CASE: Versace
Chief Information Officer
The Situation
Versace: a truly iconic organisation and a symbol of Italian luxury world-wide. Versace designs, manufactures, distributes and retails fashion and lifestyle products including haute couture, prèt-à-porter, accessories, jewelry, watches, eyewear, fragrances, and home furnishings. The business is at an exciting stage as they look to invest heavily in their digital transformation agenda in order to fuel their future growth ambitions.
The broad business ambition was to:
Grow revenue to $2.0 billion globally
Build on their luxury runway momentum
Enhance their powerful and iconic marketing
Increase global retail footprint
Accelerate eCommerce and omni-channel development
To do this, they were looking for a world class technology leader who could quickly establish credibility with their peers and stakeholders by demonstrating a clear understanding of the drivers of a luxury fashion retail business and how they can leverage state of the art technology solutions that will bring business value. They needed a strong people leader who could foster a culture of accountability and customer and results orientation to galvanize a team around this mission.
The Opportunity
Versace was therefore seeking a leader with strong business acumen underpinned with exceptional technical credentials. A change maker to drive digital transformation and establish best practices in consumer interaction.
They were also looking for someone who understood how Italian luxury had historically operated but also had knowledge of the new direction of Italian fashion. Therefore, a fundamental understanding of Italian culture was important to the client.
The role holder would be accountable for the overall application and infrastructure architecture across the Global Customer Engagement platform. They would also be the key IT partner to the Versace business teams and therefore understand the overall vision and objectives of the company.
The successful candidate would be expected to collaborate cross functionally with the Versace Global Executive leadership team and Global IT Leadership to understand how to maximize the customer experience, optimize systems and processes and drive both online and brick and mortar sales in support of overall business goals and metrics.
What made this interesting?
It was a pleasure to work with an iconic brand with such a strong reputation within its space, particularly at a time of great change and disruption for the business. At a group level, Versace was facing new ownership and an integration into a matrix structure for the first time. Moreover, Versace itself had also just appointed a new CEO, adding to the level of change at the company.
The leadership of both Versace and Capri were keen to leverage the brand’s strong reputation to drive growth in revenue and scale. It was a privilege to recruit a leader who would play a substantial role in this initiative, especially given the growing importance of and digital channels and technology-enabled solutions in the luxury industry.
What made this challenging?
It was crucial that the successful candidate for this role had experience in the luxury fashion industry and a specific understanding of the Italian market and culture. These important requirements substantially narrowed our target list at the beginning of the search, as there are only so many luxury fashion organisations of the same scale as Versace that we could target to find suitable candidates.
The timing of the project also created challenges. We presented our shortlist in the summer, just before August, when most people in Milan take their vacation and the city ‘shuts down’. This meant that many key stakeholders we’re going on leave over a number of key weeks in the search, lengthening the process and making it challenging to maintain a level of momentum. In this scenario, it was important to maintain regular communication with the candidates, so that they were kept in the loop and didn’t become too frustrated by the situation. Similarly, we also had to ensure that key stakeholders at Versace were pushing our agenda and keen for progress to be made as quickly as was possible given the circumstances.
The Digital Board Process
Our recent search for Capri had given us some context on Versace, however, we still needed to establish a strong understanding of this particular role. Therefore, we began the project by holding a number of briefing calls to get to know the client and develop a better understanding of what the key stakeholders were looking for in the VP of IT, in addition to building a more rounded picture of Versace’s culture, structure and situation.
Once we had completed these calls, our research team worked on identifying candidates with:
Experience of instilling a partnership mindset- someone who could improve the reputation of IT and transform it from a reactive support function to a true partner of the business
Strong people leadership- an inspiring leader who could foster a more positive culture within the IT department itself
Luxury fashion experience – the role-holder needed familiarity with Versace’s unique industry in order to provide the right kind of systems and solutions
Using this criteria, our research team developed an exhaustive list of targets, reaching out to them to establish: (1) interest in the role (2) how closely they fit the brief (3) their past achievements and (4) their cultural alignment with Versace.
10 of these candidates progressed to a formal interview with Bryan, our CEO, with the best of these being shortlisted to meet the client.
Throughout the project, our research team continued to identify potential new candidates in case there were any issues with the shortlist.
Success Story
The successful candidate was a strong fit to brief, with deep luxury fashion experience in a matrix environment and (as a native Italian) a strong understanding of Italian culture.
They had experience of carrying out a similar remit to the role, having instilled a business partnering culture within IT in their former organisation in addition to being a strong people leader.
On a personal level, the Versace leaders were impressed by the candidate’s high level of drive and ambition, which had contributed to them reaching high positions at a young age.
The incoming Versace CEO had also worked with the successful candidate in the past and was confident that they were well-suited to the role.