‘Transform or Die’: Can a Turnaround Expert Turn Kering Around?

Luca de Meo’s appointment as the French group’s chief executive is an admission of the seriousness of the crisis the company is facing, as well as a signal of its intent to do something about it, writes Imran Amed.

Hi, this is Imran Amed. Below I share an excerpt of my weekly letter, as well as a digest of The Business of Fashion's top stories across luxury, beauty, retail and sustainability this week. Sign up here to get the full briefing in your inbox each Saturday.

Dear BoF Community,

LONDON — This week, Kering named Luca de Meo as its new chief executive officer, replacing François-Henri Pinault in the top executive role. Pinault will retain his role as chairman, but made clear in a call with investors on Monday that he will be ceding day-to-day decision making to de Meo.

“Luca will have full liberty to take the decisions that he wants,” Pinault said. “I will remain fully involved in the strategic orientation of the group as chairman, but I won’t step in and short-circuit the new CEO regarding his prerogatives, priorities or key appointments of the group.”

Much has already been made of de Meo’s “outsider” status. Chanel CEO Leena Nair said to me at a dinner celebrating the brand’s 100 years in the UK on Tuesday that she was exchanging text messages with de Meo, joking with him that many of the articles about his appointment also mentioned her, linking them as fellow fashion outsiders.

But like Nair, Kering’s new CEO is not just any outsider. In the case of de Meo, he’s a specialist in corporate resuscitation, a turnaround expert with a track record of pulling legacy businesses back from the brink.

The clearest signal of what Kering hopes to achieve comes from the crisis he navigated at Renault, where he took the (proverbial) wheel in 2020 at a time of deep turmoil. The French automotive giant was losing €40 million ($46 million) per day, grappling with boardroom chaos and haemorrhaging cultural relevance in a market being reshaped by electric vehicles and rising global competition.

And yet, within a few short years, de Meo not only steadied the ship but gave Renault real momentum: revitalising its portfolio of brands with emotional resonance, commercial discipline and clear strategic direction, he moved the business back into profitability and doubled its share price in five years.

Can he bring the same magic to Kering?

De Meo’s appointment is an admission of the seriousness of the crisis the company is facing as well as its intent to do something about it.

Since 2021, Kering has lost more than 75 percent of its market value — a staggering erosion of investor confidence. Gucci, once a brand with more than €10 billion in annual revenue and the group’s core profit engine, is sputtering. Group debt has ballooned past €10.5 billion. And virtually every brand in the portfolio is facing its own set of challenges.

Gucci scaled too quickly and lost its magic. What had been a case study in reinvention under Marco Bizzarri and Alessandro Michele became a textbook example of creative overreach and market saturation. Balenciaga, once the most memeable brand in luxury, stuck too long to a worn-out aesthetic and mishandled public controversy. McQueen became overly reliant on a single product category — sneakers — and has not yet cracked the code on how to harness the legacy of its pioneering founding designer. Even Saint Laurent — long a consistent performer with a clear brand identity, retail excellence and steady double-digit growth — has seen sales sag in recent quarters. Only Bottega Veneta, fresh off a successful reboot under Matthieu Blazy, has consistently grown. But after Blazy’s departure for Chanel earlier this year, the brand is starting anew under Louise Trotter.

There’s a deeper structural issue at work here too. As a smaller challenger to rival LVMH, for years Kering drove substantial growth by making bolder bets on the cult of the creative director, leaning into radical aesthetic reboots and empowering its designers to change everything. Even the design of stores were put into their hands, as if they were more like seasonal collections, rendering them dated when designers left. How will new Balenciaga designer Pierpaolo Piccioli’s romantic collections fit into Demna’s dystopic stores?

Kering’s brands are not sufficiently built around the kind of robust, repeatable business processes that deliver long-term performance in today’s more complex, fast-moving luxury fashion market, where merchandising, supply chain, digital and retail excellence matter more than ever. When Sabato de Sarno’s new Gucci collections were unveiled, it took far too long for them to appear in stores, linked to confusing marketing campaigns which hobbled his attempted reboot from the get-go.

A new leadership structure has been a long time coming, as Pinault seemed ready to step back from day-to-day leadership and the financial markets called for a clear shift in strategy. Deputy CEOs Francesca Bellettini and Jean-Marc Duplaix were appointed as an interim step in this direction, but de Meo’s arrival is a much more decisive shift towards the transformation Kering needs.

The market responded very positively to the news. Kering shares jumped on the day of de Meo’s appointment. Analysts called the move “bold,” “strategic” and “decisive.” And industry insiders who know de Meo gave the appointment a big thumbs up.

I was curious to get to know de Meo better so I watched a little-known four-part documentary called “Anatomy of a Comeback,” directed by Stéphane Gillot, Marlies Demeulandre and Julie Robert, charting Renault’s turnaround under de Meo. He comes across as not just a capable executive, but a leader unafraid of ambiguity and direct communication. He walks into a company in the throes of complete crisis — €8 billion in projected losses, a broken relationship with Nissan, a plummeting product pipeline — and quips: “I’m a bit like that, always looking for trouble.”

Now he’s looking for trouble again. So what does de Meo’s stint at Renault say about what we can expect of him at Kering?

→ READ MORE

Have a great weekend,

Imran Amed, Founder and Editor in Chief

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This Weekend on The BoF Podcast

When Tracee Ellis Ross launched Pattern Beauty in 2019, she set out to challenge the beauty industry’s lack of products for curly, coily and tight-textured hair. Despite numerous obstacles, including scepticism about market viability and systemic biases in the product testing process, Ross has built Pattern into a leading haircare brand addressing an underserved market.

“Black beauty and textured hair was not being mirrored back as a celebration but instead it was a problem,” Ross shared. “[Pattern] is to allow people to have the access to their most beautiful hair and self in their own bathroom as opposed to having to always trust a professional.”

During her conversation with BoF founder Imran Amed at The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2025 in Napa Valley, California, Ross shared her journey from Hollywood actress to entrepreneur, detailed the systemic changes she’s driving in the haircare industry and emphasised the importance of humanity in business building.

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