Quotes of the Day

It's like trying to sell ice to the eskimos," says a london fashion writer. "it's like trying to sell sand to the Arabs," says an executive at a competing British fashion house. "Like trying to sell coal in Newcastle?" suggests Roger Farah, Polo Ralph Lauren's president, with a chuckle. The news that Ralph Lauren, the icon of American style, is pushing hard to expand in Europe is being greeted with a certain degree of skepticism. And bitchiness. Who needs a mass American brand like Lauren when you have the class of Armani, Zegna, Dior and Savile Row? Sure, Europeans are happy to wear a polo player by Lauren instead of an alligator by Lacoste when summering in Cannes. But will they want to don his $3,000 suits for men and $10,000 beaded dresses for women when they get back to Paris?

In fact, Ralph Lauren is no longer interested in simply selling the odd logo shirt, golf jacket or pair of Bermuda shorts. He wants nothing less than to take the European designers head on. What's more, he feels he has to. Though his U.S. business is doing well, Wall Street dismisses it as just another apparel company. If financial analysts would consider Ralph Lauren a purveyor of luxury goods, the stock price — and Lauren himself, who owns 89% of the company — would be all the richer.

Not that Lauren is a stranger to this side of the Atlantic. He was the first American designer to open a freestanding store in Europe, on London's New Bond Street, in 1981. "I think I had something to say that wasn't being said before," he claims. His clothes not only brought idealized versions of preppy America or Western America or sporty America to Europe, but also reintroduced idealized versions of European classics to the very people who invented them. "When I first came to London they didn't have what I thought they'd have," he recalls. "There were more Italian clothes than English ones." So Lauren presented the Brits with what he thought they should be buying — tweed jackets, jodhpurs, polo shirts.

But Lauren's main focus was still the U.S. business, which was booming. In just 14 years, Lauren had gone from selling the wide neckties he designed himself in 1967 to having the first in-store boutique for men in Manhattan's Bloomingdale's, to being the first American designer with his own store, on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, to having complete collections for men, women and boys, as well as his own accessories and fragrances. More firsts followed. In 1983 he introduced a collection of designer sheets and towels and other furnishings for the home. In 1986 he opened the famously lavish $14 million New York City flagship in the Rhinelander mansion on Madison Avenue and filled it to the brim with pricey antiques. To critics who bemoaned the extravagance, Lauren effectively said, "It's the marketing, stupid." Now much of the real estate on upper Madison Avenue is devoted to similar palaces, showplaces in which designer after designer presents the lifestyle he (or she) is trying to promote.

Meanwhile in Europe, Lauren's business was growing too, but differently. Though stores were opening in Germany, Greece, France and the Netherlands, they weren't owned by Lauren, but by European licensees. And the clothes in them weren't made by Lauren either, but by sublicensees. With so much going on in the U.S., it made sense for Lauren to leave Europe largely to the Europeans.

But now his strategy is shifting. To understand why, it helps to go back to a 1997 roadshow to promote investment in his about-to-go-public company, Polo Ralph Lauren. An analyst asked Lauren a question that haunts him still: "You've been in business for 30 years, what do you have left?" Surrounded by encouraging investment bankers, Lauren brushed aside the question. After all, he was then embarked on an invasion into a territory notoriously hostile to American fashion designers — Wall Street. Things went well, at first. With the offering Lauren added $230 million to the company's capital and $440 million to his own fortunes. The stock went from $26 a share at its launch to $31.50 by the end of the day. But in November 1998 the company missed its expected year-end earnings by 15� a share. The company blamed warm weather and a weak economy. Analysts blamed what they saw as Lauren's inability to control spending. "It's all those antique cricket bats in the stores," they moaned. By the end of the month the stock fell to $18.50. In May 2000 it reached an all-time low of $13.25. It has never fully recovered. Today it trades at about $20.

Lauren is not shy about voicing his frustrations with Wall Street. After all, despite a few quarterly snags, the company has almost doubled earnings since going public. Yet the stock price won't budge. Securities analysts worry that Lauren relies too heavily on U.S. department stores, which are losing market share, for distribution. They see Ralph Lauren and Polo as mature brands, incapable of the growth Wall Street had got used to in the late 1990s.

When asked if he ever thinks about what the company would look like if he hadn't gone public Lauren says, "I think about it every day. When I went public I had a great business. I don't think the company has gone backward." He can talk eloquently about how he built the company slowly, to last. He can talk convincingly about what Ralph Lauren, the brand, has meant to America, the nation. But still, in the back of his brain is: "What do you have left?"

What Lauren has left is Europe. In fiscal 2002, which ended March 31, only 9.8% of Polo Ralph Lauren's wholesale revenues came from Europe. He also has Japan, which contributed only 10.5%. Come to think of it, his women's business is still smaller than his menswear, even though women spend twice as much on clothes. So he has that left. And, hey, Polo gets only 9.4% of its sales from accessories. Gucci earns 60%, so that's left to improve too.

