The present Chief Executive Officer of Lacoste, Christophe Chenut provided his views on Lacoste's legacy, management, and its future as an iconic fashion brand to The Business Of Fashion and it was interesting. Now I admire John René Lacoste much more than Christophe but I was impressed by how well he advocated for the brand. I say that because not all CEOs have a cultural awareness of the brand they help curate, only the business. So he definitely won me over with his enthusiasm. View some excerpts from the interview below.
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On René Lacoste:
He was focused on innovation in everything, including, of course, putting a logo on a garment, inventing the petit piqué, and building a business [using] a licensing model. Not a lot of competitors were built like that. And for years after, he continued to invent and innovate [in] a lot of different ways, the metal racket, different things for golf, for cricket, for baseball. It’s truly part of the spirit of the company and even if it’s more and more difficult to innovate in the textile business today, I think we have to keep this philosophy in mind.
Diversifying Lacoste to reverse sales decline:
What we wanted to do was recruit the young and trendy people, and also women that are talking about fashion. These people are more interested in fashion than our historical male target. We thought that by offering them a better collection, we could recreate desirability around the brand, make those people [speak] good words about the brand, and make the classical customer happy to see his children and wife wearing Lacoste again.
Today's competitive nature of the polo shirt:
It’s funny to think that this garment is 80 years old. Sometimes young people think that the polo was invented by another brand. We try to communicate as much as we can to say we invented that 30 to 50 years before, thanks to René Lacoste. All the brands may be proposing polo shirts, but they are not from Lacoste. Having an iconic product is a strength and a weakness at the same time. It’s an incredible opportunity to have so many customers coming into your boutiques to buy one iconic product, but it’s very difficult to make them move to other products because they want to buy a polo shirt...You have to invest a lot to make sure your iconic product will remain iconic.
Source: The Business of Fashion