How to Reinvent a Brand, by Coach CEO Lew Frankfort; Coach (COH) was a $550 million business in 2000 when it went public and a $5 billion one a decade or so later

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

How to Reinvent a Brand, by Coach CEO Lew Frankfort

By Lew Frankfort on April 11, 2013

Coach (COH) was a $550 million business in 2000 when it went public and a $5 billion one a decade or so later. Now we’re transforming it again into a lifestyle brand for women, with shoes, outerwear, and capsule collections of tops and bottoms. A transformation has to be careful, nurtured. You have to understand what’s distinctive about your brand and build on who you are. Consumers are smart—if you try to be something you’re not, they’ll see you as an impostor. Modify your product first and build interest and loyalty into what is coming. Understand your consumers and what motivates them. It’s generally a fatal mistake to believe you can leave your customers behind and find new ones. The opportunity is to bring them along with you. You should also know your employees and what they’re capable of. To help pull off our current transformation, we brought in three additional creative leaders from Paul Smith, Nike (NKE), and Selfridges. We do an enormous amount of research. Don’t bet the ranch without any consumer insights or experience. We triangulate between research and instincts, or gut feelings. If we do research that doesn’t reinforce our instincts, we go back and do more research. We pause. We might take a different turn. A full transformation generally takes five times what you think it will. Not time, not money, but reach. It has to be comprehensive. And you’re never done. You can’t accept any applause for things that are going well. You have to fear failure.

• Frankfort is the chairman and chief executive of Coach. As told to Susan Berfield

Filed under Life

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment