Peter Fisk

Brunello Cucinelli began life in humble surroundings, growing up with no electricity or running water. Today, aged 60, he is the founder, chief executive and designer of a global luxury lifestyle brand with a market capitalisation of more than $1.5 billion.

In a recent interview with BOF he said “I wanted to be a real expert, to have a specialty or niche. There was no coloured cashmere for women. So I went to the dye shop and here we had the most famous dye expert, a young guy, I said, ‘I’d like this to be orange.” The Italian soon went out to market equipped with three round neck sweaters and three V-neck sweaters, selling 400 in the first three months.

Over the next 15-20 years the brand remained entirely focused on one product category. ““In terms of the product, it was innovative. I was seeking perfection for one single thing. I was the man with the sweaters, the cashmere guy. Womenswear was the first step and then around the 1990s we started with menswear too, but knitwear only. My hope was that it would be modern, looking after colours, the shapes.”

By 1998 sales stood at 200,000 sweaters a year, despite the fact the brand operated only one tiny monobrand store. In 2000, following requests from American buyers for a total Brunello Cucinelli look, the brand expanded its product offering. Over a period of six years, during which the brand annually rolled out four or five stores globally, Brunello Cucinelli established his namesake brand’s aesthetic. Cucinelli took his business public in the Milan Bourse’s only IPO in 2012, becoming a billionaire in the process. The company generated $444 million in revenue in 2013.

Cucinelli built his company with a deep respect for his employees and the human impact of his business. In keeping with what he dubs a human capitalist philosophy, every stitch of clothing his company creates is made in Italy, mostly in and around Solomeo, the 14th century Perugian hamlet that Cucinelli has lovingly and personally restored over the past two decades and where his clothing empire is based. Seven hundred and twenty employees work in Solomeo and, on average, are paid about 20 percent more than they would make elsewhere.

Cucinelli takes time out from meetings with designers of his next collection to discuss work — and why people shouldn’t exhaust themselves doing it. It’s a drizzly mid-September morning in Solomeo, the 12th-century hamlet where the 62-year-old CEO has located both his home and the global headquarters of his namesake fashion house.

Atop the cypress-forested hill is a medieval castle that Cucinelli has restored for his living quarters and a school. Nearby is a library open to employees featuring Cucinelli’s favorite thinkers, including Kant and Ruskin. Farther down the hill, artisans weave $3,000 cashmere sweaters from the undercoats of rare Hircus goats. He asks the 1,000-member staff to knock off work at 5:30 and not to send business-related e-mails after that to conserve their creative energies. “People need their rest,” Cucinelli says. “If I make you overwork, 
I have stolen your soul.”

Cucinelli calls his employee-centered approach humanistic capitalism and traces it to his teenage years. He watched his father trade the family’s life on a farm for more money in a factory, only to come home exhausted from a dark cement-making plant where colleagues mocked his peasant clothes. “It was very repetitive, hard work,” he says. “Very often, he’d be humiliated.”

Cucinelli insists on balance at his company. That includes a 90-minute respite at 1 p.m., when workers break en masse for lunch that costs a few euros in the subsidized canteen. On this Monday, they’ll dine on steak, pasta and local produce bathed in Cucinelli’s own olive oil. His Brunello & Federica Cucinelli Foundation extends the philosophy to funding projects that make the world more livable. “Restoring a church or maybe restoring a hospital,” he offers as examples.

For a mogul who competes with the storied houses of Gucci and Prada, Cucinelli is an upstart. Gucci was run by second-generation family members before Cucinelli was even born. He founded the company in 1978 and has built it to 1,400 employees, a presence in 60 countries, and a $1 billion market valuation. Since 2012, when Brunello Cucinelli SpA listed on the Milan stock exchange, annual net profit has jumped 52 percent to $43.9 million. Sales increased 10.4 percent to $472.8 million last year, more than double the average of 37 luxury-goods companies compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

Fellow fashion CEO Gildo Zegna  is a fan, so much so that his menswear company, Ermenegildo Zegna Group,  holds a 3 percent stake. “It was natural to become an investor,” Zegna says. “We admire his philanthropic and humanistic capitalism.”

Analysts are less dazzled. Only one who covers the stock rates it a buy, with seven advising hold and five saying sell, Bloomberg data show. Shares have fallen by more than a third since peaking in January 2014, depriving Cucinelli of billionaire status. “The question I have on Brunello Cucinelli is whether the brand has enough unique features and underlying tangible elements to maintain its very high pricing long-term,” says Luca Solca, head of luxury-goods research at Exane BNP Paribas.

Cucinelli says he’s out to make money but the markup must be 
reasonable. His company’s operating margin is 13.8 percent, lower than the average of 17 percent for its peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “Would you buy a product if you knew the manufacturer made 
a huge, preposterous profit?” he asks. He says his prices reflect his garments’ hyperlocal production, hand craftsmanship, and sustainable sourcing from Mongolia and northern India. He pays employees about 20 percent more than the average Italian manufacturing wage. If this ethos draws customers, all the better, he says.

