheBiv6• 13 years ago

Oh, sorry, I completely agree with the last part about stagnant positions and the need to create new divisions/branches within companies.

The reason I used the word ego in this individual's case was bc this is technically a "demotion" in the title sense, and there seems to be a heavy amount of jockeying for titles within major companies (in my non-scientific experience). So my overall question was relating to what drove this newly created title.

And I think we can all agree that crafting a new title in a new startup is a lot different dynamic than doing it at a top-10 company in the world, like Apple.

nicholassmith2• 13 years ago

It's a very interesting move, Burberry has weathered well over the last decade.

Also food for thought, Burberry made large inroads into China and tailored a lot of their retail efforts around that. Maybe Apple thinks it's time to double down on their China strategy.

TheBiv6• 13 years ago

Admittedly, I am not a Burberry-china strategist, but it appears a direct quote from her in this article seems to say the exact opposite of China being a growth market for Burberry:

"She added that future growth would likely come from India, Latin America and Indonesia."

Do you possibly have a source or anecdotal evidence to support that statement you presented?

http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/436421/China-helps-Bur...

nicholassmith2• 13 years ago

Sure: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5b171420-22d7-11e0-ad0b-00144feab4... (digital strategy first tested in China, 30% growth there), http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d33bbd4a-c1f2-11e2-ab66-00144feab7... (sales slowing, still making up a large percentage). ((sorry for the FT links, they should hopefully work!))

So it's an interesting one, Burberry is moving into new countries for their retail areas because it's fashion and it gets old. Burberry has had it's day in China and they're starting to move on (a similar thing is happening with LV and another but I can't remember off the top of my head). That doesn't mean China as a market is done, just that the taste has moved on. It's still fresh in new developing markets, so they're moving their focus there, but it was one of the primary business focuses for a number of years.

PakG1• 13 years ago

Nowhere does gp say that China will be a future growth market for Burberry. But even so, how can you conclude that the article says the opposite based on this one sentence? Most of the article is about Burberry's success in China, and it even mentions sales growth percentage expected.

I read the article as saying that China is going well for Burberry and is expected to continue to go well. Additional growth on top of that will also come from other countries. This is likely because China's been penetrated pretty well by Burberry, whereas those other countries haven't yet.

Live in China, and my anecdotal experience is that the Burberry advertising and store presence is on par with a lot of luxury brands here. They've done well.

YOSPOS• 13 years ago

The connection between Apple and luxury will only be strengthened because of this.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

It's interesting how the luxury brand of Apple used to be a hindrance, but is now seen as crucial to fighting off lower-end disruption.

kitsune_• 13 years ago

Coming to an Apple store near you, accessories that complement the "chav" look of the gold, I'm sorry, "champagne" iPhone.

This is actually half in chest, Ahrendts is credited with saving Burberry [1]

Totally irrelevant, but they're also selling an alligator skin trench coat on their website for a measly 79,000.00 GBP. [2]

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jun/16/angela-ahren...

[2] http://uk.burberry.com/alligator-trench-coat-p38791451

jbrooksuk2• 13 years ago

You do know that Burberry was originally worn by the upper class?

It's only worn by chavs because they signed rights to the pattern and it was recreated on the cheap. Something like that anyway.

antr2• 13 years ago

When Angela Ahrendts became CEO of Burberry, one of the first thing she did was cancelling all of those licensing agreements, which diluted the brand's value. She successfully repositioned the company from a forgotten brand with little control over its product, to a high luxury, highly profitable company. Kudos to her.

... and Burberry's share price is -5% after this was announced. This says a lot.

TheBiv6• 13 years ago

Trivializing her position to accessory-driven conclusions is misleading the $26MM/year salary she was receiving at Burberry. Clearly her role was something bigger like strategy and making the brand memorable. I would hope that is the plan, rather than creating iphone cases, as you suggested.

leoedin2• 13 years ago

What's your reasoning behind using "MM" to denote million (as opposed the fewer keyed and more commonly accepted "m" or "M")? I see it a lot on Hacker News and I just can't figure out why people are doing it.

victoriap2• 13 years ago

I am curious what her "Head of its retail efforts" job description reads like?

mpeg• 13 years ago

Apart from the push to improve the brand image as a luxury brand, she also spearheaded heavy use of social media and technology for marketing.

I had the chance to watch a presentation she gave with some people from my old company and she was really good

selectstar• 13 years ago

A mid range Apple laptop costs as much as a mid range Burberry leather jacket whilst the laptop takes way more effort to constuct.

I think someone is doing it smarter than the other here...

yalogin• 13 years ago

what was that? This comment is more in line with reddit and not HN.

mathattack• 13 years ago

There's a rule of thumb amongst CEOs that "The best way to get a CEO position is to come from one." To pull a highly paid person off of the CEO track suggests they were willing to pay top dollar for her. (Probably much more than the 10 million dollar Twitter engineer) If they're paying that much money for her, it's not just to tweak the iPhone coloring scheme.

caycep• 13 years ago

reading through that article, there are clear similarities between the direction Burberry took after she took charge, and what Steve did at Apple, what with shoring up the cloning situation and public perception of its products. This will be interesting...

iamkoby• 13 years ago

Burberry has been showing technology adaptation consistently in the past few years, and also took part in the music promotion with their Burberry Acoustic department, which is close to what Apple is doing with iTunes and iTunes Festival. I think this relates to the Apple culture deeply, not to mention their deep link to aesthetics and fashion. I see it as a great evolution for Apple retail and Angela.

josephlord• 13 years ago

I would be more optimistic about this than when they hired John Browett from DSG (Dixons Store Group - Currys, PC World, Pixmania...)

jdrobins2000• 13 years ago

Wow, you are really setting the bar low! That was a disaster, and one foreseen by many immediately who had any familiarity with Dixons (I personally did not). At least Cook had the sense to fix his mistake quickly, to his credit. This choice makes a lot of sense, and I expect she will be a much better fit at Apple.

victoriap2• 13 years ago

..which Cook removed anyway. Does anyone know how the hiring is done for such a position,? http://allthingsd.com/20130107/apple-cant-afford-buyers-remo...

mbesto• 13 years ago

There's a couple of things worth mentioning here:

- Burberry is both a wholesaler and a retailer, which can be quite rare for luxury goods. (most are wholesalers who focus on brand and let others handle distribution) I believe Apple shares roughly the same mix of wholesale/retail revenue streams.

- Head of retail is very specific to well, uh retail, which means she'll presumably be focusing much more on distribution through Apple's multi-channel (B&M, e-commerce, mobile stores, etc). One should also presume this means she'll be focusing on how to get more devices to more people...globally. (and less about "what an iPad looks like on 28 year old women")

- Burberry has been massively successful in recent years in the Asian market (the growth is very slow in US/EU)

My armchair analyst conclusion is that this is a play to get more distribution to the Asian market. One thing I've noticed about the Asian markets (especially catering to the middle and upper middle class) is that they want to know what the trends are in the Western world. If they see rich western travellers buying luxury goods in their "rip-off" market they see those trends and mimic them (by buying the real thing). Burberry did one thing very well, which was set trends. That's something very difficult to do consistently, over a long period of time, and in your own wholly owned retail chain.

smickie• 13 years ago

Let's just compare her to the recent cluster fuck John Browett.

If you'd have ever been into a Dixons in the UK you know it was all about hard selling microwaves and insurance.

However she is from Burberry, which is total elegance, luxury and class. You couldn't get a more extreme opposite to John Browett.

This feels like a good decision from the outset.

glhaynes• 13 years ago

If Cook ever provides us with his memoirs, this will be one of the things I'll be most interested in. I've never been in a Dixons but it seemed like everyone who had howled in protest when Browett was hired. At the time, I assumed Cook knew something everybody else didn't… apparently not. Props for moving on quickly when it didn't work out, I suppose.

Anyway, Ms. Ahrendts seems like a pretty much perfect person for the role. I'm excited to see what Apple Retail does under her guidance.

And it might go without saying, but it'll be very nice to finally see a bit more diversity on http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/.

rsynnott• 13 years ago

Their hiring the Dixons guy was sort of astonishing. Dixons/Currys/PC World is about as close to the opposite of an Apple store as you can get.

AnthonBerg2• 13 years ago

I'm taking this as a weak hint that Apple is moving away from what I wish it were. Burberry sells useless stuff for lots of money. I was hoping Apple would try harder to be genuinely useful.

Still, it's a big ship and this hire won't really change anything. And to be able to be useful, Apple are also going to have to be able to extract money from fools.

pisarzp• 13 years ago

If many people are willing to pay lots of money, I don't think things they sell are useless.

AnthonBerg2• 13 years ago

Counterexample: Cigarettes aren't useful.

Consumers may perceive things to have value, and pay accordingly, but I see no need to relinquish my sense and judgement that certain things are actually useless.

soolemez• 13 years ago

Aside from the comeback of Burberry under the leadership of Angela Ahrendts does have similarities to the comeback of Apple with Steve Jobs and definitely the retail efforts of Burberry, I have a feeling this hire may also be to lead the wearable computing era that Apple is rumored to be starting soon with the iWatch

rafski• 13 years ago

This hire is a more natural fit than most techies would think.

The genius of Jobs was that he understood better than others that personal tech had more to do with fashion industry than tech industry.

He run Apple as a fashion company: he set trends, introduced seasonal device colours and collections, presented them in fashion gala shows packed with industry press. He was a fashion dictator.

Most of their competition still doesn't get it, they still think they sell technology.

Apple builds great technology, but it sells hip and sexy.

Apple Hires Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts to Head Retail Efforts

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