Since 1993, Polo/Ralph Lauren’s revenue-including its share of worldwide licensing income-has increased 30%, to some $900 million operating profit has grown nearly 70%, to around $110 million. A new, 45,000-square-foot store-the length of an entire city block-is scheduled to open in London, of all places, late next year. Even so, there are enough customers to sustain 116 freestanding Polo/Ralph Lauren stores, 62 discount outlets, and some 1,300 boutiques inside department stores all over the world. A Polo suit might sell for $600 to $900 a woman’s blazer for $1,200 a pair of socks, $11 a leather sofa, $9,000. The price of admission is relatively high, as befits a business with aspiration at its soul. “They’re buying a piece of his world.”Īt the flagship Polo store in Manhattan, the counter culture is British. “When people buy his products, it gives them the feeling of having class and stature,” she says. And indeed, before Martha was Martha, she made gift baskets for Lauren’s clientele in the 1980s. He was the first to sell not only the suit you wear to work but the pajamas you wear to bed and the sheets you sleep on. He was the first fashion designer to have his own stores. He doesn’t sell socks he sells his very mildly fevered (98.7º) dream.Ĭould Martha Stewart have existed without Ralph? He blazed the trail of “lifestyle” merchandising, selling not just items but his own personal context-and at a premium price, no less-at a time when such things weren’t done. When Lauren creates the look of an English country home, the panache of a Savile Row suit, or the luster of some Western belt belonging to an imaginary rancher, his version is always a little cleaner, a little brighter, just a touch more polished. “Everything is done with the promise of good taste.” And derivative idealism. “Ralph’s world is not unapproachable or scary,” says Neil Kraft, former head of advertising for Calvin Klein. He is the nation’s leading proponent of safe slacks. Lauren stands manfully above the fray, upholding simple, classic good looks (allowing for occasional lapses like those slippers).
RALPH LAUREN CHAIRMAN PHOTOFRAME 5 X 8 PLUS
Let other designers-Italians, handbag-toting Frenchmen-urge kilts and capes and corduroy plus fours upon an impressionable public. “I try to give people a clean, aspirational quality, with no bullshit. “He’s an established brand that stands for reliability and quality.” “Buying Ralph is like buying a Maytag,” says Hal Reiter, president of the executive search firm Herbert Mines Associates in New York, who owns six pairs of Ralph Lauren trousers and two Ralph Lauren suits. Somehow Lauren- faux cowboy, relentless Anglophile, exponent of yachting and polo-has come to occupy the kind of solid middle ground that Brooks Brothers did in the 1950s: He is the default fashion choice for men who don’t care a whole lot about fashion but nevertheless want to look good in office clothes. Add in women’s clothes, eyeglasses, perfume, bedsheets, dinner plates, leather couches, and the rest, and consumers around the globe spent some $5 billion on Lauren goods-making him the best-selling designer in the world. And yet mainstream guys bought $2.7 billion in suits, shirts, ties, and other Ralph Lauren (RL) garments last year.
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