In Solomeo, Cucinelli saw the chance to revive a village that residents had abandoned and create the workplace his father never had. His wife, Federica, grew up in the town. He began visiting in the 1970s, after dropping out of engineering school at 21. He’d started a small company in Ellera di Corciano, near Perugia, making brightly dyed cashmere sweaters. As the company grew, he decided that when he had the money, he’d bring life back to Solomeo’s borgo, or town center. “I wanted to be a guardian,” he says. “Someone who basically spent his life in this very tiny corner of the world and embellished, restored, and built something new.”

He bought the central part of the castle from its absentee owner and moved the company there in 1987. “I thought we’d all go back to appreciating life in the village and my buildings would acquire value,” he says.

Today, women in gray smocks work in light-filled spaces, the antithesis of his father’s dank factory. One, with glasses at the end of her nose, deftly threads cashmere fibers through a machine’s metal teeth, fluffy yarn spilling onto her lap.

Cucinelli lives up the hill, surrounded by a 300-year-old frescoed church and classrooms he’s built to teach young people arts from knitting to masonry. His next endeavor is plain to see from the terraces. He’s tearing down six disused warehouses in the nearest valley to make way for a youth-sports stadium, vineyards and orchards. He sold shares worth €62.9 million ($71 million) in January to fund the parks as a buffer against industrial sprawl. “We have to start to give humanity back to the outskirts,” he says.

When employees leave for those outskirts at day’s end, he’ll likely return to his castle to restore his own creative juices. “I’m here only transiently,” he says. “It’s my duty to make these places more beautiful than when I found them.”

After a decade of working for large corporations, Vicky Tsai yearned for simplicity and authenticity in her life. On a trip to Kyoto, she discovered a world of pure beauty, craftsmanship and heritage. A chance encounter with a modern-day geisha changed her life.

The beauty secrets she learned from the geisha introduced her to a different approach to skincare — that less is more. Their skin care philosophy and time-tested ingredients were captured in an ancient text widely considered to be the oldest beauty book written in Japan, and perhaps the first such work of its kind. Within its three delicate, thread-bound volumes are seven chapters devoted to beauty and elegance in both appearance and spirit. This special guide informs and inspires our collection.

Among the many titles Tsai holds at Tatcha — founder, CEO, product developer, sushi connoisseur in chief — the one on her business card suits her best: Chief Treasure Hunter. A Harvard Business School graduate turned globetrotting beauty expert and explorer, Victoria splits her time between the Bay Area and Japan, where she travels frequently to work with scientists, researchers and modern-day geisha to create formulas for the Tatcha collection.

She created the line after suffering from acute dermatitis and developing a keen awareness about the importance of ingredients used on the skin. Pregnant with her daughter, Alea, at the time, she made certain every product would be as gentle and safe as it was effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxvHFyveKJ8

Here is an extract of a recent profile in Entrepreneur magazine:

Vicky Tsai has been on a continual hunt to find that ideal combination of living simply and naturally and appreciating this life. And her journey reminds us all that if you have a problem or an issue, odds are good someone else is suffering from it as well.  So fix it and build your business around the solution.

As a fixed-income analyst at Merrill Lynch, Tsai worked in the World Financial Center, which was across the street from the Twin Towers. So she saw everything on 9/11. And everyday thereafter. “Every time they recovered another body we knew because they would cover it with the American flag,” remembers Tsai.

And then her once-athletic husband got very sick for the next two years after the attacks. “And they still don’t know what happened,” she says. “Plus I just didn’t believe in what I was doing anymore,” says the Jersey Girl, whose parents came from Taiwan.

So she knew it was time — they had to get out of there. Life is a gift, she says. Don’t waste it.

She went back to business school and got a job launching consumer products in China. But she made the grave mistake of testing way too many of those products on her own face. She ended up with acute dermatitis – which is basically a bleeding, blistering red rash – and couldn’t find anything to cure it.

In the process of researching a treatment for herself, she learned that the FDA has no oversight over cosmetics here in the States. “Ingredients are innocent until proven guilty here,” she says. “There are no advance protections in place for consumers.” And the chemicals in some of the products she tested were obviously the reason for her current condition.

We often forget that the skin is the body’s largest organ and 60 percent of what you put on your skin passes right through into your body. So Tsai got completely turned off by the cosmetics industry and went “the natural, granola route, but that didn’t work either,” she says.

When flying through Japan one day, she came across these blotting papers – thin papers you use to pat your skin and absorb the excess oil. They were made from the abaca leaf, which is more fibrous that a banana leaf, and hammered into a super-thin sheet.

Her skin started to dramatically improve with these papers and she learned that the Geisha used them.

