American Fashion Is About Being Cool, Not Price, Says PVH CEO Stefan Larsson

Stefan Larsson has had a busy branding year at PVH Corp. 

It started with Calvin Klein’s breakthrough campaign featuring Jeremy Allen White in January and built up to Tommy Hilfiger’s closely watched fashion show in September.

This is not new territory for either brand, but the context, how the businesses sit within PVH and how the company is operating, is new. 

But it’s a transformation that has involved a lot of retrospection. 

“We are trying to go back to the DNA that made these brands beloved and cut through culture and then make them current,” Larsson, who is chief executive officer, told James Fallon, chief content officer at Fairchild Media Group, at the WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit.

It’s a process with two parts. 

“We have a consumer-facing part, which is driving as much desirability as possible into product, marketing and experience and then we build a data- and demand-driven underlying business engine,” Larsson said. 

Identifying the brand DNA to build on was the easy part. 

Larsson, who is exacting by nature and spends “56 percent” of his time traveling, said people all over the world smile when they hear Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. 

“People not only are aware of the brands, they like the brands and there is an underlying love for the brands,” he said. “Tommy had a completely unique take on American style — he took classic American style and then he made it current with his twist.”

Calvin Klein “basically created” what Larsson described as “modern American style” that was “confident, essential, minimalistic, rebellious.” 

“The DNA is so clear and it’s timeless because both brands have stood the test of time,” he said. “If you look at what’s happening in the fashion industry right now, I see there are two places to go. It’s the sea of generic brands and generic stuff and then there are the most desirable brands in the world.” 

Larsson grew up in a small town in Sweden, caught the fashion bug and joined H&M’s fast-fashion charge before moving on to Old Navy, Ralph Lauren Corp. and, five years ago, PVH.

Along the way he developed a clear take on American fashion.

“What I love about American fashion is that it doesn’t try to be pretentious about price,” he said. “American fashion to me is about being cool, cool is not about price.” 

Great products and great execution also have very little to do with price, he said. 

“It’s about the intentionality of saying we’re going to set down to do something great,” the CEO said. 

Both Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger sit in the premium space in the market, which Larsson described as a sweet spot. 

“We’re able to offer the consumer something great at a price that most people can afford,” he said. “The biggest lift is about the intentionality to say anything and everything we do … has to be great. And once you start to set that hurdle, everybody else starts to step up their game. But the premium space makes it possible to invest in innovation, quality, experience.”

While the idea is to grow two already big brands — Tommy Hilfiger with revenues of $4.8 billion and Calvin Klein with $3.9 billion — the umbrella company does not have to be big. 

“I want PVH to be a next-generation brand-building group,” Larsson said. “I want us to be as small as we can be from a PVH layer perspective and be as focused on the brands and as consumer-facing as possible. I’m a big believer in leveraging the scale of being big, but working like we are small and that’s hard and I’m fairly successful at it. 

“The hardest thing for us as a big group is to be close enough to the customer, fast enough, creative enough, risk-taking enough,” he said.  

In a big company it can be safer to not make a decision than to make the wrong decision, so Larsson said PVH tries to put the decision-makers as close to consumers as possible. 

“Is this a decision that we can quickly learn and improve on it?” he said. “OK, then it might not matter if it works or not. Then it’s just the momentum of learning and moving. Is it a big $200 million investment? Well, then we have to think that through.” 

The idea is to maintain momentum. 

“The consumer keeps moving,” Larsson said. “That’s why we have to be able to learn, to improve, to test, and most big companies are set up to control versus create. That’s why the learning cycle is so important.”

That’s about learning from and keeping up with the consumer. 

Larsson is also learning about himself.

“I seldom today have the best ideas, almost never,” said Larsson, making an admission that is exceedingly rare in the high-powered world of the corporate corner office. 

“But what I can do uniquely in my role is to take away hurdles, to give people the confidence to say, go test, I’ll back you even if that doesn’t work,” he said. “Can you quickly improve? Can you change?” 

At PVH, change is still the order of the day — in the structure of the business, at the brands, among the brand’s consumers and more. 

Larsson is also keen to reframe technology and what it’s used for in the fashion industry. 

“We talk too much sometimes about technology and not enough about creativity,” he said. “Creativity is the core. A brand is an aspirational world that somebody dreams of and the product is the physical representation of that. Creativity is number one and technology is an enabler to that. Technology used to be the infrastructure, but now it is getting increasingly to become an amplifier.”

And in a world that is ever-more technological, he said creativity will go a long way with consumers. 

“People crave unique, authentic, creative, takeaway things,” he said.