MILAN — In the year of its 10th anniversary, Kering Eyewear has become a case study at Harvard Business School, offering insight into its strategy and fundamental role as a game changer in the eyewear industry.
Further marking the decade, Roberto Vedovotto, founder, president and chief executive officer of the eyewear group, arranged the release of the commemorative book “Never Never Never Give Up,” published by Rizzoli.
KeringEyewear was a pioneer in changing the business model for luxury groups with regard to the eyewear category, straying from the well-trodden licensing business model. Vedovotto, who was previously CEO of Safilo Group for 10 years, exiting that company in November 2013, often remembers being met with much skepticism in the early days.
Also for this reason, the book pays tribute to the people and employees who have helped grow Kering Eyewear against all odds, “from zero,” as he recalls, into a group that in the first nine months of the year reached sales of 1.25 billion euros, an increase of 4.7 percent compared with the same period in 2023.
The tome is filled with photos of key moments for the group, from the “blank page” of the early days, the gradual production of eyewear for Kering’s brands, the first collection for Gucci unveiled in October 2016, to the agreement in March 2017 with Compagnie Financière Richemont to take over the development, production and distribution of Cartier eyewear, and the acquisitions of Lindberg and Maui Jim.
Here, in an exclusive interview, Vedovotto highlights the “daring and audacious” team that helped him build Kering Eyewear, always remembering the support of Kering chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault, who he described as a “visionary” and “with the foresight that distinguishes every great entrepreneur.”
The cover of the Kering Eyewear book published by Rizzoli.
WWD: In the book, there are so many photos of the people that have accompanied you over the past decade. As you write in the preface, it is not meant to celebrate the group’s business success, “the results achieved and the expectations exceeded,” but rather the “courage and determination” and the passion and trust of your team. What did you have in mind when you set up to realize this book?
Roberto Vedovotto: We created this company from scratch 10 years ago, in October 2014. We had no money, we had no office, no Wi-Fi, no chairs, no computer, no tables, nothing. And we became, in 10 epic years, as I call them, the second largest company in the eyewear industry in the world, with around 1.6 billion euros of revenues wholesale, also the most profitable one and the fastest growing company. But the book is not about our economic success. It’s not about celebrating the compound average growth of these last 10 years. The book is about celebrating what I wanted to do from the beginning — create a company where people were happy to participate into an adventure, where people are friends before being colleagues, where people enjoy coming to the office every day, where people are proud of what they do, and they believe in the same values. They believe in working together. They’ve shown a courage that nobody thought we could have had when all odds were against us, when everyone was saying, these guys are a bunch of runaways and they will never make it, because this is an industry that has been basically stagnant for many, many years.
Nobody did anything new in so many years. These are people that have had this time to recognize me as their leader, and together, we realized this dream that is only at the beginning, to be honest with you, and but I wanted to celebrate our memories of what we did together, I wanted to celebrate what we were able to accomplish together, the friendship, the team spirit, the resilience, the audacity, and as the book says, never, never, never giving up. So, as you said, the people are at the center of the book, and it is a recognition of the contribution of all the people, who are unique for what they’ve done and for what they have contributed to realize.
A photo from the Kering Eyewear “Never Never Never Give Up” book
WWD: How did you manage to convey this energy to your team and to have them believe in this dream? And if a young executive came to you and asked for a suggestion on how to create trust, what would you say?
R.V.: Alone, I didn’t do anything. This is a collective effort from people that I knew from before and of people that trusted my idea. From the very, very beginning, I remember having conversation with some of them and saying to them, you know, this is an idea that I have. I think it will work. It is clearly very risky, because we are changing the business model of the industry. It is very complicated, especially in terms of supply chain and in terms of sales network, because this is a huge industry, and to be able to establish a presence in the markets, to realize what I have in mind is super risky. Therefore, I want to be clear with you, it could not work. It is possible that it will not work. So, you need to think well before deciding to join.
But I was so convinced, and I was so much into it, that people, most of the people at the beginning, especially the senior management team that I still have now after 10 years, nobody really left. They were saying to me, Roberto, if you say you’re going to be able to do it, it will happen. So, you don’t need to tell me more. We trust you completely, and we are joining. We are happy to do it. So they know and they are aware of my resilience, my mentality, that if I want to get to a target, I get to a target. I was able to find the people that were sharing my same determination to get where we wanted to, and of course, because most of them were coming from the industry, it was sort of a way to demonstrate that we could have done it better than anyone else, and that’s what we did.
WWD: How do you select your team? How do you realize when a person fits with Kering Eyewear? What do you look for in your collaborators?
R.V.: This is key, because, of course, I needed people that had an entrepreneurial spirit, people that were right there to take a risk to get to a higher reward. So, first of all, entrepreneurial people. Second, people that wanted to change, that had a dream to change the industry, to make it better, people that would trust this business model, changing from licensing into internalization, people that are smart, that are skilled and that are audacious, because we made a decision that nobody had made before. And when we started to make those decisions, people were looking at us saying, they’re never going to make it. When we decided not to go to the traditional industry fairs, they said, how can you gather orders? And now others, as you know, are doing the same. So being audacious, wanting to change the industry, is what I was looking for. And of course, it was not easy.