Geisha, which means arts person, are considered almost sacred in Japan. They are the female version of Kabuki actors.

Thanks to inaccurate accounts of sexual promiscuity, they have closed down their access to the rest of the world. “They don’t want to be taken advantage of,” says Tsai.

But she went back to Kyoto, the center of Geisha tradition, to find them anyway because she needed to know more of their beauty secrets.

When Tsai met her first Geisha she was blown away by her beautiful skin – with that white makeup and without makeup. “It was magical to meet her,” she says.

She learned that what they put in their bodies they put on their skin. But they didn’t write anything down. For more than 300 years, these traditions were just passed on.

She eventually heard that there was one book with all the details, written 200 years ago.  When she finally got her hands on it and had it translated, “I didn’t know whether to be delighted or disappointed,” she says.

It was super simple: In addition to the abaca leaf, they used green tea, seaweed, red algae, oatmeal, rice bran and Japanese wild roses.

In the Western world, we are taught to believe that future discoveries must be better than what happened in the past.

But certainly not in this case.

“Visiting Kyoto was like walking back in time. Craftsmanship and integrity are still part of everyday life,” says Tsai. It inspired her and made her believe in something again. And she wanted to keep that feeling with her at all times.

It was then she decided to create a company that embodied these simple, old principles.

She sold her engagement ring and car to finance it. She took on consulting jobs and was even the superintendent of a building to make ends meet.

She found two partners and began the process of creating products — those blotting papers — made from these few ingredients.

When the first 10,000 arrived in big wooden crates, she panicked. “I really hoped other people were as obsessed with this piece of paper as I was” even though it wasn’t new or technologically advanced, Tsai says.

They put up a little website, “and there were crickets,” she says. The only people who purchased were a few good friends, whom she is forever grateful to.

She tried to hire a PR agency but they all turned her down.  So she sent samples to magazine beauty editors and makeup artist.

And then people took notice. She was soon in every magazine, including O, the Oprah Magazine, and on the Today Show. Calls from stores started coming and today her blotting papers now are in every Hollywood star’s handbag.

Her skincare, all made with the same ingredients that the Geisha used, has taken off as well. While the company is private and doesn’t release numbers, 2014 results were made available and total revenue was $12 million.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIi2B_dz7XY

Everyone asks Tsai about her “exit strategy” because that seems to be the top question when your company is headquartered in San Francisco.

But there is none. “I am on the 100-year plan,”  she says. Her intent is to leave the company for her daughter and she wants it to stay in the family for generations to come.

In 2014 they started a partnership with Room to Read, an organization committed to improving our children’s education. So every full-sized Tatcha skincare purchase funds a little girl’s day of school. She has since funded more than 1,500 years of school for girls in 11 countries.

“That is how I measure my success,” she says. That’s how we all should.  Life is a gift. Live simply.

Go start your own treasure hunt.

Kate Unsworth is the 28 year old maths graduate who became a fashion and tech entrepreneur. In the last 5 years she has set up three businesses, from fashion to wearable tech, splitting her time between London and LA, driven by a belief in the power of ideas … “Ideas will continue to evolve the more you tweak them and the more you learn.”

Unsworth is the founder and CEO of the London-based company Vinaya, a research and design house aiming to explore the relationship between humans and technology. Vitaya is described as a “Studio and Lab” (part fashion, part tech) building design-led technology products that elevate productivity, tranquility and wellbeing. They believe technology should be seamlessly integrated into our lives and driven by human-focused insights.

Unsworth has brought together a multidisciplinary product team that draws inspiration from three main pillars: minimalism, innovation and sustainability. Based at the Vinaya House, a three-story building in the heart of London’s creative hub, Shoreditch, their goal is to use technology to make us more human than less human.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX08PtRYxW4

Vinaya’s first product range was called Altruis, a collection of mindful wearable technology in the form of smart high-end and high tech jewellery. The FT described the range as “utterly genius, and possibly more exciting than the Apple Watch.”

“We want to empower you to take a step away from your phone so you are less distracted,” Unsworth said. “When you are in a meeting or at dinner, we want to give you a way to remain connected to the most important people but silence the noise. You set different profiles so you can filter who can make your ring or necklace vibrate. I can add it for specific people or specific words. I have my close family on my list, it connects your text, phone, email and Whatsapp. I have two secret words banana and martini, if you need me urgently, use one of the words in the subject line of an email and you will reach me.”

A user can vary the number of vibrations, so one vibration could be your boyfriend, two vibrations could be your boss, three can be your mom, whatever a user’s priority level is. The goal it make people aware of how they spend their time and steer them away from bad habits.

“When you were only your phone ten minutes ago, it hasn’t buzzed but you refresh, it’s just a habit. We will alert you when someone important is trying to reach you so you can wean yourself off that habit,” Unsworth said.

