Creative director Sabato De Sarno, the man handpicked to establish a new creative vision for Gucci, has been shown the door after only two years on the job. This comes two weeks before Gucci will premiere its Fall-Winter 2025 collection at Milan Fashion Week. The Gucci design team will represent the brand with more boos than cheers expected.
Since De Sarno joined the company in early 2023, brand revenues dropped 6% that year, after reaching a historic high of $10.9 billion in 2022. Then in 2024, once customers got a taste of De Sarno’s fashion, the bottom fell out.
Gucci revenues were off 25% on a comparable basis in third quarter and through the first nine months, revenues are down 21% to $5.9 billion from $7.6 billion same period last year.
Gucci, part of the Kering luxury group, will report full- year results next Tuesday, Feb. 11, and it won’t be good, since Gucci accounts for 45% of Kering’s year-to-date $13.3 billion in revenues.
Transformation Coming?
Kering’s other brands have also hit a rough patch this year. Yves Saint Laurent is off 9% through the third quarter and its Other Houses, including Balenciaga, Brioni, Alexander McQueen and Bucheron, are down 8%. The only bright spots are Bottega Veneta up 4% and Kering Eyewear advancing 7%, yet they only account for 21% of the company’s nine-month revenues.
In reporting third-quarter results, which were down 16% across the board, Kering chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault reassured investors that the company has the discipline and determination to execute a transformation of the company, in particular at Gucci.
“We have the right strategy, organization and talents to achieve these goals,” he said in a statement. “Our absolute priority it to build the conditions for a return to sound, sustainable growth.”
Apparently, newly appointed Gucci CEO Stefano Cantino and Francesca Bellettini, Kering deputy CEO responsible for brand development, did their jobs. They quickly righted a creative mistake made at Gucci and can now put the right strategy, organization and talent in place to return the brand to the “sound, sustainable growth” that Pinault promised.
Pivot From Luxury Into Fashion
At De Sarno’s appointment at the end of Jan. 2023, Pinault had high hopes for the designer “to bring a singular and contemporary perspective to modern luxury,” he said at the time.
De Sarno brought nearly 20 years of design experience from Prada and Valentino. However, he never held a creative director position that was the size and scope of Gucci before.
His remit was to reconnect with the brand’s iconic Italian luxury heritage after it veered too far into the fashion lane under previous creative director Alessandro Michele.
De Sarno’s first collection, entitled “Gucci Ancora,” meaning “Also now, also then,” was introduced in Sept. 2023. Globaldata’s senior apparel analyst Louise Deglise-Favre observed it was a “palate cleanser” after the maximalist designs from predecessor Michele. However, a main course didn’t follow.
“The more muted and wearable designs failed to translate into commercial success due to the lack of truly impactful pieces that generated buzz and excitement,” she added.
Yet Gucci fans got used to a steady diet of saucy mains and rich desserts from the fashion that Michele fed them. They weren’t ready to go on a diet. And neither was Kering management which reveled in the revenue and profit spike the Michele era produced.
Michele’s fashions saw brand revenues more than double from 2016 to 2019, from $4.5 billion to $10 billion. It got a post-pandemic bounce to $10.9 billion in 2022, then started to level off, dropping back to $10.2 billion in 2023 and with it, Michele’s exit.
Restoring Gucci’s Legacy
Luxury industry analyst and founder of the SUN DeLuxe newsletter Susanna Nicoletti observed that Gucci’s real problem began when Michele was given too much free rein. He disrupted the natural order of a luxury brand with a rich legacy like Gucci, which goes back more than a century to when Guccio Gucci opened his first leather goods shop in Florence.
“That chapter took Gucci to a totally different universe, alienating loyal legacy customers and creating weak links with the new ones who got bored with the maximalist looks,” she said.
Perhaps after getting so off track, it was too much to ask for any designer no matter how talented to pull the brand back into its proper lane.
“De Sarno was pointless for this already disrupted brand,” she pointedly said. “Gucci was in trouble before hiring De Sarno and is in a nosediving chapter that is deeply hurting the business, loyal employees and suppliers, as well as the brand equity.”
On BrandFinance Global 500 rankings of the world’s most valuable brands, Gucci slipped to number 204 from number 129 in brand value, well behind luxury leaders Chanel at 46, Louis Vuitton at 55 and Hermès at 98.
Managing Expectations
Going forward, Gucci CEO Cantino and Bellettini, overseeing Kering brand development function, must be the leaders to bring the brand back to greatness. In hiring a new creative director, they can’t put brand building responsibility into the director’s hands.
Rather, they must take the lead in brand management with the creative director following their direction, not giving it, to create the fashion that meets their vision for the Gucci brand.
“Fashion brands like Gucci continue to make the same mistake in a loop: delegating the brand management role to creative directors represented by designers with a pure specific design background. They are very often technicians with no idea of how to develop a brand; they rarely have knowledge or natural aptitude in brand building.”
In their joint decision to cut ties with De Sarno, Cantino and Bellettini are showing the resolute leadership the brand needs at this time. Let’s hope they make the right decision and find a new creative director who will follow their lead.
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