The Italian apparel brand was once an innovative precursor to fast-fashion groups
Andrew Hill
A family-controlled European group uses innovation, automation, and clever branding to rush its clothes to demanding young customers via stores on every high street and in every shopping mall worldwide.
This could be a description of the modern champions of fast fashion: Zara, owned by Inditex of Spain, or Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz. But 25 years ago, this was Benetton, a company my fashion-conscious teenage daughter has not heard of.
One of my first assignments as the FT’s Milan correspondent in 1994 was to interview lion-maned Luciano Benetton, oldest of the four siblings who created the business in 1955, in its elegant 16th century villa-headquarters near Treviso. From there, he oversaw multiple factories and 7,000 shops in 110 countries.
But Benetton did not sustain that success. Its global footprint and brand recognition shrank. In 2000, it ranked 75th in Interbrand’s ranking of best global brands. It fell to 100th in 2001. By 2002, it had dropped out. Zara and H&M were both in this year’s top 30.
Benetton is now attempting a comeback, and despite the recent death of Luciano’s brothers — Carlo in July and Gilberto last week— it has a rich legacy of innovation to draw on. Five elements stand out:
1. Teamwork The family partnership was crucial to Benetton’s early success. The fourth sibling, Giuliana, provided the crucial creative impulse and made the first colourful jumpers for Luciano to sell. Carlo became Benetton’s production manager, while Gilberto was the family’s financial mastermind.
2. Branding In Benetton’s heyday, the family gave photographer Oliviero Toscani unprecedented freedom to devise controversial advertising campaigns with an emphasis on social issues such as race and religion. They included images of a nun and a priest kissing, or a white baby being breast-fed by a black woman. They were decades ahead of their time, and there was not a colourful sweater to be seen.
3. Retailing Benetton cut through the ossified Italian retail sector, assembling a network of branded stores. A franchise model let it distribute direct and expand quickly. It used commission-driven agents to oversee regions, often planting several outposts in the same shopping districts. At one point, Benetton had six shops on New York’s Fifth Avenue, some virtually within sight of each other.
4. Automation Benetton built a sophisticated data network to track sales right down to store level and automated its factories and warehouses with Italian robotics, “raising fashion from the artisanal to the industrial”, in Luciano’s words.
5. Speed Benetton aimed to be flexible enough to respond to shifting taste and demand, just as Zara and H&M do today. It prided itself on its ability to produce, distribute and sell “flash” collections of products that were proving popular.
Now for the cautionary part of the Benetton tale. Rivals learnt how to copy or defeat these same strengths. The family wrestled with generational change and the introduction of outside managers. The shock ad campaigns (the Pope kissing an imam, for instance) started to look pointlessly provocative. The franchises proved less flexible and responsive than H&M’s or Zara’s, whose sales multiplied in the 2000s while Benetton’s stalled.
The group became trapped in a style no man’s land. Its clothes were too slow to market and too costly to be classed as fast-fashion, but not sumptuous enough to be classed as luxury. In 2012, the family took the listed company private to rebuild it.
The Benetton family story is not, however, a proverbial case of dalle stelle alle stalle — from the stars to the stables. That is partly down to Gilberto’s financial foresight. Not only did he sell his bicycle in 1955 to help fund the purchase of the family’s first knitting machine (Luciano flogged his accordion), 40 years later he led the diversification of the family holding company Edizione into toll roads, airports and digital infrastructure.
The sad coda to this success was last August’s fatal collapse of a bridge in Genoa that was part of the toll road concession. The tragedy tarnished the Benettons’ reputation in Italy. It also reportedly hastened Gilberto’s death, which comes as Luciano and Giuliana are leading a revival of the brand.
For the one-time fleet-footed pioneers of the new, it is ironic that the strategy is based in part on nostalgia. Benetton is revisiting 30-year-old product lines and emphasising durability over speed. Luciano, now 83 and back as the group’s frontman, says realising the outfit you bought last year is already out of style feels like “being robbed in [your] own home”. Thanks to his brother, though, he at least has a base from which the family may be able to launch a second act in fashion. My daughter says she may even buy her first Benetton sweater.
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