Burberry's CEO on Turning An Aging British Icon into a Global Luxury Brand

As her top 60 executives arrived in London for the first strategic planning meeting after Ahrendts took the helm, she noticed that not one of them was wearing a Burberry trench coat, despite the damp, gray weather. It was a sign of the challenges the company faced. Even in a burgeoning global market, Burberry was growing at only 2% a year. It had lost focus in the process of global expansion: Each of the 23 licensees around the world was doing something different. Ubiquity was robbing the of its luster. Ahrendts realized that if Burberry was going to be a great, pure, global luxury brand, it needed to have one design director-a brand czar-and it needed to capitalize on its historical core: the trench coat. The company decided to innovate at the core to attract the luxury customers of the future: millennials.