Burberry CEO Joshua Schulman Shares Where Burberry Went Wrong and How It’s Repositioning
At the NRF Big Show, Schulman also shared how some strange childhood tendencies informed his future in fashion.
Joshua Schulman is candid about Burberry and himself.
Despite very strong brand awareness and affinity around the world, Burberry in recent years went “a little bit off course, lost sight of our core customer” and delivered “a brand expression, which may have been unfamiliar to many of our customers,” Schulman said at the NRF Big Show convention at Manhattan’s Jacob K. Javits Center.
“The outerwear category probably hadn’t been getting as much attention as it should have. More broadly speaking, outerwear and scarves are areas where we have enormous authority,” Schulman said while being interviewed by Pete Nordstrom, president and chief brand officer of Nordstrom Inc., for an edition of “The Nordy Pod” podcast.
After Schulman became Burberry chief executive officer last July, succeeding Jonathan Akeroyd, the company in November launched its “Burberry Forward,” strategy “to reignite our designers, reconnect with our core customer segments and focus again on our core outerwear and scarf categories,” Schulman said. “So making sure those presented in our communications and so forth is super important.”
Burberry’s marketing was among the first areas to evolve, with the “It’s Always Burberry Weather” campaign featuring celebrities speaking with irreverence and humor — British style — on what Burberry means to them.
“The coolest people in the world want the most authentic parts of our brand,” Schulman said.
“The best brand evolutions make you smile and make you think that’s what I always loved about the brand, but it’s also about doing something fresh and different.”
Also crucial to the Burberry repositioning “is what we’re doing is within a luxury context,” Schulman said, noting there was a lot of speculation about Burberry’s future because he previously worked with some aspirational brands, such as Coach.
People, he said, were wondering whether Burberry would rapidly reduce pricing, go down market or open up hundreds of outlets.
“That’s not our plan,” Schulman said. “We are a luxury brand with broad universal appeal. And when I think about the top five luxury brands, those luxury brands have broad universal appeal, and each has a different way of exciting customers. Some use lipstick as the entry point. Some use sunglasses. Our core is outerwear and apparel.”
Because Burberry is “putting the customer at the center of everything we do,” as Schulman said, the brand is not taking a monolithic view of the luxury consumer, and considers five archetypes: the most fashion forward, the investor, the conservative sector, the hedonist and the aspiring customer. The framework was introduced at Schulman’s first town hall for the Burberry teams. “When we come up with our marketing campaigns, we’re thinking through that lens of how we deal with the breadth of the luxury customer,” Schulman said.
He also spoke of staging “luxurious fashion shows…supported by great product at a range of luxury prices — good, better, best — to serve a variety of luxury consumers.”
“It’s a fairly tough consumer environment out there, so we have a lot of work to do, but there is a real sense of purpose and a sense of excitement and ambition,” he said.
Burberry, hurt by the sluggishness in the global luxury market as well as its own missteps, posted a first-half operating loss of 53 million pounds on the back of a 22 percent decline in revenue to 1.09 billion pounds. When those results were issued, Schulman, said the company is “acting with urgency to course correct, stabilize the business and position Burberry for a return to sustainable, profitable growth.” For fiscal 2024, Burberry reported a 4 percent decline in revenue to 2.97 billion pounds, with adjusted operating profit falling 34 percent to 418 million pounds.
Though it’s early days in the turnaround strategy, Schulman told the NRF audience, “We have started to see the shift in the brand sentiment…where we disappointed our customer before, now we’re surprising and delighting them.”
Speaking generally about reviving brands, Schulman said, “You can’t just repeat the past. You have to create an echo of why people love the brand in the first place and adapt.
“Really, the modern Burberry was launched about 25 years ago when Rose Marie Bravo [a former Burberry CEO and Saks Fifth Avenue president] changed the brand from Burberry’s to Burberry and reinvented it into a modern luxury brand the way we know it.” It has a unique identity of being one of the few British fashion brands with scale, Schulman said.
Getting personal, Schulman said, “I was a pretty strange kid, because I was interested in stores, and I was interested in department stores, especially shopping malls, and not necessarily to shop, but I went there to just look at them and to study them. I went to most of the Nordstrom openings” in California.
When Schulman was 14, he sent a letter to Jim Nordstrom [Pete’s late uncle] when Nordstrom opened a department store in his neighborhood. “I gave all sorts of probably unwarranted tips.” Surprisingly, Nordstrom wrote back. “He actually tried to get together with me, when he was in California at Horton Plaza, and at that point, my parents were like, we can’t drive down to San Diego on that day.”
Schulman’s career started at a small clothing store in Beverly Hills where Kris Kardashian and Kathy Hilton shopped among other celebrity moms and where he learned retail operations, curating product and display. He later interned for Marc Jacobs and Robert Duffy at Perry Ellis, and became an account executive and sales manager. Tom Ford also worked there. Schulman felt there was a “mismatch” between the creative ambitions of the designers and the ambitions of the company itself. “They didn’t know how to harness this very creative talent they had. That was a lesson that became very important later in my career that I didn’t even realize I was learning at that point. Marc was fired from Perry Ellis, which was the best thing that happened in his career.”
Schulman subsequently worked at Richard Tyler in Los Angeles. “It was a brand that was emerging and had a great celebrity following.” Because of his interest in Nordstrom as a kid, Nordstrom became a big part of Richard Tyler’s distribution plan.
Later, Schulman joined Gucci, working alongside Ford as that brand’s transformation was already progressing. When Gucci acquired St. Laurent, Schulman moved to Paris to oversee global sales. At the time, Schulman was in his late 20s. Later, he ran Jimmy Choo, Bergdorf Goodman, Coach and Michael Kors.
“I had big jobs, but I also had amazing mentors who gave me opportunities,” Schulman said.
Nordstrom asked about the industry narrative that department stores are a dying breed, to which Schulman replied: “For Burberry and other brands, Nordstrom is an incredible showcase to a very important customer segment in the United States, and it’s important for emerging brands. It is also important, not only for the initial discovery of the brand, but to discover how a brand can be changing and evolving,” as is the case with Burberry.
“We have some customers who come to us once a year for a coat and then [again] for a gift…but not with the frequency that they might at Nordstrom where they’re dressing themselves, and dressing their family.”