The Altruis collection is comprised of rings, necklaces and bracelets, retailing from $345 to $450. The line is made in sterling silver base, with gold plating or rose gold plating, and zirconia ceramic stone. Sourcing production across Asia, the jewelry is made in Bangkok, the electronics in Taiwan and the stones in Hong Kong. The battery lasts a month, and charges in under 30 minutes.

Most recently Vinaya announced their latest creation: Zenta, the world’s first biometric band for emotional wellbeing.

Zenta is the world’s first designer biometric wearable that interprets your emotions, helps you understand your own behavioral patterns, and allows you to share how you feel visually, in the form of art. User data will create what Vinaya calls “biometric art” and pieces made from the technology will be featured at Art Basel later this year.

“Just like our first product Altrius, Zenta was built in order to help you re-establish ‘connection to self’,” Unsworth explains. “In such an always-on world, it’s so easy to distract ourselves with emails and articles every spare moment we have. But we should consider the impact this has on our stress levels, emotional state and our ability to self-reflect.”

Emotion technology is nothing new, just like wearable tech, it’s been around for over a decade. However Unsworth said that technology has only recently reached the point where the electronics can be shrunk down to something actually wearable. Just as The Consumer Electronics Show declared 2014 “The Year of the Wearables”, Unsworth, predicts that 2017 will be “The Year of Emotion Tech”.

“It’s literally only in the past year that the idea of ‘Emotion-sensing consumer tech’ has become feasible from a technical perspective, which puts us in a very exciting position,” Unsworth said. “We were ready and waiting on the start line with the likes of Apple, and given our ability to be fast and nimble, we’ve managed to compete with them. Zenta contains more advanced sensors than the Apple Watch, and aggregates the data in terms of emotions, rather than fitness.”

Zenta uses the most advanced, patented, sensing technology to collect physiological cues such as heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels, respiration, perspiration and temperature. This data is then cross-referenced against other data from your smartphone including your social media usage, calendar, location and more to derive actionable insights. The more you wear Zenta, the more it can build up an accurate profile of your emotional responses over time, identifying possible triggers, and spotting patterns in your behavior. These personalized insights then allow you to design your life in a way that makes the most sense for you, so as to decrease stress and increase happiness.

“Zenta provides a more complex medium to understand our own personal emotional scope, acting as a tool to visually share our feelings with others, unlocking a new potential for self-awareness and enhanced emotional intelligence,” Unsworth said. “An emotional system that is unbiased and thought provoking, Zenta could just be the next unlocking of self-awareness, self-actualization and personal development.”

Unsworth is both an artist and mathematician, and she is uniquely positioned at the intersection between these two worlds, making her the perfect person to blend these two disciplines in a unique way.

“Growing up I was always a musician – in my mind that was unquestionably the life path I was going to take,” Unsworth said. “I became fascinated by how numbers define music: frequency, harmony, resonance, intervals, syncopation… I fell down the rabbit hole and wanted to understand more about numbers in nature. In a way, numbers allowed me to enhance my creativity. I quickly realized that math and coding could simply be another creative outlet for me: it was like adding another color to my palette.”

Given Unsworth’s story, her creation of “bio-art” makes perfect sense: This data-driven, algorithm-based artwork is generated by physiological clues. Vinaya has collaborated with New York City artist Betty Kay to transform feelings into art.

“Betty Kay’s art will be decoded into our algorithms so our users can generate their own mesmerizing ‘nebulas’ using their biometric cues,” Unsworth said. “With the help of Betty Kay’s supreme talent and intuitive understanding of color, shape and form, I really believe we can create an entirely new way for people to express themselves.”

The colors reflect your emotional state, the density of color indicates how strongly you feel that emotion, and the shapes/brush strokes give an indication of your state of being, for example, more angular artwork is created when you are stressed.

“I want to provide people with a means of creating beautiful, personalized visual reminders of how they feel at certain points in time,” Unsworth said. “Imagine buying someone a canvas and being able to say ‘this is how I felt the moment I fell in love with you’ – what a meaningful gift, to be able to actually show someone how they make you feel.”

“The name Zenta was inspired by the desire to find moments of stillness – of zen – amongst the chaos of daily life,” Unsworth said. “We shouldn’t have to escape to a beach with a piña colada, or to the Himalayas for a meditation retreat just to find peace, we need to figure out how to bring that into our daily lives in bite sized chunks. Zenta helps you do this by identifying when and why you’re at your most balanced.”

With Zenta, Vinaya aims to create a new emotional lexicon. A way of visually showing people “this is how I feel” without having to struggle to articulate it… Could this be the future of dating? To see if your Biometric-art matches with that of another?

Unsworth concludes “When you think about it, given how advanced technology is today, it’s bizarre that we still have to digitally express our emotions to one another by pushing pixels back and forth on a screen through text and email. Emotions are far more complex than pixelated words, or even emojis, can begin to convey. The existing method of emotion communication is just not doing us justice!”

