Alessandro Bogliolo: his road to Tiffany

An unpublished portrait of the new number one of Tiffany, Alessandro Bogliolo ♦ ︎
“When I bought my first pair of Diesel jeans in Rome, many years ago, they cost 100,000 lire. I was surprised because for jeans I would usually pay half. The quality and craftsmanship of the product were high and now we are now returning to what the brand was then.” These are the words spoken only a year ago in an interview with Drapers by Alessandro Bogliolo, until October 2017 CEO of Diesel, and from that day onwards of Tiffany (see also Alessandro Bogliolo new jewel of Tiffany). In the end, the same course that has been dealt with in the company founded by Renzo Rosso will have to be managed in the giant of jewelery, after a number of disappointing accounts. In Diesel, Bogliolo has faced reorganization by closing down more unprofitable stores and focusing the brand on a high-end market. And according to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis (see also Tiffany under the Wall Street Journal’s lenses) positioning it’s also a Tiffany’s problem. Will the manager succeed in bringing the good humor back to the American company’s shareholders? Maria Silvia Sacchi, the most well-known financial journalist in the industry, wrote for Corriere Economia (attached to Corriere della Sera) a portrait of Tiffany’s manager.

“The first call came in February.Tiffany had just fired CEO Frederic Cumenal for disappointing financial results and the American jewelry giant was looking for his substitute. Almost five months after that first connection, the announcement to drive Tiffany will be Alessandro Bogliolo, current CEO of Diesel, the main trademark of the Otb of Renzo Rosso.
You could say he is coming home. Not because Bogliolo has ever worked in Tiffany, but rather because the manager knows jewelery very well: 16 years of his already long professional career (despite being only 52) has spent them in Bulgari, the Roman house that is now part of the stable Lvmh (Arnault). In Bulgari worked closely with Francesco Trapani, who was the creator of the Italian company’s success before being sold to the French. And now Trapani is Tiffany’s shareholder (5% together with Jana Partners) and is a member of its board of directors. For this reason many have written that old attendance has in some ways helped Bogliolo. Anyway, he tells who was close to negotiating, it was the opposite, since Tiffany is a public company listed on Wall Street and American rules about possible conflicts of interest are very narrow.
In Veneto
Bogliolo will move to New York City Headquarters from 2 October. But until then it will remain to drive Diesel where went in exactly four years ago with the task of returning a direction is a correct positioning of the home princess mark Otb. A job that Bogliolo did alongside with Renzo Rosso and is beginning to bear fruit. At Diesel’s headquarters in Breganze, inVeneto, they say that people in his team will regret it, as it’s already happened in Bulgari, because he is a man who protects his team. And he will regret Diesel where he has not only worked well, but also willingly, being the brand he has always used in his spare time.
Of course, Bogliolo on the changes is used to it. Graduated in Bocconi University, others advanced studies in Paris, began his career in the French capital as a consultant for Bain, from where he moved when it opened an office in Milan. But advisory work is tight, and he trying to put into practice what entrepreneurs and managers suggest. That’s why he accepts the challenge of going to Piaggio. It was the years of Giovannino Agnelli, Umberto’s son who disappeared for only 33 years, who raised the company of Pontedera, Tuscany.
That is for Bogliolo a moment clou in every sense. The manager is in fact sent to China five years, until when he becomes Sales and Marketing Vice President of Great China. It was the first half of the 1990s and China was not the same as today: it was the world’s contractor country, not the world’s first customer.
But Bogliolo’s assignment was to sell Piaggio in China. Negotiations were so long and complex that it was said that the manager had adopted the strategy of holding two meetings simultaneously: while in a table the counterpart translated and compared, he passed to the other until it came to a conclusion. It is in China that Tiffany’s new Ceo knows his Italian wife, with whom he has two sons (a teenage girl and boy) who follow him throughout his career and who will go with him to New York.
Cosmetics
The meeting with Bulgari takes place in Great China, just when Bogliolo decides that it is time to return to Europe. They offer him a place in Singapore where he lived five years old and then arrives in Rome. He stay 16 in Bulgari as Coo’s Chief Operating Officer. It is the charge he has when the Bulgari family – the brothers Paolo and Nicola Bulgari and nephew Francesco Trapani – decide to sell to Lvmh. A negotiation ended on a weekend at a price analysts call stellar. Bogliolo is offered to move to the United States, in San Francisco, as Coo of Sephora, the cosmetics chain of Lvmh, where it will remain only one year (from 2nd to 12th of 2013) because called in Italy by Renzo Rosso. But where it learns the use of social, which in the US is already developed especially in cosmetics. Experience that then consolidates in Diesel. She now knows the logic of production, she knows how to distribute, knows how to build and maintain the right positioning of a brand, she is aware of the centrality of the service, knows how to use the social. From the Pontedera factory where a two-wheeled icon comes out to the one that produces an icon for beauty, everything binds. It is now up to this to be translated into one last line of the budget that gives satisfaction to the shareholders. Also because there is a jump from the past: no longer a shareholder family but many small individual shareholders. But one of Bogliolo’s mantra is that for growing, we need to be able to restart”. Maria Silvia Sacchi