Magazine·Ralph
Lauren
Inside
Ralph Lauren’s luxe reset—and the CEO who made it stick
Patrice
Louvet brought discipline, premium focus, and modern marketing to steer the
American icon out of its discount spiral.
Alex
Fradkin for Fortune
https://fortune.com/article/ralph-lauren-luxury-fashion-retail-patrice-louvet/
Phil
Wahba
By Phil
Wahba
Senior
Writer
October
2, 2025 at 5:30 AM EDT
17 min
read
This
April, designer Ralph Lauren commandeered Manhattan’s sumptuous Clock Tower
Building for his eponymous company’s fall 2025 fashion show—and proceeded to
pack the place with boldface names and influencers young and old, all curious
to see what the brand had come up with.
On a pass
through the room, maneuvering around the building’s marble Corinthian columns
and grandiose staircase, you could spot Anna Wintour of Vogue, not far from
actor Anne Hathaway (in a beige trench coat) and country star Kacey Musgraves
(in a white tank top and cowboy hat). Nearby, Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld
and Veep fame was hanging out with Lauren’s wife, Ricky.
The show,
“The Modern Romantics,” unveiled a collection of women’s wear—an area where the
company is avidly boosting its presence. Models sported aviator jackets,
cashmere wraps, and boots in styles that blended masculine and feminine, mixing
hard materials like leather (lots of it) with soft ones like lace. The fashion
press would later declare the event a home run. And once all 47 models had
walked the runway, the 85-year-old Ralph Lauren himself appeared to rapturous
applause on the mezzanine, taking it all in.
Watching
the designer from below, beaming deferentially, was a dapper, bespectacled man
sporting a natty pocket square: Patrice Louvet, Ralph Lauren’s CEO. Though he’s
hardly tabloid famous, the fashionistas in attendance knew him well; he was
deep in conversation with Wintour for part of the evening. And if Ralph Lauren
the company is firing on all cylinders financially and culturally these days,
it’s in large part thanks to Louvet, whose business acumen has complemented
Ralph Lauren the man’s nearly infallible instincts.
Louvet,
CEO since 2017, came from Procter & Gamble, a world of toothpaste and razor
blades, but he has arguably saved the most important American fashion company
from the threat of obsolescence. In the years before his arrival, Ralph
Lauren—long a barometer for the financial health and cred of U.S. fashion—had
seen declining sales and profits, and more worryingly, declining brand equity.
In its quest for growth and a wider customer base, it had become a fixture at
discount chains like J.C. Penney, Kohl’s, and T.J. Maxx—retailers that don’t
exactly scream “timeless luxury.” And Ralph Lauren’s welter of overlapping
sub-brands was confusing its customers.
“There
are a number of levers you can pull to continue fast growth that you can
convince yourself are not problematic,” Louvet tells Fortune, describing that
spiral at company headquarters in Manhattan on a hot day in early summer. He’s
dressed in an immaculate navy blue suit from Purple Label, the company’s luxury
men’s wear line. “You say we will do a little bit more, it’ll be fine, then yet
more the next quarter, and you keep dialing it up,” he continued. Until one
day, like a frog that’s been boiled gradually, your brand equity dies.
For
Louvet, the solution for a company with decades of history was to return to
what made it coveted in the first place. “Ralph founded this company as a
luxury company, and what we needed to do was go back to this mindset,” says
Louvet, who’s 61.
Under
Louvet, Ralph Lauren exited more than 1,000 U.S. department stores, reducing
the brand’s very high exposure to that declining retail format. It has built
more stand-alone stores and focused its product assortment on pricier items
around which it can sustain its understated-but-upscale fashion narrative.
Over
eight years, Louvet has refashioned a company whose top line, $7.1 billion in
the most recent fiscal year, is on a steady upward course, and whose profits
and operating margins are at 13-year highs. Average unit retail, a metric that
serves as a composite of the prices a company charges for all its products, has
doubled. (It helps to be selling calfskin shoulder bags for $2,200. Suits like
the one Louvet wore to our interview retail for a tidy $2,995.) Not everything
is extravagantly priced—a perennial hit is the $398 U.S. flag cotton Polo
sweater—but fewer items are discounted every year.
The
luxury halo appears to have returned—just in time for a period when more people
are dressing up again after years of wearing athleisure everywhere. “Ralph
Lauren has always been synonymous with quality, and that really resonates with
consumers today,” says TD Cowen analyst John Kernan. Savvy marketing has helped
the 58-year-old company become a hit with Gen Z shoppers and influencers, a
promising sign for the long term. One big recent coup: In the social media
posts where Taylor Swift announced her engagement to football star Travis
Kelce, both were wearing Ralph Lauren.
