Gucci Case Summary
Haley Ankenbauer
Gucci Case Summary Robert Polet became CEO for Gucci in 2004 after spending the last 26 years of his life at one of the largest consumer goods companies, eventually becoming the president of the ice cream and frozen foods division. In 2008, shoppers were starting to feel the pain of the recent credit crunch crisis. Polet thought about improving Gucci’s CRM system because of his past experience and how much potential a good CRM system can have. Gucci created a corporate group of luxury brands because of the boom of the fashion industry in the 1990’s. In 2004, Polet announced his strategy of declaring that Gucci would double in size in seven years. He had mentions Zara’s strategy of getting new products more often instead of only four times a year. Once he mentioned Zara, people were mad and thought that this would make the brand look cheaper. After implementing the strategy, Gucci Group had doubled in revenues in 2007, just three years later. Polets strategy is something called freedom within the frameworks. Freedom within the frameworks basically means that each CEO can have freedom to do what they want with their sector but they must not do anything to destroy the DNA of the company. With this being said, they must run things by Polet to ensure it is within the DNA of the company, and if it is, they can do it however they want.
After Polet had made Lee CEO, Lee had decided to further decentralize the brand and reinforce the autonomy of Gucci’s regional offices. One of Lee’s first actions that he took to reinforce the autonomy of Gucci was to concentrate all of the designer responsibilities into the hands of one designer. He chose the designer Gianni because in his opinion, “Gianni was more of a worker bee than a celebrity. Gucci’s DNA is in her blood. She has an absolute vision about what Gucci was and what it is, and that belongs really to her.” Lee made it so that the regional offices had the option to pick items freely from the new
Gucci Case Summary Robert Polet became CEO for Gucci in 2004 after spending the last 26 years of his life at one of the largest consumer goods companies, eventually becoming the president of the ice cream and frozen foods division. In 2008, shoppers were starting to feel the pain of the recent credit crunch crisis. Polet thought about improving Gucci’s CRM system because of his past experience and how much potential a good CRM system can have. Gucci created a corporate group of luxury brands because of the boom of the fashion industry in the 1990’s. In 2004, Polet announced his strategy of declaring that Gucci would double in size in seven years. He had mentions Zara’s strategy of getting new products more often instead of only four times a year. Once he mentioned Zara, people were mad and thought that this would make the brand look cheaper. After implementing the strategy, Gucci Group had doubled in revenues in 2007, just three years later. Polets strategy is something called freedom within the frameworks. Freedom within the frameworks basically means that each CEO can have freedom to do what they want with their sector but they must not do anything to destroy the DNA of the company. With this being said, they must run things by Polet to ensure it is within the DNA of the company, and if it is, they can do it however they want.
After Polet had made Lee CEO, Lee had decided to further decentralize the brand and reinforce the autonomy of Gucci’s regional offices. One of Lee’s first actions that he took to reinforce the autonomy of Gucci was to concentrate all of the designer responsibilities into the hands of one designer. He chose the designer Gianni because in his opinion, “Gianni was more of a worker bee than a celebrity. Gucci’s DNA is in her blood. She has an absolute vision about what Gucci was and what it is, and that belongs really to her.” Lee made it so that the regional offices had the option to pick items freely from the new