From the top: Renzo Rosso
diesel’s engine
CEO and sole owner of megabrand Diesel, Renzo Rosso tells us what fuels his creativity
words by Josh Sims
A designwear store manager once advised his sales staff not to snub customers according to their clothes. The man in the suit has probably dressed up to go shopping, he said, but the man in the tattered jeans may well be a millionaire. In the case of Renzo Rosso, the little-known CEO of a company based in little-known Molvena, in Veneto, Italy, that couldn’t be more true.
He would almost certainly be wearing tattered jeans, as he has done every day since he was 15, claiming that they are integral to keeping his mood positive. He has also built a business around them, pioneering the now-stratospheric market not just for premium denim but also distressed denim, with nail guns and sanders artfully deployed to make pricey trousers look careworn before they’re out of the bag. It may have seemed counterintuitive to many designers at the time, but it worked. As for the bank balance, his company and assorted interests have a turnover of more than €1 billion, 3,000 staff and over 320 shops in 80 countries, with a push into Scandinavia – which it considers a trend-setting market for casualwear – on the cards.
The company is Diesel, a purveyor of fresh, vintage-style casualwear across a number of international brands that, in total, produces over 3,000 different pieces every six months. This covers everything from accessories to kidswear and cool clothing for teenagers. Following the acquisition of the manufacturing and distribution rights for designer brands such as Martin Margiela and DSquared2, Diesel also sells high fashion for design-conscious grown-ups.
Then there is the huge Diesel brand itself, which is slowly but surely being repositioned as “upmarket” – with concession stands alongside designer names, a New York catwalk show and prices in some instances going up by 25%, all without losing business – because Rosso believes that the fashion market is becoming increasingly polarised between the top end and the high street. The company recently signed a deal with L’Oréal to make its debut fragrance. It has also opened its first business in India, with China in its sights, and plans are under way to start selling items for the home.
Indeed, Rosso has good reason to drink to his own success – perhaps with a glass of Diesel wine, launched in the spring of 2006, accompanied by some bread and Diesel olive oil, both produced on the 55-hectare Diesel Farm that Rosso owns in the hills near the company’s HQ, which is, refreshingly, in the middle of nowhere.
In some respects, these are suitably homely products for a man who has been outspoken in his preference for a local life over flashbulbs at flash fashion parties; for one who grew up in rural Padua, the son of a peasant farmer, and who has now returned to the earth, albeit after a spell in his private jet or the penthouse suite of his Diesel hotel, the Pelican in Miami, the interior of which was designed by Swede Magnus Ehrland. Despite the money, and despite counting Bono and the Dalai Lama as friends, this is symptomatic of the fashion emperor, who likes to keep things unaffected, if permanently clad in denim.
“My education was simple and quite tough because I had to do my bit on the farm. That’s probably why I look for the genuine and the authentic in everything,” says the 51-year-old. “I like to hang out with my friends in my hometown, go to a nice restaurant with my family, play soccer with a local team. I have much more fun with them than I ever do with the rich and famous. That said, I do like it when people recognise me in the street and tell me that they like what we do. That’s the only kind of fame I’m looking for, though, not my name on the label.”
It is certainly a testament to the brand power of Diesel, rather than Renzo Rosso, that Diesel wine and oil have not been released to guffaws echoing around the hip interiors of Marketingland. Instead, they seem to have been snapped up by fashion fans and foodies alike, even though Rosso has released them in uneconomical cases of five, his favourite number.
But then Rosso has always gone his own instinctive way, even if he claims that his decisions are mostly based on an almost overwhelming flow of information. Rosso reads more than 200 magazines a month, has 100 young, well-connected trendspotters travelling the globe and reporting in with new ideas, and claims to reply to all the e-mails sent to him by his employees within 24 hours of receiving them.
The whole premise behind Rosso’s business was once considered mad. After graduating in industrial textiles, he started making bell-bottomed jeans for himself and then began selling them to his friends. Contrary to sound business sense he had a notion that the denim market, then dominated by the likes of Levi’s, Lee and Wrangler, had room for a tiny Italian upstart. The USP? The jeans would look old before their time. The trick? He’d charge extra for the privilege. This would be premium denim, at a time when jeans were considered a cheap commodity product. But he needed a vehicle. Rosso co-founded the Genius Group in 1978, an Italian company that nurtured new fashion brands, among them Diesel and designer Katharine Hamnett, when Diesel had a turnover of a mere €2.2m. Rosso reckoned it had potential and, in 1985, he bought it outright.
“That was my most difficult moment in business so far,” says Rosso. “I was very young and I had to plan a strategy for a company which at the time was not in good economic shape. But since then we’ve achieved consistent growth, so every day has been a high point. Put it this way: every day I receive a new request for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) on Diesel. But I still work out of passion, not for the money. I couldn’t sell Diesel because Diesel is my life. Besides, I like to be able to take risks, not to have to refer to a board about figures and profits.”
These risks include Diesel’s irreverent advertising campaign, which mocks the aspirational nature of fashion promotion with its “for successful living” tagline. One of its most popular ads analysed the stains on a garment, concluding it was “28% pigeon shit”. In 2000, Rosso created a storm by announcing Diesel’s sponsorship of a young Polish pop star called Joanna Zychowicz, touted as the next Madonna. For months the press went crazy for the tidbits Diesel gave them, announcing her tour and her album. The punchline? She didn’t exist.
“I love to say that Diesel is an attitude more than a company – it’s all about being brave, confident with yourself and having the desire to innovate,” says Rosso. “Irreverence, in the sense of being original and unpredictable, will always be part of the brand’s attitude because I think it’s the best way to start an individual thinking. Take the distressed jeans. In order to convince buyers who balked at the concept, I promised that I’d take back any unsold jeans. And how many times did that happen? Never. Not once. But that kind of idea can’t ever become a formula. Creativity is not a formula. It’s constant research, and that needs dedication and an open mind. Our first and ultimate goal is always to do things not just better than the others, but before the others too.”
Recent years have seen Rosso’s decision to take on the global players and reinvent a mass-market product as a luxury item fully vindicated. Fashion has deemed denim the everyday, all-occasions fabric, and the premium sector has exploded, with ever more esoteric and expensive brands launching each month. These many imitators might hold the seeds of Diesel’s destruction, were it not for the fact that Rosso long ago moved the company forward. Its heart may still be made of indigo cotton, helping to keep it attractively idiosyncratic, but the body is a brand that could now conceivably offer any lifestyle product. It’s up there with Ikea or Apple – ripe for Rosso’s son Stefano, one of his six children, to take over should he ever retire.
“I’m not surprised at all at the explosion in premium denim,” says Rosso. “After all, I’ve believed in it from the very beginning. We were pioneers in its creation. Some years ago people in the industry were talking about a ‘denim decrease’ but it didn’t happen. And I think the future is still bright for denim. The amount of new brands launching on the market proves it. It’s a strong, concrete signal of a great interest in the fabric.
“Besides, once the denim fever is definitely over, only those brands with the real know-how will survive,” he adds. “And I truly believe in innovation. It’s with that value that a company can make a difference and reach for long-term success, not just short-lived fame.”
rosso’s 5 tips for success
1 Foster creativity
2 Think outside the box
3 Believe in your intuition
4 Listen, listen and listen some more to the people around you
5 Work with passion
Bookmark This Post