Zenta will retail at $249, but can be pre-ordered for $119 only through their Indiegogo page.

Diesel is a global clothing and lifestyle brand. With a history stretching back over 30 years, the company now employs some 2,200 people globally with a turnover of £1.3 billion and its products are available in more than 5,000 outlets. However, this list of numbers is far less interesting than the company, people and founder behind them. Diesel is a remarkable company with a unique mindset. A mindset which puts sales and profit second to building something special, something “cool” and something which can change the world through fashion.

The story begins with a young Renzo Rosso passionate about the clothes he wears but disappointed in the options available to him in his home town Molvena, Italy. Acting on impulse, he decided to use his passion to make the clothes he wanted to wear. Renzo was drawn to the rebellious fabric of the 1960s and rock & roll: denim. It inspired him to create jeans which would allow him and others to express themselves in ways other clothing simply could not. 

Proving popular, Renzo made more and more of his handcrafted creations, selling them around Italy from the back of his little van. The still-young Renzo is the proud owner and CEO of Diesel along with that impressive list of figures. That impulse and passion apparently paid off.

Diesel sells nice jeans. Close, but no “A”. Actually, it”s not that close. The reason Diesel has grown is because it knows it is about a lot more than selling nice jeans. Diesel is a lifestyle: if that lifestyle appeals to you, you might like to buy the products. Renzo describes this as an end of the “violence” towards the customer forcing them to buy and rather an involvement in the lifestyle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udUv8pFG5_Q

The brand

It might be useful to ask a question what actually is a brand? The answer could take a variety of routes and go on for pages but a useful way to think of a brand is as a set of promises. Those promises form the basis of the customer”s relationship with that company. In the case of Diesel those promises are very personal, very passionate.

The Diesel brand promises to entertain and to introduce customers to new, experimental experiences. Its product line now goes far beyond premium jeans and includes fragrances, sunglasses and even bike helmets.  These products complement, convey and support the promises of passion and experience made by the Diesel brand.

Being such a crucial element of its work you might imagine the product design team at Diesel to “plot” in something akin to a war room, pushing little squadrons of well-dressed soldiers around with long sticks. Actually, this is where that elemental passion which created Diesel sets them apart from many others. The whole team at Diesel lives the brand. They are all incredibly passionate about their creations. So when it comes to expressing that passion, ideas come naturally. Living and breathing the set of promises the Diesel brand communicates means employees can listen to their instincts, creating products straight from within.

Be Stupid

A recent marketing campaign was built around this phrase. Diesel took a look at what brought its current pipeline: it was Renzo Rosso, all those years ago, taking the “stupid” move to make jeans he wanted to wear. Then he took the even more stupid move of trying to sell those jeans to others, believing he might not be the only fool in Molvena! As it turned out, there were quite a few more to be found and Renzo’s “stupid” move ended up creating something which millions of people around the world now enjoy.

Promotion and marketing at Diesel takes a very different route to many other companies. It is always about engaging with the customer as opposed to selling at them: creating an enjoyable two-way dialogue as opposed to a hollow one-way monologue. All elements of Diesel’s promotion aim to engage the customer with the lifestyle. If they like the lifestyle, they might like the products.

For example, the Diesel team saw music as an inseparable part of that lifestyle and realised that exploring new music and new artists was all part of trying something different and experimenting with the unusual. 10 years later, Diesel U Music is a global music support collaborative, giving unsigned bands a place where they can be heard and an opportunity to have their talent recognised. It’s not about selling, it’s about giving people something they will enjoy and interact with.

Tied to Diesel:U:Music is an online radio station. It is another example of where Diesel unconventionality has created something which pushes conceptions and the usual ways of doing things. The radio station takes a rather unusual approach of not having a traditional play list but rather gives the choice to the resident DJ. This freedom is reflected in the eccentric mix of music which is played on the station.

Remix marketing

In promotion and marketing, we often talk about “above-the-line” and “below-the-line” methods of reaching consumers. Above-the-line marketing is aimed at a mass audience through media such as television or radio. Below-the-line marketing takes a more individual, targeted approach using incentives to purchase via various promotions. In this case passion again acts to blur and gel the boundaries between the two approaches. If we had to define this approach in terms of theory, we would call it “through-the-line”, i.e. a blend of the two.

The passion and energy embodied by the Diesel lifestyle is communicated through a mix of above-the-line and below-the-line approaches. The balance and composition of that mix is what the Diesel team hands over to their passion and feel for the company and brand. That energy guides the way this abstract theory is realised in projects such as Diesel:U:Music and the “Be Stupid” campaign, which entertain and interact with their potential customers.

Another, drier, way of describing “place” in the marketing mix is “channel” or distribution channel. The way a business chooses to offer its products to its customers has a huge impact on its success.  Only around 300 of the 5,000 global outlets which sell Diesel products are owned and managed by the company itself. The majority are large department stores offering many other brands or boutiques with a very specific style of their own. How do you maintain the quality of a product and its communication when dealing with so many different partners and distribution channels?

