Business Breakdowns
· Chris Davies
How they think about the brand, how they imagine the brand. And you'll have fashion shows which then reveal on a periodic basis what that designer has come up with. Remo Ruffini is not that keen on industry standards and the usual way of doing things. And part of the reason for this is that when he bought Moncler back in the early 2000s, you already had some pretty big brands out there in the world. So if you want to try to compete with these, you've got to do something that's really quite different. And this really culminates in the launch of Genius in 2018. And the idea is that you just collaborate with a whole bunch of different designers during the course of an individual year. So I think so far they've probably collaborated with 80 plus different designers over the history of Genius so far. But what it does is basically generates hype and excitement and interest. These are limited edition, time-limited collections that they develop with individual designers, and they've actually blown this up to a much larger scale. So actually, if you go back last year, they had this incredible extravaganza in Shanghai where they basically took Genius and in one go had 10 different designers collaborating in this old shipyard which had been completely revamped. It was a bit like Disneyland for fashion designers. And they had 8,000 people attend. It was live streamed by nearly 60 million people. And so you had these 10 different areas where these different designers would interact with the Moncler brand, reimagine, reinterpret it. So you had one section which was Donald Glover with an agricultural theme, another explore the intersection, connection between fashion and AI. So that was really interesting. To really understand how it works, you need to see it as part of a flywheel. It very much drives interest and excitement for the brand. So those are the three pillars, I would say, the core collection, Grenoble, and then you've also got Genius as well.
· Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S0: And I think you've covered a decent amount about what makes Ruffini different. But are there other things that you would point to just in terms of him taking over this business, which was struggling at the time? He was opportunistic in terms of the time that he acquired it. You've described some of the ways that he's left his fingerprints on it. But anything else that would get into the ethos of Ruffini, because he does seem like such a primary character within this business story.
· Chris Davies
[00:00:00] S1: Oh, yeah. He is the impresario in this case, for sure. So he's the chairman and CEO. Moncler doesn't have a creative director, but he's like the driving force on the creative side as well. He is restless. He is constantly innovating, looking for ways to reinvent Moncler. I've heard him say in the past, we should never compromise, never get bored, so we don't bore others. And this, as a philosophy, has worked pretty well. So I think Moncler had about $45 million of revenue when Ruffini took over. He grew that tenfold to approximately $450 million by 2012, which was the year before the IPO. I think to really get into his head, you need to go back and look at his history. So actually, his parents were involved in the fabric industry a long time ago. So there are stories of him, aged six, seven, sitting around the kitchen table talking about fabrics and styles and the like. He said to us in a recent meeting that he used to have this light blue Moncler jacket when he was a kid, and he loved this jacket. But it really planted a seed for his career when he went to work for his father's business. So his father set up this business called Gianfranco Ruffini S.p.A. in the early 1980s. He actually moved out to the east coast of the US and Remo Ruffini actually went to work for him. For a while, but he was traveling around. He explored the east coast of the US and this was around the time back in the 1980s, when the sort of preppy lifestyle was taking off. Very much oriented around quality clothing, lots of links to sailing and tennis and these sorts of things. And it's the sort of style that's really survived. And people even today can still figure out what preppy actually means. But that inspired him and he came back to Italy, went back home to Como, and basically set up these two brands of his own, one of which was called New England. And he describes this period as basically a bit like going back to school. Now, these two brands were pretty successful. He sold both of them to a private company called Stefanel. This was in about 2000. Stefanel specializes in knitwear. But this gave him some liquidity. Now, I think I mentioned earlier, he was working as a creative consultant for the holding company which owned Moncler at the time, and they were really struggling with the fallout of the TMT crash. Were just looking to sell.
· Chris Davies
And so Remo Ruffini is basically in the right place at exactly the right time, and acquires this brand for about a million dollars in 2003, which is a real bargain. He acquires the operations in 2005 with the help of a private equity company. The operations are valued at about 1.2 billion euros. And you basically have this succession of private equity investors being involved, the likes of Carlyle, for example. Now, the IPO was originally planned to be around 2010, 2011, but for those of you who will remember what was happening around that time in Europe, the chat was all about Brexit, not Brexit, which people have been talking about so much since 2016. We had that referendum in the UK. Europe felt at the time like it was falling apart. There were all sorts of problems in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain. So the private equity firm that was involved basically decides, you know what, actually we're just going to sell to another private equity company. So this is Eurazeo, and the IPO is pushed out, but eventually happens. It happens in 2013, the share price pops, I think 40% or something on the day. It's an incredibly successful IPO. And then private equity gradually kind of sells down and we get to fully listed Moncler. So Ruffini is still very much invested most of his wealth, and he's multi billionaire by now. Most of his wealth is tied up in the business. So by the end of last year, his holding company actually held around 16% of the company. He's still around, he's still really important. He's a driving force. He's only 63, so he's kind of, in the luxury world, still a bit of a spring chicken. If you go and look at Bernard Arnault over at LVMH, who's been incredibly successful in the luxury business. He's in his late 70s. He's just got an extension to stick around in his capacities as chairman into his 80s, and he's fit as a fiddle. Ruffini's still young. I don't think he's going anywhere anytime soon.
· Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, Arnault's got his crop of the next generation of Arnault getting prepared in the wings, but I don't see him leaving anytime soon. So can you get into that? We've covered some of the backstory, we've covered the interesting history about how it's evolved. What does it look like today? Just from a numbers perspective, if you can paint the picture about size and any relative data points, I think that would be really helpful.
· Chris Davies
[00:00:00] S1: Sure. So last year, if you look at the whole Moncler group, it made 3.1 billion euros of revenue. So that's quite a substantial growth rate from that $45 million I told you about at the outset of Ruffini's involvement. Now, the lion's share of that is the Moncler brand I mentioned earlier. They did that Stone Island acquisition, which I know we're going to talk about because it's so important for thinking about the future and capital allocation generally. But the lion's share of the revenues really go to Moncler. That's about 2.7 billion euros. Stone Island is the rest. So just over 400 million, about 13% of group revenue. So to kind of put Moncler in context as a group, it's now bigger than Burberry and fast catching up to Gucci, which I think did just under 8 billion euros last year. And if you look at the sort of longer-term performance over the decade to the end of last year, the top line compounded at just over 16%, roughly the same for operating profit and earnings per share. For the five years to the end of last year is about 14% top line. And that is pretty incredible when you think about the fact that the pandemic happened in the middle of that. So you basically had two ski seasons kind of wiped out. And China, which is a really important market for Moncler, went through this horrible period of really extended lockdown. So I think that's pretty impressive from a revenue growth standpoint as far as margins are concerned, I mean, the operating margin of the business, the EBIT margin, is really hovering around 30%. And it's been there thereabouts for the last four years. But actually, if you go back to 2012, since then, they've been above 28% every year since 2020, which obviously was a tough year for reasons we all know. And they did just under 26% in that year, which was actually pretty decent. So, actually, when I look back at our internal meeting notes, minutes from discussing this company, which we've been following for the best part of a decade, one of the big doubts was really about margins. How do you maintain margins that are this high? You guys have interviewed one of my colleagues, Mark Urquhart, talking about Hermès, and actually, if you look at Hermès financial outputs, the operating margins have been in the low 40s. LVMH. If you look at their fashion, leather goods business, that's where Louis Vuitton sits.