Louvet is
quick to share credit, not least with the man whose name is on the door of
every store and on every product. As executive chairman and chief creative
officer, Ralph Lauren still plays a central role in how the company operates.
Even more so than most CEOs, leaders who work with founders need emotional
intelligence, and Louvet, by all accounts, has plenty; he knows how to lead
without being the star of the show.
“Ralph
founded this company as a luxury company. What we needed to do was go back to
this mindset.”
Patrice
Louvet on Ralph Lauren’s Revival
David
Lauren, chief branding and innovation officer and the only one of Lauren’s
three children to become a company executive, is among Louvet’s fans. “When you
find someone who also brings a unique humility, kindness, self-awareness, and
maturity,” he says, “it’s an amazing combination.
Ralph
Lauren, born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx in 1939, has been famous for longer
than most American shoppers have been alive. Though he never went to fashion
school, doesn’t do his own sketches, and has no training in how to cut fabrics,
he’s always had a sharp eye and no shortage of chutzpah. Lauren first won
attention in 1967, with neckties that were wider than was fashionable at the
time. When Bloomingdale’s told him it would buy his ties only if he narrowed
them and replaced their Polo tags with Bloomingdale’s labels, he said no; a few
months later, Bloomingdale’s relented.
Lauren
has always said he wanted to see the clothes he saw in the movies in stores.
And selling that fantasy—whether the WASP aesthetic of a Connecticut estate, or
the preppy panache of upscale college kids, or the cowboy feel of his own
Colorado ranch—has remained at the heart of his aesthetic vision. As filmmaker
Ken Burns said in the 2019 documentary Very Ralph, “You’re not just buying an
article of clothing, you’ve joined a narrative.”
Even so,
says fashion historian Emma McClendon, Ralph Lauren has never tried to be
cutting-edge. “What they’re attempting to be is the standard-bearer of American
style,” she says. Being “timeless,” a word company executives use ad nauseam,
is perhaps the cornerstone of its identity. By the 1980s and ’90s, Ralph
Lauren’s suits became the uniform for many men on Wall Street, and Lauren has
dressed first ladies from Nancy Reagan to Melania Trump, along with countless
celebrities.
But over
the decades, the company’s hyper-speed rise sowed the seeds of an existential
crisis. Much of its growth was fueled by licensing deals. By 2000, some 26
outside companies were making and advertising the wares Lauren designed,
limiting the company’s control over everything from quality to distribution to
brand equity. And the company faced enormous pressure to keep the pace going
after it went public in 1997.
Management
delivered: Between 2007 and 2015, Ralph Lauren revenue rose 80%, to a peak of
$7.6 billion. But the quest led the company down some ill-advised roads. By the
late 2000s, convinced it could retain credibility while selling lower-end
brands at discount chains, Ralph Lauren was everywhere from Saks Fifth Avenue
to J.C. Penney. Trying to be all things to all people “is often the beginning
of the end for luxury brands,” says Silvia Bellezza, a former LVMH executive
who teaches marketing at Columbia Business School.
Ralph
Lauren also took risks in its manufacturing, overproducing for fear of leaving
revenue on the table—which in turn led to mass discounting of unsold goods. It
was unclear what this company was anymore: one that competed in luxury with the
likes of Brioni, or one that sold socks at $10 for a four-pack at T.J. Maxx.
As
business began to erode, the Lauren family had one vital advantage: They held
the vast majority of voting shares (85% currently). That control shielded Ralph
Lauren from the drastic decisions that could have been imposed by an activist
investor, and it gave the family the room it needed to fix the company.
In 2015,
Lauren announced he was stepping down as CEO (but staying on as chief creative
officer). He handed the reins to Stefan Larsson, who had seen wild success as
global president of Old Navy, and whom Lauren encouraged to bring in fresh
thinking. Larsson began the difficult process of reform: In 2016, Ralph Lauren
laid off 8% of its staff, eliminating 1,200 jobs. It also began closing stores,
including its new Polo store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue—a move that fomented a
sense the company was in crisis.
But for a
founder with such a strong point of view, ceding any measure of control proved
to be difficult. Larsson was gone by May 2017, after only 20 months. Media
reports at the time suggested that Lauren and Larsson agreed on where the
company should be heading but not on how to get there. (Larsson, who is now CEO
of PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, says he remains
a big fan of the company. “I was honored to play a part in its journey,
contributing to that strong foundation and heritage that Ralph and Patrice have
so successfully tapped into,” he told Fortune.)
