In their first joint interview, Coach CEO Todd Kahn and creative director Stuart Vevers discuss how they developed a chemistry to build their winning game plan.
Vevers agreed: “I think you’ve got to trust each other, and if Todd sees that I’m passionate about something, he knows that this is potentially going to be something great for Coach. And if he trusts me to go on that journey, to explore it, to experiment, then he knows that something good can happen.”
“I first got to meet Stuart when we were trying to recruit him,” Kahn said. “I’ve had different jobs and functions at Coach and Tapestry, so when I became the interim CEO last summer, we had worked together for a long period of time, and we were able to kickstart things. It wasn’t a new relationship, there was already a lot of trust and understanding built in, and I think that’s why things are working so well: we’ve been in the trenches a long time.
But like most brands, the past 18 months have been challenging to navigate because of the pandemic. For Vevers, it created what he called “an exploratory mindset. We’ve been in times that are so changed and so different, so we’ve encouraged each other to do things differently, and I think that’s been really liberating.”
“We set out over a year ago to make our icons more important,” Kahn explained. “With the Pillow Tabby, typically, we would have been bored with it and moved it off of our full-price offering. But Stuart injected a sense of newness and longevity into the product, and not only did the Pillow Tabby become phenomenally successful, all of the Tabby bags became important again.
He continued: “I think we know who we are at Coach, we’ve carved out an area that feels right for us, that feels authentic, and it’s not about doing things how other people do them – it’s about doing things that feel right to us, like the way we approach our runway show where we embrace fashion and pop culture and entertainment and a sense of fun. It means that we’re doing something that feels unique to us.
Coach currently operates in 50 countries. China, with 22 percent of sales, is the second largest market behind North America, which represents 58 percent. “The growth in China is substantial because of the consumption of luxury goods in China,” said Kahn. “We’re very connected to China and the Chinese consumer, we’ve been in China for over 20 years, we have a vast fleet of retail stores that are very elevated and we’re going to continue to have events in China, like we did this year.
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