Who Drives Diesel? - Gucci

http://www.time.com/time/style/article/0,9171,1533547,00.html

我在圖書館翻到Time(Style&Design)上這篇超有趣的文章

顧不得明天考試就要爆炸還是把它看完了

分享給眾多diesel的愛好者

With his laid-back look and casual air, Renzo Rosso doesn't appear to be a
typical luxury leader. But his smart deals and creative flair have turned
Diesel into a major fashion player

By SARAH RAPER LARENAUDIE/MAROSTICA
SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR
Posted Monday, Sep. 11, 2006

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE EARLY 1980S, the sales staff and agents of Genius Group,
a mishmash of trendy Italian clothing labels, were previewing the upcoming
collections and discussing strategy. When talk turned to their second-string,
$7 million jeans company Diesel, a production manager with a minority stake
and an unfashionable mustache upbraided the others, "Guys, take this
seriously because one day we're going to be bigger than Levi's."

"We all laughed and said, 'this guy is crazy,'" remembers former Genius
president Adriano Goldschmied, who was running the meeting that day. "Diesel
was a brand we had created to get rid of leftover fabrics and closeout stuff.
We even chose an anti-movie-star name that said cheap, a slow car that smells
bad."

In 1985 there were few objections when the upstart manager, Renzo Rosso,
announced he wanted to swap out his group shares to become sole owner of
Diesel. A modest farmer's son from outside Padua, Italy, with a
textiles-trade-school diploma, Rosso, 50, is not your typical luxury-group
CEO. Sure, he flies in private jets and frequents fashion shows, but most of
the time he wears jeans or sweats, and his curly hairdo is more Peter
Frampton than Bernard Arnault.

Yet at a moment when trendsetters complain that ultraformatted luxury brands
like Dior, Chanel and Gucci are becoming too predictable, Diesel, with its
quirky stores and advertising and its outsider chief, is suddenly at center
stage, a success story few would have predicted.

Except Rosso, of course, who for 20 years has remained singlemindedly focused
on the development of the brand and fanatically obsessed with the idea that
casual clothing could be fashion's long-term winner. Since he bought out his
partners, he has grown Diesel from $7 million to $1.4 billion last year,
acquiring the small Belgian designer Martin Margiela in 2002 and signing up
manufacturing and distribution agreements with the trendy Milan-based
DSquared designers, Dean and Dan Katen. Rumors are rife that additional deals
are in the works, specifically acquisitions.

"One way or the other, you must be successful," says Rosso, leaning across an
outdoor table laid out with a country lunch. He has driven up the steep
gravel road to the Diesel Farm, an estate acquired as a sort of company
retreat in the Veneto countryside, with Stefano, 27, the second of his six
children, who is completing a customized M.B.A.-style training course to be
able some day to take over the company's management. Rosso's oldest son
Andrea, 28, is creative director at the group's surf and street-wear line
55DSL. Rosso is wearing his usual chief-executive attire: jeans, T shirt,
Margiela sneakers. His favorite jeans are ones that have been dyed with
indigo and dipped up to 16 times to achieve a dark blue color.

"If you don't succeed"—and here his teased-out mass of curls bobs in rhythm
as he taps his fingers (two of them tattooed with his initials RR)
emphatically, rattling the wine glasses—"it's the product, or it's the
managing, or it's the costs, but there must be a reason. I have to succeed. I
am a Virgo, and I need perfection."

Rosso credits his hardscrabble upbringing on the farm for his determination
and pragmatism, including a meticulous attention to logistics widely admired
by competitors. Plus he has a real flair for marketing. Today Diesel is still
less than half the size of the Levi's brand (a separate high-end
manufacturing division, Staff International, does an additional $114 million
in sales), but it's fast growing, highly profitable and so far has managed
the delicate balance Renzo evokes when he says his goal is to be the "coolest
of the biggest."

That's the favorite Renzo-ism at L'Oreal, the French beauty giant that beat
out rival Proctor & Gamble for rights to develop a Diesel fragrance next
year. "We adore working with him, and we believe very much in the project,"
says Patricia Turck Paquelier, L'Oreal's international-brand president for
designer fragrances. "But it will be a major investment for us, so we
validated our intuition with research." What appealed to L'Oreal in the
findings was Diesel's international positioning. Consumers perceive European
styling with what she called a "think-positive, go-for-it" American spirit;
young consumers perceive that "jeans are forever" and identify Diesel as
sexy, creative, good quality.

Diesel continues to be seen as an innovator (Rosso claims to have developed
many of the manufacturing innovations for denim) in one of the most dynamic
corners of the fashion cosmos, the jeans bar, where consumers are falling
over one another to pay $150 or $200 a pair. That is a recent phenomenon.
Jeans were long considered a $30, five-pocket commodity, with connotations of
youth, rebels and weekends in the Western world. Periodically, prices spiked
for so-called designer jeans (think Calvin Klein in 1980). But those remained
a status sell focused on pocket stitching and the tag; most proved to have
short life cycles.

Rosso's big idea was to improve the product and the margins. (He had road
tested the first part of that formula as a teenager selling friends $7 jeans
he made on his mother's sewing machine.) In 1988 he hired a young Dutch
fashion-school grad named Wilbert Das, and they began to experiment with dyes
and destruction—all sorts of techniques to age the jeans and give them a
more vintage feel. They moved pockets, reshaped the jeans, introduced curves—
and then charged a whopping $79. Their look was Rosso's look, a blend of
thrift store, Americana and '50s B movie. At first, retailers balked, so
Rosso promised to take back anything they couldn't sell, an offer he claims
he never had to make good on.

