Bitter Juicy

Juicy Couture’s Founders Have Left the Company

 

 

 The future of “Juicy”-stamped asses may be on the line now that Juicy Couture founders Gela Nash-Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy have stepped down. Liz Claiborne, which bought the label in 2003, said their departure is in keeping with their contract. Yet why would they leave Claiborne’s most successful brand behind? Granted, that isn’t saying much since Claiborne has been tanking horribly for a while now, but Gela and Pamela say they just wanted to “bust out.” They’ve netted $200 million there so they may as well start taking risks.

“We stayed seven years, which is a long time,” Nash-Taylor said.

They have been working on a TV show, a movie and a book, Skaist-Levy said. “We’re super-creative girls. We want to bust out and do everything.”

 

By TV show, we’ll assume the Post means costuming Jersey Shore. And a book? Well, anyone can write a style guide by copying the most recent one that came out and plugging in different pictures and chapter titles, since from what we can tell they’re all basically the same. But a movie? We guess they’d be the perfect people to dream something up with characters like those in Mean Girls, who will overspend on anything popular without questioning WHY GOD WHY.

The Post suggests the two are leaving because the company just isn’t doing quite as well these days. Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s are cutting back on floor space for Juicy, according to the Post. The label’s sales also dipped 7.8 percent in the third quarter. Gela and Pamela are expected to stay on as creative consultants for the label while they busy themselves with fun new projects and, you know, cool themselves with fans made of money.

The two have since appeared “fat and happy,” and have been noticeably out of the office recently, according to one source, despite contractual obligations to oversee Juicy Couture’s day-to-day operations.

 

Oh. The employee who let that slip certainly isn’t bitter.
Read more: Juicy Couture’s Founders Have Left the Company — The Cut http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2010/01/juicy_coutures_founders_have_l.html#ixzz0eFwknsZE

Saving Private Donatella

Versace Agrees on Job Cuts, Unveils Lower-Priced Line

 

 

 

By Andrew Roberts

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Gianni Versace SpA has signed a preliminary agreement with unions on job cuts in Italy and introduced a lower-priced women’s wear collection as part of a plan to return to profitability in 2011.

The deal is “the guarantee that our plan as we organized it will succeed,” Chief Executive Officer Gian Giacomo Ferraris said in a telephone interview. The accord, which includes the closure of Versace’s three-year-old accessories factory in Burago, near Milan, will be concluded Feb. 4, Ferraris said. The cuts will commence in March and end in June.

Versace, which was founded by the late Italian designer Gianni Versace in 1978, said Oct. 28 it would eliminate about 350 out of 1,360 positions worldwide, or 26 percent of its workforce, and scale down investments. The luxury clothing maker expects to report a 30 million-euro ($42 million) operating loss for 2009, while sales probably fell 19 percent to 273 million euros, hurt by falling wholesale revenue, Ferraris said.

“The aim of the restructuring is to stabilize the company to maintain independence and to have the basic condition to create a future in the company,” the executive said.

Ferraris forecast “positive” earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and revenue unchanged at about 270 million euros in 2010. He said he expects to “break even on the bottom line” in 2011. Ferraris said the forecasts were “realistic” and reflected his expectation that “the economy will not pick up” in 2010.

Job Cuts

About 40 jobs will go at Burago, mainly administrative and warehousing functions, while 37 employees, who have the product “know-how,” will move to Versace’s ready-to-wear plant in Novara, also near Milan, Ferraris said.

Burago’s closure “does not mean” Versace will scale down its accessories production either, Ferraris said. “On the contrary, it will be one of the areas of growth.” Versace expects accessories to generate 40 percent of revenue in 2010 compared with 35 percent in 2009, he said.

Ferraris, former CEO of fashion house Jil Sander AG, joined Versace in July, a month after the departure of his predecessor Giancarlo di Risio. Di Risio, who ran Versace for five years, left amid speculation of clashes over strategy with Donatella Versace, the company’s chief designer.

