WHAT'S THE STORY
The Future – Who?
ALBERTO
“PANTS HAVE POWER” For Alberto, customers are the ultimate market seismograph. Own sales channels help to understand them better. Marco Lanowy talks about fashion, brand, and margins. Interview: Martina Müllner-Seybold. Photos: Alberto
A new collection every season… When will we finally be brave enough to abandon this pattern, Marco? We at Alberto are brave enough. Our new campaign is entitled Iconic Pants, by which we mean the iconic pants we have created, which have often been on sale for seven, eight, nine years. They are, after all, also in line with our claim: “Pants we love”. This is not a mere marketing slogan. We mean that seriously. Of course, we always work modularly on our icons, but basically it is the same pair of trousers. We are now ready to communicate this confidently. Our Impulse Pants – that is what we call the deliberately fashionable pants – retain their modernity for two to three years. How do you safeguard your products against devaluation? Maybe by ceasing to only promote the new? In our store, for example, we encouraged young employees to design their own pants. We did not ask them to design from scratch, but to individualise and upcycle existing models. It unleashed an incredible amount of creativity. Employees are proud when they sell those models. I believe there is enormous potential in the smart use of existing resources and goods. What are the most important conclusions you can draw from your store in Mönchengladbach? It is a place where we primarily observe. What expectations do customers have? How can we create a feeling of well-being that they would enjoy? It is about anticipating what customers want. We imagine how one would host a guest in one’s own home. It is important to make the guest feel comfortable, but one would never call it a service. We have observed that pants have power. The choice of which pants to wear influences so many subsequent decisions. Which shoes or jacket one wears is often only decided after the choice of pants. What do you advocate for the cooperation with multi-brand dealers? The retail trade is the backbone and engine of the economy. I think that has to be said so clearly. There is a lot of responsibility in that, a responsibility that we, as a brand, would like to fulfil in partnership with the retail trade. It requires a lot of honesty. On the retail side, it requires the honesty to ask tough questions about every brand. Why do I stock it? What does it do for my relationship with customers? Limiting oneself to fewer suppliers would free up, or save, many resources. We must not forget that 120
style in progress
Marco Lanowy of Alberto says about himself that he enjoys observing, which allows him to draw important conclusions.
In its new campaign, Alberto hails the pants that have performed over many years as Iconic Pants.
every e-mail we write also ties up resources. In the relationship between retailer and brand, I consider honesty in business matters to be indispensable. None of us can increase calculations indefinitely, because even higher calculations for season-independent Icon Pants that can be reordered would be dishonest to the consumer. If we, as a company, invest in sustainability – and doing so is a matter of course in my opinion – every single product becomes more expensive to manufacture. At the moment, our brand is absorbing that estimated Euro per piece, but at some point we will certainly enter talks with retailers about what their contribution to sustainability is.