The missing piece was marketing. In 1992 Diesel launched eye-catching,
tongue-in-cheek ad campaigns that spoofed fashion advertising, the how-to
craze and mother's wisdom with equal doses of kitsch and sex—and, seemingly
as an afterthought, glimpses of Diesel product. "Diesel: For Successful
Living" became the brand's tagline. Today Diesel continues to expand. In
addition to perfume, there's a home-furnishings line in the works, and Rosso
is in the middle of an ambitious strategy to make Diesel more premium by
integrating sophisticated techniques from ready-to-wear and pushing up prices
accordingly. Rosso says he is driven by the increasing sophistication of
fast-fashion outfits like H&M and Zara. And by the fact that there are more
newly rich people in emerging markets. "My company is 28 years old, and all
the customers who were with me at the start are now older and looking for
more sophisticated things," he says.

Stefano Rosso is not so sure. "I'm more scared of losing touch with our
younger consumers. We are creative, and if we lose touch ..." his voice
trails off, and he shrugs. Stefano probably would have hated the opening of
the new Diesel store on London's Bond Street in May. The two-level store on a
prime corner is a template for the new Diesel. Curvy leather seating and mod
decorative resin dividers are part of the sophisticated decor. The layout
says designer rather than jeans. At the party, Diesel had paid actress
Heather Graham to model a denim mermaid number for the tabloids, and guards
shooed guests away from a roped-off VIP area—effectively aping just the sort
of fashion antics that Diesel has long skewered in its advertising.

Like any other hot jeans brand, Diesel is accustomed to finding itself
featured in fashion layouts and splashed across the celebrity pages, but
earlier this year the family-owned company popped up on the financial pages.
An Italian financial daily compared cash-flow data and estimated growth
potential and proclaimed Diesel the top candidate among Italian fashion
companies for a public offering. Published reports in Europe had Diesel
scooping up designers Sophia Kokosolaki and Viktor & Rolf, recalling the
Margiela acquisition. Goldschmied, the former partner who remains a Rosso
confidant, predicts something big is in the works. "Finally, finally, he has
made a very important strategic decision. He could be the owner of a group
that's a leader in the next wave of fashion."

Clearly, Rosso has been thinking about the next chapter. "We contributed to
making jeans part of the luxury universe," explains Rosso. "If we could do
that with denim, maybe we could do it in other ways. My intention is to be
part of a new, upcoming version of pret-a-porter." Investment bankers are
skeptical that Rosso could transform Diesel into a multibrand conglomerate,
but smaller designers have long hoped for a private concern to find a third
way between big business and the financial pitfalls of independence.

Over the lunch, just outside the low-slung stone lodge that is the main
building of the Diesel Farm, an hour's drive from Venice, Rosso talked about
what he would consider.

"You find a company that is 100% on the market and not controlled by a family
and was a nice brand and is on the way to disaster—that could be an
opportunity for me to buy. Yes, that would give me energy if I succeed," he
says.

What if Giorgio Armani were for sale? he is asked, and he's unsure. "Giorgio
is Giorgio," he says. "I might buy a bike company." Or maybe a quirky drinks
company, he adds, and when you consider the Art Deco hotel he developed in
Miami or the venue for that day's lunch, it doesn't sound like idle chatter
at all. The farm was purchased on a lark; then Rosso got interested in the
vineyards and the olive trees, and he brought in specialists because, he
says, as long as you're going to have a bit of fun, you might as well try to
have a top-quality wine. "I like to put my hand into other things. I don't
want it for money. I want it for the pleasure to do something different."

From his place at the table, high on a hill, he gestures to Diesel's many
installations in the valley below. "Over here" is headquarters, a hangar-like
building in a light-industrial district just outside the town of Marostica.
He swings around and points in the direction of a cutting-edge Diesel shoe
factory that has just been completed, replacing an arrangement with a
licensing partner. "It was a risk because we stopped our license worth $190
million in shoe sales to do it ourselves," he explains. The warehouses
holding the company's reference archive, with 13,000 pairs of jeans and other
items of clothing, are out of range, but one can just make out the villa
where the design teams work.

The CEO has never shortchanged creativity. Diesel employs 100 staff designers
and graphic artists and allocates a significant portion of its marketing
budget to an array of projects promoting up-and-comers in music and design.
Everyone questioned who has worked with Rosso mentioned his ability to spot
and keep talent as one of the main qualities that explains his success. He
has been known to circulate an e-mail on a hot summer day at headquarters to
invite hundreds of employees to his nearby house for a pool party.

Rosso has grown fond of his country life and his house wine. And that's why,
he says, he throws water on speculation he's maneuvering for a public
offering. "If I do 2 billion [euros] in sales instead of 1, maybe I'll be
more prominent than today, but maybe I won't even have time to do this lunch.
And this makes me very sad," he says. "We have only one life. I want to enjoy
my time with my family, my children, my friends. I don't want to only work."

The investment bankers who chopper into the Veneto to sell him an ipo or a
major acquisition have heard just about everything, but he laughs, saying he
managed to catch a group by surprise recently. "The Dalai Lama told me not
to," he recalls telling them. "I say to the Dalai Lama, 'Why do I work like a
crazy?' And he knows—not maybe all the details—and he says, 'You have to
stay, and you have to work. Because the way that you work is very different
from the others, and people need that. Maybe you can be an example for
others."


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台灣只有兩種人 一種是已經看清陳水扁的人 一種是將要看清陳水扁的人
個人板:Ptt2 Dieseldenim板
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NTU_CSIE 特殊 Σ台大資訊系 [fishyun]
DieselDenim 個人 ◎我也真的醜胖窮笨 弱渣廢宅 SonyVaio
Blog: http://www.wretch.cc/blog/SpinalCord

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