Ralph Lauren has ambitions to increase sales by a billion dollars by 2023. Marketing spend will go up by a 100 million dollars over the next five years.
The last few years have been about cutting costs including closing 50 stores, eliminating more than 1,000 jobs and removing three lines of management.
Ralph Lauren is an American fashion house. The goal is to woo the next generation of consumers and increase gross margins by improving the core product (which makes up 60 per cent of overall revenue), amplifying under-penetrated categories (including women’s, outerwear and denim) and operating with discipline, which constitutes being more careful about discounts and promotions, more strategic when it comes to price, and cutting costs in creative-but-impactful ways.
One example of this is fabric platforming. At Ralph Lauren, different categories (i.e. home, kids, Polo, ready-to-wear) use different qualities of fabrics. Instead of each sub-brand buying its own fabric, Ralph Lauren is buying deeper into higher quality fabrics, which brings down the cost and increases the quality of lower priced products.
The brand targets working professional men in their early-to-mid 30s, new-to-the workforce women in their mid-to-late 20s, and the creative class.
The aim is for half of the company’s growth to come from core categories — men’s shirting — and half from undeveloped categories like denim, wear-to-work, outerwear, footwear and accessories.
