A SHIPWRECK AT FENDI
When the managerial axe trips over its own feet, here is the chronicle of a very expensive shipwreck. It seems that at Fendi, the way to repair old machinery is to first break everything that was still working. Called to the bedside of the Italian fashion house to revive it from a state of lethargy that seemed to have no end, Ramon Ros apparently decided, with the enthusiasm of a hurried surgeon, to cut into everything at once.
A sweeping restructuring, musical chairs at every level of management: the new captain clearly had more of a taste for a grand clear-out than for simply keeping the ship afloat. Admirable zeal, too bad it ran, as it so often does, headlong into the seemingly indestructible wall of employment law and accounting.
Among the heads that fell on the altar of renewal, that of Cristiana Torre (Brand Strategy & Fashion Advisor) will no doubt go down in the annals as a textbook case: the delicate art of turning a simple departure into a crisis-management fiasco worthy of a handbook.
According to our information, the matter was handled with such clumsiness that the house had no choice, in order to prevent its dirty laundry from being aired even further in court, but to reach for its cheque book. A cheque, they say, commensurate with the scale of the disaster: substantial.
In the hushed world of luxury, where the track records of senior executives come at a premium, this kind of blunder is never just an anecdote: it is measured in hundreds of thousands of euros, with headhunter fees and the disruption of teams swelling the bill with the generosity of an unwanted service charge.
And beyond the balance sheet, it is the entire corporate culture that is taking on water. Quite a “hiccup”, to borrow the in-house euphemism, and one that says a great deal about the robustness of management practices at this subsidiary of LVMH.
On Glassdoor and Indeed, where anonymous employees quietly say what management would probably prefer never to read, there were already whispers of constant pressure and a revolving door of executives whose pace was beginning to make people dizzy.
The departure of Cristiana Torre, as hasty as it was costly, has merely added another discordant note to an already shaky score, further deepening the mistrust among the executives who remain in place.
Meanwhile, unperturbed, Ramon Ros continues to redraw the organisational chart with broad strokes, backed by the recruitment of Maria Elena Cima and Gianmaria Pizzocheri, as though nothing had happened.
This little financial mishap does at least have the merit of reminding us of one simple truth: in human resources, as in fashion, haste can sometimes cost as much as a failed collection. And it often costs far more to stitch back together.
There remains one rule that we thought had long been carved into the marble of corporate headquarters: when the gravedigger handles his shovel with such enthusiasm, sooner or later, he invariably ends up burying himself.
FM