Latest / The Pivot Podcast with Fexingo: How Businesses Change Direction and Survive Disruption / How Burberry Pivoted From Heritage Fashion to Digital Luxury
Transcript
- Lucas: So it's June 2026, and the luxury fashion world just watched another heritage brand fumble its digital strategy — but Burberry? Burberry actually pulled it off. And they did it nearly twenty years ago, long before most of their competitors even knew what a hashtag was. Luna: You're talking about Angela Ahrendts, right? She took over as CEO in 2006 and basically bet the entire house on digital. Lucas: Exactly. And that bet looked crazy at the time. Burberry was a 150-year-old trench coat maker. Their biggest asset was that check pattern — which, by the way, had been so over-licensed it was showing up on cheap plastic headbands in airport gift shops. The brand was tired. Luna: Right. And Ahrendts came in and said, we're going to be the first luxury brand that truly lives online. Lucas: Yeah, and this is where it gets specific. In 2009, Burberry launched something called 'Art of the Trench' — a user-generated content campaign where people uploaded photos of themselves wearing Burberry trench coats. It was basically Instagram before Instagram existed. They built a custom platform for it. Luna: I remember that. It was huge. And it was risky — letting customers control the brand image like that. But it worked because it felt authentic. Lucas: And it signaled something bigger. Ahrendts wasn't just doing a marketing campaign; she was restructuring the entire company around digital. She appointed a chief digital officer in 2010 — one of the first in luxury. She had every single employee — from the factory floor to the design studio — trained on using iPads and social media. Luna: Which, for a heritage brand with century-old traditions, must have been a huge cultural shift. Lucas: It really was. And look, these conversations we have on the show about companies making hard pivots — they take time and resources. A couple of dollars a month from listeners is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: Yeah, it makes a real difference. And it keeps us ad-free, so we can dig into the details without interruption. Lucas: So back to Burberry. One of the most concrete examples of their digital pivot was the Regent Street flagship store they opened in 2012. That store had RFID tags in the products — so when you walked into a fitting room, a mirror would turn into a screen showing you how the coat was made, or what it looked like on the runway. It was straight out of sci-fi. Luna: And that wasn't just a gimmick. It actually drove sales. Customers spent more time in the store and bought more items per visit. Lucas: Right. And they live-streamed their runway shows — again, before anyone else was doing it. In 2010, they streamed the show in 3D to cinemas in New York, Tokyo, and Paris. They were treating digital not as a separate channel but as the core of the experience. Luna: It's interesting because a lot of luxury brands resisted e-commerce for years, worried it would cheapen the brand. Burberry embraced it early. Lucas: And the numbers backed it up. Under Ahrendts, revenue grew from about $1.5 billion in 2006 to over $3.2 billion by 2014 when she left to join Apple. Digital accounted for a much bigger share of that growth than any of their competitors. Luna: But it wasn't just about selling online. They used digital to protect the brand's heritage. The 'Art of the Trench' campaign reinforced the trench coat as an icon — it made it cool again for a younger generation. Lucas: Exactly. And they were disciplined about it. They pulled back on licensing — those cheap headband deals — so the brand had cachet again. Then digital amplified that cachet instead of diluting it. Luna: So what's the lesson for other heritage companies? You can't just slap a digital layer on top of an old business model. Lucas: The lesson is that the pivot has to be structural. Ahrendts made digital a part of how Burberry operated — from supply chain to marketing to store design. It wasn't a separate 'digital department.' It was the operating system. Luna: And she had the conviction to do it before the rest of the industry caught on. By the time other luxury brands started taking digital seriously, Burberry had already set the standard. Lucas: That first-mover advantage mattered. Burberry's market cap roughly doubled during her tenure. And the brand perception shifted from stuffy and declining to innovative and desirable. Luna: It's a textbook pivot. And one that's still relevant today — especially as we see brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton now scrambling to catch up on digital. Lucas: Yeah, and it raises a question: could a similar pivot work today for a struggling heritage brand in any industry? Or has the window closed on that first-mover digital advantage? Luna: That's the question. Because now every brand is digital-native in some sense. But maybe the lesson is about conviction — betting big on a direction before it's obvious. Lucas: Right. Burberry's story isn't just about technology. It's about leadership willing to make a bold bet and then executing it with discipline. And that's a lesson that never goes out of style.