This approach to distribution can be seen as a mix of exclusive and selective distribution over intensive distribution. Exclusive distribution involves limiting distribution to single outlets such as the Diesel flagship stores. Selective distribution involves using a small number of retail outlets and partners to maintain the quality of presentation and communication to the customer. Intensive distribution, on the other hand, is commonly used to distribute low price or impulse goods such as sweets.

The price of a product is so much more than a little, or rather big, number on a tag. The price of a product is the most direct and immediate tool a business can use to convey the quality of its product at the point of sale. If done right, the price reinforces the rest of the marketing, drawing in the target customers by conveying the appropriate quality.

Diesel has a premium pricing model. As we have discussed, Diesel is far more a lifestyle than a clothing brand.  Through the vision and passion of Renzo Rosso, the company has created a whole new approach to engaging with its customers. The price of Diesel”s products needs to reflect the substance and value of that experience.

A strategy such as penetration pricing used by businesses making high-volume, relatively low-margin products would be inappropriate as it would undermine the quality association thus devaluing the brand and experience.

We do not pay a premium price for Diesel jeans because they are a premium quality, that is taken for granted. We pay a premium price because the jeans and the brand fit in with and even encourage a premium, dynamic lifestyle built “for successful living”, as Diesel would say. 

The team at Diesel must be intimately in tune with that lifestyle so they can see how their diverse range of products from jeans to fragrances and even bike helmets fits within that lifestyle. That feel for what Diesel is and how we, the potential customers, interact with it allows the company to price those products in a way which complements and neatly fits into that lifestyle.

Beyond brand

The marketing mix is all good and well but it doesn”t paint the full picture. To understand it we must look at the “touchy, feely” elements of business which are less often discussed. Diesel has built its existence around that touchy, feely passion with every one of its 2,200 employees living the Diesel brand. Diesel is the perfect company to allow us to see how this dry theory actually works in real life: how the passion of a founder like Renzo Rosso can be communicated around a company and breathed into each and every one of its diverse products.

Diesel grew into a global household name for premium clothing but it all started from that one man wanting to do something unusual, something “stupid”. Stubbornly he stuck to his belief in doing the unusual and it has created a global company whose products are enjoyed by millions. More importantly, this has created a lifestyle a whole new approach to the way we see a brand. Diesel is an experience which interacts with and entertains its customers a far deeper relationship than most other brands.

Being driven by passion and the desire to do something special naturally ties these elements together. Understanding theory like the marketing mix in a company like Diesel can be difficult if we expect the elements of price, place, product and promotion to be separate from each other. It becomes easier if, like a magic eye picture, we look beyond the dry theory and realise all of these elements are inseparably bound together by the passion of people like Renzo Rosso who have dedicated their lives to treating their work as an artistic expression of their feelings.

Shu and a couple of helpers were picking up food from restaurants in Chelsea and delivering it to local residents just three years ago. At the last count, it is now dispatching a vast fleet of pedal and motorcyclists to 5,000 restaurants in 52 cities across 12 countries and is being earmarked as a global tech-meets-logistics giant for the modern age. The rise has been meteoric.

However, Deliveroo no longer operates below the radar and faces stern questions about how resilient its business model is. As it launches around the world, how well can it stand up to a host of competitors?

Any appraisal will invariably lead to a discussion about its ‘playbook’, a term popularised by Uber — the company that has defined the on-demand economy — referring to its finely tuned blueprint. The blistering speed of Uber’s international roll-out is considered to be a function of this playbook of streetwise tactics and wily manoeuvres to establish the service in a variety of cities with a level of speed and impact that no one had previously seen.

Deliveroo’s own playbook is built on hyper-locality and the intense propagation of a triumvirate of constituents: restaurants, drivers and customers within a 2.5 mile radius. The process of lighting the spark in an area to see if it reaches a point of sustainability is an anxiety-inducing and cash-draining affair. Deliveroo is believed to have honed its loss-making period down to just three months for a typical neighbourhood that it has launched in.

Few companies have embraced the ‘think global, act local’ maxim as emphatically as Deliveroo, which hasn’t deviated from drilling down to micro areas even as it has become bigger. Each patch of streets is identified based on how well it ticks its three golden criteria: lots of nice restaurants, affluent locals and people densely packed in together.

Only when all three exist, the company says, can it offer sufficient choice and deliver within its 30- minute threshold. Because of this criteria, even its early fans thought the concept little more than a ‘Kensington startup’; surely the Deliveroo concept (and prices) couldn’t stretch beyond the most salubrious of postcodes. As it has turned out so far, very few areas the company has launched in have flopped, prompting it to take more gambles and loosen its criteria. The model appears to have worked in student-heavy towns such as Exeter, lower-income cities like Coventry and even sprawling cities including Cheltenham and Berlin. All a long way from King’s Road.