WWD: The trajectory of Kering Eyewear has caught the eye of Harvard Business School.
R.V.: Becoming a Harvard case study and being acknowledged by one of the most prestigious and recognized educational institutions in the world is a unique privilege for all of us at Kering Eyewear. They started to call us, because they saw what we were doing, they were interested in understanding how we decided to change the business model, how we were able to get François-Henri Pinault, who is the quintessential entrepreneur, to discuss this and agree to invest and to take such a risk, to take these brands away from the traditional eyewear production business model, and to invest into a start-up, into a mature industry, into somehow a fast-moving consumer goods industry. So Harvard was really interested into understanding how we did it, the development and the results we have achieved.
WWD: How was the case laid out at the Harvard Business School?
R.V.: The way it works is that three members of the faculty, three professors, came to see us, and they conducted extensive interviews with the senior management team of the company. And then they gathered data from the markets, from industry research, from articles, from equity research. And then they wrote the case themselves. And, of course, they showed it to us because they wanted to make sure that we were aligned with what they were writing. And then they discussed it in class earlier this month, and I participated in that discussion with the students remotely.
WWD: What did you discover from that lesson? Was there something that perhaps you did instinctively and that seen from the outside you perceived was not so par for the course?
R.V.: I think that something that came natural to me was taking the risk of doing something that had never been done before. And I remember when meeting [Pinault] in his office back then and presenting him the idea, I remember I realized what a responsibility it was to suggest he change a successful eyewear business model, but I was convinced that it could have been done better. And when the Harvard Business School case was written, I realized that taking risks is part of being a successful entrepreneur. Also, the Harvard Business School analyzed our acquisition of Lindberg and of Maui Jim. And what I found interesting is that the professors, they discussed the case, and they interacted with students, leaving to them questions that they will need to then develop and come back with the answer, sort of being creative in suggesting what they would have done in our shoes.
Photos from the Kering Eyewear “Never Never Never Give Up” book.
WWD: How did you select these two brands, Lindberg and Maui Jim, as targets for Kering Eyewear?
R.V.: The way we developed the company was first to deliver on the promise that we made, to fully exploit the potential of the Kering brands in the eyewear category. And then I was in love with Cartier since my previous time as an executive within the eyewear industry. And so I started to talk to them about the possibility of doing something together, and they were actually quite excited about what we had done with the Kering brands. And so we entered into the second phase of the development of our company. At that point, we had, I would say, the best portfolio of brands in the luxury industry, and we were mostly focused on sunglasses.
In terms of gender, we were exposed to women more than men. I realized that we needed a cherry on the cake. I asked myself what is the most luxurious brand in prescription frames for men in the world? There is nothing like Lindberg, a product that is the quintessence of luxury, in full titanium, the lightest in the market, with no screws. It seemed to me the natural addition to this very nice cake that we had prepared, and that we needed a cherry to put on. I had been wanting to buy the brand for years even in my previous professional life and when I shared the idea with [Pinault], he immediately liked it. He understood perfectly that it would have been very complementary. And I think that it has been a fantastic acquisition.
Then came Maui Jim, the last independent high-end sunglass brand in the world. If you are in this industry, you really need to make sure that you compete with the rest in such a way where you have a unique standing and proposition, something that no one else has, such as Maui Jim’s polarized lenses, which are truly unique, and so we thought that after having bought the best prescription frames brand, it was only natural for us to buy the best available sunglass brand in the market.
Photos from the Kering Eyewear “Never Never Never Give Up” book.
WWD: You said this is just the beginning for Kering Eyewear, so what is your main objective looking to the next 10 years?
R.V.: This is a moment in which we are particularly proud of what has been done, and being discussed as a business case is something quite unique, and we are truly proud and grateful. So my main dream going forward is to make sure that at this size of a company where we have more than 4,000 people around the world, we are going to be able to keep up with the promise that this is the best place to work, in terms of team spirit, in terms of being happy, in terms of enjoying what we do, in terms of what we say, we work hard, but we play harder.
You might have seen in the book, there are many pictures of different events, parties that we did. It is, for us, a way of saying thank you to the people, because people here work very, very hard. We are quite a lean organization, so going forward, first and foremost, I would like to keep up with this promise of being a place where people like what they do, where people enjoy what they do, and where people are happy to come to work every day, wherever in the world they are. And then, you know, having been the changing factor for this industry, we would like to keep our eyes open to understand how we could remain at the edge of the envelope in terms of being the leading company in our product category. It would be important for us to further expand the reach of what we do in terms of the Kering brands, the Richemont brands and our own brands.
I think that we have many projects. I think that the potential for the brands that we have in the portfolio, in terms of the different dimension of our business, is quite big. So I think that truly the best has yet to come.