Donatella and Chairman Santo Versace have helped run the company since their brother’s murder in Miami in 1997.

Deliveries

Last year’s earnings were hampered by a halt to deliveries of the VJC denim and sportswear line, Ferraris said. Until September, VJC was manufactured under license by Ittierre SpA, a unit of IT Holding SpA, which went into government-backed administration last February. Versace signed a new licensing deal for VJC with Gruppo Facchini Sept. 7.

The new collection, which is under Donatella Versace’s creative direction, is the women’s ready-to-wear counterpart to Versace’s lower-priced men’s line and is also labeled Versace Collection.

The clothing line, which is priced between 400 euros and 1,000 euros and distributed as wholesale only, “completed” the market segmentation of the company’s brand portfolio, the executive said. Versace Collection for women will be made in Europe.

Clothing Lines

Versace’s other fashion lines are: Atelier, which sells custom-made dresses from about 16,000 euros; the Versace signature collection, which sells men’s and women’s ready-to- wear and accessories from 800 euros to 16,000 euros; Versus, which is designed by Briton Christopher Kane for younger clientele and priced between 200 and around 2,000 euros; and VJC, according to a company spokeswoman.

Versace has also diversified into watches, fine jewelry, furniture and home wares, interior design, helicopters and luxury hotels and residences.

Ferraris said the Palazzo Versace Dubai hotel and residence, being built in partnership with Australia’s Sunland Group Ltd., would be completed by the end of the year and Versace is in talks about “another possibility.” He didn’t say where.

The company unveiled its first mobile phone in Paris this week under license to ModeLabs Group. It will go on sale this spring. Restarting underwear and beachwear in 2011 is also under discussion, Ferraris said.

Versace will also open four new directly operated stores this year, in Las Vegas, Melbourne, Mumbai and Beijing, as well as relocate its boutique in Shanghai, Ferraris said.

Versace said Oct. 7 it would close Japanese stores and review its entire business strategy, as demand for luxury declined in the world’s second-largest economy. The company plans to reenter Japan at the beginning of 2011, Ferraris said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aW1MwQ8vLJgI

The monster doesn’t want to go back to the cage……

Fashion Companies Don’t Like It When Blogs Run Ads Early

 

 

 

You might think fashion companies would be thrilled when blogs like this one run images of their ad campaigns in posts. It is a part of the industry deemed worthy of such coverage by many fashion blogs, and free advertising for the labels. However, this being a notoriously — and often inexplicably — hypercontrolling industry, the early leaks of spring ads, such as those of Dior, Balenciaga, and Celine on sites like Fashionologie and Modelinia caused “puzzlement and consternation at some design houses,” according to WWD. Heavens — a free ad for people to ooh and ahh over. Terrible indeed.

A few ads leaked on Love magazine’s blog. Loewe and Givenchy gave Love permission to post their spring campaigns, but others “were snatched from fellow blogs,” according to WWD. Damn us all! We are bottom-feeding ad snatchers hell-bent on breaking rules we didn’t know existed!

Love editor Katie Grand is doing damage control so as to not screw up relations with these companies in such dire economic times:

“This was a genuine human error, made in enthusiasm, and it was certainly never our intention to upset anyone, in particular designers we hold in such high esteem,” Love editor in chief Katie Grand said, assuring “practical steps have been taken to ensure no unauthorized campaign content can appear on the blog at any point in the future.”

Longtime editorial stylist Venetia Scott recently called attention to the growing problem of magazines exerting control over advertisers by trading ad pages for editorial coverage, often forbidding stylists from styling their clothes in any way but how they want them to look. So what is the point of having stylists work on shoots if editorials are becoming, even more so than they already are, additional advertising? And now companies have a problem with their ads getting run — for free, in a terrible economy — for thousands of adoring fans? If they’re so worried, they may as well start their own magazines, not share any images with any editors but their own, and do things just as they like them.

Read more: Fashion Companies Don’t Like It When Blogs Run Ads Early — The Cut