It’s now preparing for a major international push. It launched in Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Melbourne in autumn last year and the background of its latest investors offer a revealing insight into the company’s next steps.

The lead investor in the last round was DST Global, a major investor in Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb, Twitter and the key backer of India’s biggest e-commerce firm, Flipkart. Deliveroo also took investment from Greenoaks Capital, which has interests in one of the world’s most lauded e-commerce businesses, South Korean firm Coupang and Hummingbird Ventures, best known for guiding investments in Turkey and the Middle East.

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It’s 1994 in Montreal, and three friends – Shane Smith, Gavin McInnes and Suroosh Alvi – decide to launch a free punk magazine called the Voice of Montreal. Two years later, the magazine drops the “o,” changing its name to Vice. By 2014, the business, having since relocated to New York and now known as Vice Media, has become a multi-platform news and entertainment group worth more than $2.5 billion.

Vice, however, is not just another news website or magazine. It has followed a different path. At a time when many legacy media organizations are struggling to stay afloat, Vice has found that magical point of convergence where good journalism, positive cash flow and (most elusive of all) the millennial attention span meet.

Recently, Vice Media has launched a full-fledged news division,  a 24-hour news network and raised $500m from investors excited by their ability to reach new audiences. For the company to have reached this point is largely due to CEO Shane Smith, who has emerged as Vice’s much-tattooed chieftain.

The way Smith sees it, there’s little about the Vice formula that’s magic. “We look at it very simply. We want to do three things. We want to make good content, we want to have as many eyeballs as possible see that content, and we want to make money so that we can keep paying to do that content,” he says.

Vice has grown up whilst staying counter-cultural. Retaining the spark that made it a hit in the first place, first among Gen X-ers, then among the coveted millennials. On a given day, the website features provocative headlines like “I Went to a Blowjob Bar in Bangkok, Thailand” and “We Asked Drug Addicts to Rate the Music at Copenhagen Central” alongside news about unrest in the Middle East.

Even corporate advertisers love it, Vice includes among its clients the likes of Google, Levi’s and Intel, all of which have created branded content with Vice. According to Smith, Vice’s ad inventory is sold out on every platform, including its booming YouTube channel, across the next eight months. “Even when Vice was at its craziest and most zany and salty, we were still 50 percent ads,” says Smith. “I think that the skill lies in getting the brand what they want, which is brand lift, while also getting the content that we want out there, rather than the content that [brands] want or that everybody thinks that they want. Our success lies in finding brands that are sophisticated enough to realize that they should sponsor that content.”

Smith himself is known for being provocative, whether by announcing his intention to build Vice into “the next MTV, ESPN and CNN rolled into one” or by calling the competition (in this case, Gawker) “a bunch of bitches.” But it’s that same disdain for PR-friendly cautiousness that makes Smith such an effective leader, says chief creative officer Eddy Moretti. “I think [Shane] sees the media world, by and large, as a system that suffers from a bureaucratization and standardization of something that should be the most beautiful, human, cultural artistic thing,” Moretti says. “At the core of Shane’s vision is that if he holds onto that, he can cut through all the bullshit, and the company can continue to grow without losing sight of the secret behind its success.”

So what can we learn from Vice about the future of media?

1. Be platform-agnostic: Vice started out as a magazine and like others ventured online in the mid-to-late 1990s. Yet this was more than a print-to-digital transition. Vice publishes records, publishes books, makes TV programmes and produces films. It goes where its audience goes.

2. Know your audience: Subject, platform, treatment … that’s the recipe. It’s not enough to know what your audience likes; you have to know how they like it. “Young people have been marketed to since they were babies, they develop this incredibly sophisticated bullshit detector, and the only way to circumvent the bullshit detector is to not bullshit.” says Smith.

3. Have your own voice: Any decent publication will cultivate a tone of voice. But where others might opt for something collegiate and inclusive – collaborative, accessible and straightforward – the voice of Vice is challenging and rebelious. It is exclusive rather than inclusive (you’re either in the club or you’re not), it’s polarising and  provocative. Contributors and audience revel in it. “We want you to love us or hate us.”

5. Create some noise: This may mean social media engagement but it needn’t. Vice’s Twitter and Facebook shares are good but not spectacular. Creating some noise means more. First, it means getting readers and viewers to talk to each other about you face-to-face. Second, it means getting the rest of the media to talk about you (think Dennis Roadman in North Korea!).

6. Make money (without losing audience): This is the delicate balance. Vice generates significant revenue through sponsored content. Clients, past and present, include Intel, North Face, Dell, Nike and Red Bull. So far its audience is onside. Perhaps this is down to the skill of its film-makers, a rigid divide between (editorial) church and (advertising) state, or an uncanny knack to pick brand partners that perfectly reflect the attitudes of its followers.