Enter
Patrice Louvet. His nearly 29 years at P&G had endowed him with enviable
brand-building chops and mastery of the intricacies of global supply chains. He
also knew how to run a big team. Ralph Lauren’s workforce had ballooned to
25,000, generating an org chart that was bureaucratic and full of overlap;
Louvet patiently simplified it. “The company was hungry for someone who could
organize it into a smoothly functioning system,” says David Lauren. “A lot of
creativity didn’t have an outlet.”
After the
Sturm und Drang preceding his arrival, Louvet’s people skills were just as big
of a draw. One of his first moves might seem banal: creating a mission
statement that galvanized the troops after the 2016 layoffs. Louvet, who has a
multi-hour weekly lunch with Lauren to talk shop and life, marvels at how his
boss regularly asks him big existential questions, like “Are you happy?” “No
one at P&G ever asked me that. It’s an amazing question,” Louvet says. And
he now asks the same question of his own direct reports.
However
tight the partnership, Lauren ultimately calls the shots. Louvet’s contract
contains a provision stipulating that Lauren has final say on brand and
creative decisions, along with hiring and dismissals of top executives in
design and marketing. (Larsson’s contract had no such provision.)
Louvet
says he and Lauren simply found the areas in which each is best suited to lead:
“It’s not written, ‘Patrice, you do this; Ralph, you do that,’ and yet
naturally we have fallen into our respective roles.” Lauren himself is quick to
hail their collaboration. “This company has never been a one-man show,” he said
in a statement. “No one achieves this alone.”
Brand
erosion has a way of going slowly at first, then snowballing. That was the
situation Louvet inherited at Ralph Lauren. Sales fell $1.3 billion, or 18%,
between 2016 and 2018, and profit was plunging. (Sales began to rebound in 2019
but tanked again during the pandemic.)
Some of
Louvet’s changes involved making Ralph Lauren smaller to make it stronger.
Building on Larsson’s work, he continued to get the brand out of department
stores that were not showcasing it well. The company has exited about
two-thirds of the North American department stores where it had a presence at
its peak. In 2011, Macy’s alone sold $1 billion worth of Ralph Lauren goods,
accounting for 22% of the fashion brand’s sales. Now it’s a fraction of that.
All the
while, Ralph Lauren expanded its own store base. Its footprint remains
relatively small: It has 269 company-operated stores worldwide. But at those
stores, it tunes the setting for maximum impact. Lauren’s cinematic
sensibilities inspire the look and establish a visual vocabulary that sets a
Ralph Lauren blazer apart from a rival’s. The Ralph Lauren flagship, on Madison
Avenue in Manhattan, exemplifies this approach. Sturdy wooden desks, leather
armchairs, and horse-themed photography suggest an exclusive country club, but
one with warmth. It’s a marked contrast to the department store vibe of the
2010s—think piles of unfolded Polo Bear sweaters strewn across tables.
Stand-alone
stores also help Ralph Lauren build buzz. The women’s store, across Madison
from the flagship, is home to the popular Ralph’s Coffee, which has lines
around the block on most days. (It’s the original Ralph’s: There are now 30
worldwide, with more on the way.) The company has placed its luxury handbags
right by the coffee shop, the better to entice upscale locals and tourists
alike. Louvet hopes Ralph Lauren can become as dominant in handbags as it is in
sweaters and polo shirts.
The
company also sells antique jewelry and vintage clothing at that store, to add
to the treasure-hunt fun so many retailers forsake in pursuit of efficiency.
Back at the men’s flagship building, there’s a new, hyper-luxurious suite that
the biggest spenders can use for private shopping or private events. Downtown,
the popular Double RL store in SoHo sells leather jackets and jeans adored by
creative types, albeit those who have a bit more money.
Dotting
the world with stores is not in the cards. Louvet says the company will remain
focused on its “gateway cities” (it currently has 30 and plans to add 20 over
the next three years), while serving others via its website or its wholesale
partners. But the elevated presentation at its own stores has allowed it to
more clearly differentiate its subbrands. One of Louvet’s early moves was to
sell mass-market brand Club Monaco, the better to strengthen the remaining
brands’ identities.
“We
sometimes get reduced to, ‘You’re the preppy style guys,’” Louvet says. “But
actually this brand is multidimensional. You want to be a cowboy in Colorado?