But first, Europe. In 1998 the company spent $200 million buying back its key licensee, Poloco SAS of Paris, which had only been managing to increase sales in the single digits. And last summer Polo Ralph Lauren spent another $22 million buying out its Italian partner, PRL Fashions of Europe. A key Polo lieutenant, Lance Isham, moved to London to oversee the company's international development, and an Italian, Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni, who had most recently been the ceo of Ferrari North America, was hired to manage day-to-day operations in Europe. Two years ago Lauren signed Spanish actress Pen�lope Cruz to be the face of the All-American brand, and in March he took the dramatic step of moving his men's fashion show from New York to Milan. That show, for fall, and the one for spring 2003 that followed last month were well received by the local press. "With Ralph Lauren Man is Elegant Again," said the Milan daily Corriere della Sera. The international press played up the competition between Lauren and the European king of menswear, Giorgio Armani. Again a compliment — no such comparison was made when Calvin Klein staged his first men's shows in Italy. The moves have already begun to pay off. In 2002 European sales grew more than 30%, though from a very small base.

Wowing the fashion press, with their natural affinity for anything new, may be the easy part. Convincing the Continentals — particularly the conservative European male, weaned on a diet of Italian cashmere and French tailoring — may be more difficult. "Some Europeans know me very well," Lauren says. "But they know me for sport. Having the classy clothes is new to them." Lauren is encouraged in his mission by both the reviews and by what he sees as the nature of the European shopper. "It's a culture that understands quality and taste," he says. "They understand my clothes more than Americans. They're hungry for it. Armani and Zegna? They don't look like me." For fall, Armani looked east with kimono shirts and Mao jackets; Lauren went Gatsby with pleated trousers and waistcoats.

"Sometimes Europeans are bored with European brands," says Jacques-Franck Dossin, a Goldman Sachs luxury-goods analyst based in London. "Ralph Lauren is cooler, it's different, it's from the U.S." Carol Pope Murray, an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney in New York, more or less agrees. "Yes, I think there is a consumer in Europe who will buy the product," she says. "But the issue is, and has always been, can they do it and make a profit?"

The reality of selling clothes in Europe extends beyond creating styles that suit European tastes. The whole process, from creation to marketing to distribution, is completely at odds with what Lauren has done in the U.S. While European designers love centralization, Lauren is more willing to give important roles to others. Take creation. In the last 12 months Gucci Group has announced it will open a state-of-the-art facility for shoemaker Sergio Rossi by the end of the year. Armani has announced a joint venture with four shoemakers. And Marzotto, the new owners of Valentino, have promised that Val will get his own accessories plant too. All this activity in the name of corporate control and "made in Italy" on the label. Polo doesn't own a factory, doesn't make a single shirt or dress itself. "Owning a factory is a two-edged sword," says ceo Farah. "It works great on the way up. No one yet understands how it works on the way down." In other words, although Farah says they plan to move some of the company's production from Asia to independent European factories, why take the risk of having to lay off workers? Says Farah: "It's not at the core of how we want to operate."

Then there's distribution. In the U.S., 47% of Polo Ralph Lauren revenues come from selling to third-party retailers — mostly big American department stores in which Lauren controls a vast amount of floor space. In Europe, there are simply not enough department stores to support such a strategy. If Lauren wants to sell in Europe, he'll have to build, staff and run his own stores. Not an inexpensive proposition.

To tackle these issues — and ultimately the thorny matter of profit — the company says it plans to spend more than $1 billion in the next five years. "When Ralph invests, it's for the long term," says Ron Baron, ceo of Baron Funds, which has $137 million invested in Polo Ralph Lauren. First up, five new stores in Manchester, Glasgow, Antwerp, London and Paris. To start, the company will focus on just half of Lauren's many offerings, including the top-of-the line collections for men and women, children's wear, men's sportswear and Ralph Lauren Blue Label, a new women's casual line that will debut this September. What won't be coming are the lowest of the Lauren lines — Chaps and Lauren — those produced by licensees in the U.S.

"Thirty-five years of business in the States taught us what we want to do and what we don't want to do," says Farah, who will oversee the retail operations. "What we want to do is establish the high end of our business first." Lauren too thinks his experience in the U.S. can help him in Europe. "I started out in America piece by piece. Now I'm coming with all the equipment," he says. But not always waving the American flag. "All the stores are international now. Someone who is 12 years old doesn't know if Armani is Italian. These stores are a part of life, you respond to them based on if you like them or not."

It would be easy to say Lauren's view is a simplistic one, that he doesn't know Europe very well, that he speaks only English, that he doesn't shop the stores in Milan ("It's not about stores to me, it's about people," he says). He is not, he admits, a "kiss-kiss kind of fashion guy." So how could he possibly understand the European psyche? Fact is, he can't. He can't any more than a working-class boy from the Bronx, which is what he is, can understand the psyche of the American upper class, which is what his clothes embody. Lauren has been railing against this sort of criticism since he started his business. "The idea that there is a correlation between where you come from and what you make is ridiculous," he says. "I have a taste level that people respond to." And, by the way, Lauren now lives the life he's been touting. He's got a collection of antique cars, a 14,000-acre ranch in Colorado, a mansion in Bedford, New York, and a Fifth Avenue duplex. That's just the beginning. There are also homes on Long Island, in Jamaica, a collection of antique watches, and motorbikes and, yes, a private plane.

Last year consumers around the world spent $10 billion on Polo Ralph Lauren products, making him the world's best-selling fashion designer by far — and proving his point. What Lauren has been saying all these years is that he doesn't have to understand the psyche of anyone. What's important is that the world understands — and wants — his sense of style. In the U.S. they do. In the rest of the world? Well, Giorgio Armani, Ermenegildo Zegna and Wall Street will certainly be watching.

• LAUREN GOLDSTEIN
• The American garment genius is moving into Europe?