How crazy is it that I just watched the movie "CoCo Chanel" and all of a sudden, BAM!, the CEO of Chanel shows up at my school. You all KNOW I was the first one there eager to see what this head-woman-in-charge had to say. So here is my rundown/review.
Background
So, to begin, she starts with her Bio. She is from a small town in Missouri and at the age of 16 she fell in love with France. She went there for a summer and fell more in love with each day.
She explained that she went to Yale University to study Cinema with an emphasis in French Film (surprise). Her big punch line of her career path is that she "walked out of the LSAT." She recalls that she went to take the test because "that was what you were supposed to do" but after an hour in she walked out.
She moved to Paris upon graduation from college, got an internship with L’Oreal, met a French husband and then moved back to the US.
When she moved back to the States her and her husband moved to San Francisco because they "liked it." There she called the GAP to try and get a job in marketing. Since there was no marketing program at the time she became a merchant until 1994 when she was asked to work on the brand Old Navy.
In 2002 she went to work for Banana Republic and after a year she joined Chanel and had to go back to Paris for a year. She said she always wanted to work in luxury retail but exclaimed never knew much about it saying "I mean, I liked luxury clothing." In 2007 she became the Global CEO at Chanel.
Takeaways
Now, she wanted to inform us of the things she learned over the years, here they are for you summed up:
About Chanel:
1. They emphasize creativity
2. They insist on quality and strive for excellence in service and product
3. They have a nique story, rich heritage and modernity
4. They have a decentralized structure
About having a job:
1. Learn to listen
2. Let passion lead your choices
3. Get your hands dirty
4. Have a vision
5. Break some rules
Myths to get out of your head:
1. More is better
2. Bottom line is king
3. Change or die
4. Get rid of people who are at the bottom
5. central organizing is key
She went on to discuss being a woman in business and how we are comfortable when a man leads a company but we need to break out of that comfort zone. Followed by (here is the shocked) a large Chanel plug about the new stores, the line, jewelry, perfume, and beauty products.
What was interesting to me
What I found the most interesting is her (or Chanel's) approach to the creative end. She relinquishes all the creative control of Karl Lagerfeld, saying "what Karl makes is what will be in the store." She continues saying that Chanel is not the type of company that thrives on customer feedback, they basically anticipate what the customer needs, without the use of actual customer feeback ( or so they say). The discussion on the creative part of Chanel was very much Karl focused, and when asked what she would do if Karl were to leave, she didn't have a true answer. She said that Karl makes a lot of lines each season and he is happy here and he will be designing for a longtime. Yes, that might be true, but he may not be with Chanel forever. Clearly, they do not have a back up plan.
Critiques
As you can tell already I have my own critiques, but my biggest concern is diversity of opinion. Maureen claims that this company is not hierarchical but throughout the speech she hints otherwise. She says that they have work groups that have the ability to contribute their ideas with campaigns and what the customer wants. (First of all, they don't care about what the customer wants and she made that very clear.) She added that these teams don't get to make decisions, but they are important. Oh really? So what about the diversity of opinions and thoughts. The point of having work groups is to have a diverse group of opinions that held aim the product at the particular customer at each store, or is that wrong ? How do you strive for top quality customer service, when you really don't engage the customer on what they want and need? hmm
I am also concerned about diversity in campaigns. After getting to about page 17 of google images, I have found no one advertisement that involved ANYONE of color for Chanel ( most of my results included Chanel Iman but never in an ad). During the presentation she showed us some ads as well, still no color. I am wondering what is going on with that? People of color buy Chanel and there are some great models of color that could be featured in those campaigns. Where is all the modernity she was talking about ?
Final Thoughts
In the end, she was an interesting person with a diverse retail background (Old Navy to Chanel) but it is troubling to me that some of the things that her very brand and company "stand for" are not the things they are doing: like being modern and keeping up with the times with diverse campaigns and having a diverse amount of opinions. Don't get me wrong, I like Chanel but I think that the views of Karl Lagerfeld ( who is notoriously controversial when it comes to race and size) are influencing the company a bit too much.