Double RL gives you that. And you want to be some dandy on Savile Row? Purple
Label can give you that. You want to be a college kid at Boston University? We
have rugby shirts.”
That
clearer differentiation among brands allows Ralph Lauren to sell some of its
Purple Label men’s dress shirts for $800 while selling similar-looking ones
under Polo for $138—without confusing, or angering, shoppers.
The
company has also gotten much better at marketing to those shoppers and
gathering information about them. Ralph Lauren’s marketing budget is about 7.3%
of sales, roughly double what it was a few years ago. It’s become more targeted
and effective, seeking the young consumer who favors “old money” and classic
looks but wants more affordable prices than Hermès or Balenciaga offers.
Ralph
Lauren now has much deeper data it can analyze, not just for personalizing ads
but to figure out what products would do best under what sub-brand. “We are
more precise, more targeted, more intentional,” says chief product and
merchandising officer Halide Alagöz. While roughly 70% of Ralph Lauren’s goods
are similar year in, year out, that data helps the company reduce the risk of
misfires for the other 30%, or simply to know if a new jean jacket might make
more sense for RRL or for Polo.
Alagöz
insists that the science of merchandising doesn’t choke off the art. New
collections continue to reflect designers’ passions: For example, Ralph Lauren
recently launched an acclaimed collection, Oak Bluffs, evoking the crisp style
at historically Black colleges and in the Black enclave on Martha’s Vineyard.
It also collaborated with Major League Baseball to create sweaters, satin
jackets, and the like bearing iconic team logos.
Whatever
the balance of art and science, the company is winning over young customers.
Research firm Kantar’s BrandZ tracker found Ralph Lauren has the fourth-highest
brand equity in the luxury apparel category among young people, a marked
improvement from just five years ago.
This
popularity has come much to Louvet’s relief. He recalls being asked by friends
before starting his CEO job whether Ralph Lauren could still be relevant. “It
was clear at the time that for the younger generation, the answer was no,” he
says. Now, young people are dying for a table at the Polo Bar, a
celebrity-packed eatery that is one of the hardest places to land a reservation
in Manhattan. The bar features a $110 steak and a $495 martini: Timeless
luxury, in food and beverage form.
In 2022,
as Ralph Lauren began to recover from the pandemic, it unveiled a three-year
growth plan, grandiosely titled “The Next Great Chapter.” Women are central
characters in this story: The company is sharply focused on its nearly $2
billion women’s business, which represents only about 30% of apparel sales.
Categories like handbags and outerwear are under-tapped, the company believes,
as are markets like India and cities other than the gateways. “I am planting
the seeds for my successor,” Louvet says.
The
positive reviews the women’s show garnered in April demonstrate that Louvet has
much to work with. But in fashion, by definition, a brand can never sit on its
laurels. “It’s got to stay fresh,” says Louvet. Indeed, his boss demands as
much. “As soon as we’re done with a fashion show, [Ralph] celebrates for about
12 seconds, maybe 15, and then he’ll say, ‘What’s the next thing going to be,
and how are we going to raise the bar?’”
Doing
more with fewer brands
Ralph
Lauren’s portfolio includes a dozen or so sub-brands—considerably fewer than a
decade ago—and each has a particular target clientele. Here are the biggest, in
descending order of fanciness
Ralph
Lauren collection (women) and Ralph Lauren Purple Label (men)
The ne
plus ultra brands on the roster, where the company competes with luxury
heavyweights like Brioni and Hermès. Many items are hand-tailored, and quite a
few made in Italy. (A Purple Label cotton-linen denim Western men’s shirt
fetches $995, while a large calfskin tote goes for $4,400.)
Double RL
A
reference to the initials Ralph Lauren and his wife, Ricky, share, Double RL is
a high-end line inspired by vintage work wear and American West iconography. A
comparable T-shirt that costs $50 at Polo costs about $80 at RRL. Mostly
focused on men’s wear since its 1993 founding, Double RL is now going after the
women’s market.
Polo
Ralph Lauren
The
company’s flagship brand. While far less expensive than Collection or Purple
Label, Polo, with its immediately recognizable, ubiquitous polo player logo, is
not exactly cheap, with some sweaters going for $400. The brand focuses on
preppy looks that evoke an active lifestyle.
This
brand is focused on more technical sports apparel, offering a range of
moisture-wicking Polo shirts and outdoor gear such as pullovers and
windbreakers. There is an emphasis on golf apparel.
Lauren
Ralph Lauren
This
women’s line caters to what Ralph Lauren calls “aspirational” luxury seekers,
with lower prices than the company’s other brands.
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