Realizing that he could not draw, aspiring animator Ed Catmull decided to change his academic focus to physics and computer science. He joined a small off-shoot of George Lucas’ filmmaking empire, Graphics Groups which actually made visual technology products for healthcare. Combining science and art, Catmull drove the creation of “PhotoRealistic Renderman”, an image-rendering process used to generate high-quality images. It was a business that intrigued Steve Jobs, who bought the business from LucasFilm in 1985.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25aIZ7URHM

Whilst the technology was cutting edge, it wasn’t a good business, and to stay afloat, Catmull started making short animated commercials. John Lasseter, a creative director soon joined to help. Out of financial necessity emerged one of the most imaginative movies of all time, Toy Story. It was the beginning of a long sequence of award-winning success.  Both Finding Nemo and Toy Story 3 are among the 50 highest grossing films of all time,  with Toy Story 3 being the all-time highest, grossing over $1 billion worldwide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HN3-l_f-U

The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion, but retained its independence, allowing the creativity and technological inventiveness (perhaps best articulated in Wall-E) to flourish without the distractions of a big business. Pixar’s movies and licensed characters continued to be loved by children – and adults – across the world. Steve Jobs loved the brand so much, that even when he didn’t own it anymore, he still used his Pixar email address rather than Apple’s address, “because it’s much cooler”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjwBdyzsLZU

Pixar’s “Braintrust” meets once every few months, putting its smartest, most passionate people together in a room for the day to think bigger ideas, solve the most difficult problems, and do what individuals can’t or daren’t. Ed Catmull says “a hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms”. Pixar finds that decision making is better when it draws on the collective knowledge and candid opinions of the Braintrust group, finding that straight talking encourages collaboration and more daring creativity.

Philosophy was founded in 1996 by Cristina Carlino, who brought over 30 years of experience in clinical skin care and beauty, including her previously created brand Biomedic, a medically-based skincare range.

What Cristina believed in more than anything was the combination of function and emotion, science and inspiration. “What is in our bottles and jars inspires better skin, what is on our bottles and jars inspires better days”, the latter a reference to the quirky poetry that adorn every piece of packaging. Philosophy was acquired by Coty in 2011, and in 2016 became part of P&G’s premium beauty portfolio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRrludELRnE

The philosophy is based on both advanced science (for example, millions of women get hooked on the hydrating properties of its “Miracle Worker” cream), and on “celebrating the beauty of human spirit”. Everyone knows that there is no magical formula to prevent skin aging, but Philosophy gives you “Hope” recognises that beauty is as much a feeling inside as an outer appearance. “We believe that skin care can give us better skin and inspiration can give us better days” it goes.

But that’s the point … the brand isn’t about the product, it’s about the consumer … whilst the product is scientific and functional, it’s the inspiration that engages people, that brings like-minded women together, and that builds loyalty and advocacy. It’s not about how good the manufacturer thinks the product is, it’s what the consumer believes. Philosophy as a brand inspires its consumers to believe not just in the product, but that they can be more. And together, as a like-minded community, they can be even more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9Xy1nOunT8&list=PLKF_y6jOy-L6NZ-jgl9FyJv_KwM_Z4YWb

In 1947 Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic-injection moulding machine in Denmark to start manufacturing plastic toy bricks. Within 4 years he had patented the stud-like bricks that locked together as systems.

For the next 56 years, Lego seemed the perfect company. An iconic brand, the business was still run by the family, grandson Kjeld Kirk now the CEO. However in 1993, sales slowed dramatically, blamed on everything from low-priced Chinese imitations to kid’s new love of computer games.  Lego responded with wave after wave of innovation. Jumbo sized for toddlers, pocket sized for girls. Computerised “Technics” range for the most inventive, and video games for the lazy. But kids were growing up faster.

Licensing of Star Wars and Harry Potter ranges tapped into trends, but were short-lived. It sought out new spaces – fanatical about finding uncontested “blue oceans” rather than more competitive “red oceans” – and encouraged diverse creativity. Clothing and jewellery, theme parks and education added to the brand’s extensions.

Yet in 2003 Lego almost went bankrupt. The unbridled innovation had lost a sense of direction, trying to be too many things to too many people, forgetting what it was really about – “playing well” as the brands origins in the Danish phrase “leg godt” translate.

The family ceded control to a professional CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, who brought tighter focus to the portfolio, and added discipline to the creativity. He sold the theme parks, moved out of the head office, and outsourced production to Czech Republic and Mexico.

However Knudstorp still believed in innovation, it just needed discipline. It wasn’t about blazing a trail into every market, but focusing on the best opportunities for profitable growth.  Investment focused on the ideas which fitted best with the core brand, and delivered a long-term return. By 2006, the world’s third largest toy maker started growing again, with profit growth double revenue growth, always a healthy sign.