Two of the biggest fashion houses made exactly the same decision within months of each other. One became the hottest brand in the world. The other watched its parent company's share price fall the day it was announced. And, it has nothing to do with the people they hired.
In December 2024, Chanel announced that Matthieu Blazy would become its new creative director. A few months later, Gucci announced that Demna would be taking over there.
If you don't follow fashion closely, those names won't mean much, so I’ve summarised it quickly for you. Both men are considered among the most talented designers alive. Blazy had spent three years making Bottega Veneta one of the most admired labels in the industry. While Demna had spent a decade turning Balenciaga into a cultural force, the kind of brand teenagers argue about online. Two enormous houses, two of the best hires available, announced within months of each other.
And then the results went in completely opposite directions.
Chanel became the hottest brand in the world (not a figure of speech). The Lyst Index, which tracks global fashion demand, put Chanel at number one for the first time in its history, and then it stayed there the following quarter. Brand Finance valued the house at 37.9 billion US dollars, up 45%, making it the fastest-growing name in the entire luxury top 50.
Gucci's announcement was met rather differently. Kering, who owns Gucci, saw its share price fall around 12% in the aftermath, and the reception in China, a crucial market for the house, was reportedly lukewarm.
Same decision. Same calibre of hire. Wildly different outcomes. And once you understand why, it stops being a fashion story and becomes one of the more useful lessons available to anyone building a business right now.
$13.4 million
The media value generated by the announcement of Blazy's appointment to Chanel alone, according to Launchmetrics. Not a campaign, a press release.
Down 24%
Gucci's sales declined year on year in 2024, before Demna was hired. Kering's overall profit fell 62% in the same period. This wasn’t a brand that needed sharpening. It needed rescuing.
Up 45%
The growth in Chanel's brand value to 37.9 billion US dollars, per Brand Finance, making it the fastest-growing brand in luxury. Chanel is privately held, so we see valuation and demand signals rather than reported sales.
50 million
The number of high-end customers Bain estimates left the luxury market entirely in just two years. The reason wasn't design, it was actually price.
When a business is struggling, the instinct is to change the most visible thing, because it feels decisive and everyone can see you doing it. Fashion's version is hiring a famous creative director. Yours might be a rebrand, a new website, a new hire or a content push. But, no one ever asks, “Was the visual thing, actually the problem, or was it something deeper?”
It's tempting to read this as Chanel picking better than Gucci did. However, that isn't what happened, because Demna is an extraordinary designer with a proven record of transforming a house. Balenciaga was a quiet, respected, slightly sleepy label before him and a global obsession after. If raw talent decided these things, Gucci made a brilliant hire.
The difference is the state of the business each man was walking into.
Chanel wasn't broken. Virginie Viard had left abruptly in mid-2024 after 5 years in the role and nearly 30 years at the company, and the house sat without a creative director for 6 months. But the business underneath was healthy. The codes were intact, the customer was still there, and the thing people loved about Chanel still existed. Blazy was brought in to sharpen something that already worked.
Gucci, on the other hand, was in serious trouble. Sales down 24% in a year. A house that had swung from Alessandro Michele's maximalism to a much quieter approach under Sabato De Sarno and lost a sense of what it stood for somewhere in the middle. Demna wasn't hired to sharpen Gucci, he was hired to save it.
A brilliant creative hire is an amplifier, not a cure. If the business underneath is sound, the right person multiplies what's already there. If it isn't, you've just bought an enormous amount of attention and pointed it directly at a problem you haven't fixed yet.
That's why the market reacted the way it did. Investors weren't questioning Demna's talent. They were questioning whether talent was the thing Gucci was missing, and whether one person, however gifted, could reverse a decline that had already been running for years across multiple creative directions.
The same logic applies at every scale. Hiring a brilliant marketer into a business with a weak offer doesn’t produce brilliant marketing. It produces a frustrated brilliant marketer and a louder version of the same problem.
There's a second reason these hires keep happening, and I don’t think it’s really about design at all.
Blazy's appointment to Chanel generated 13.4 million US dollars in media value from the announcement alone. Not from a collection, not from a campaign, not from a single photograph of a product. From the news that a person had been given a job.
Think about what that means commercially. There is no advertising buy in luxury that delivers that kind of attention for the cost of a press release and a non-compete clause. The hire isn’t just a creative decision, it's one of the most efficient marketing moves available, and the people making these decisions are far too smart not to know it.
When the announcement of a decision generates more attention than anything the decision actually produces, you're not watching a strategy. You're watching a campaign, which isn’t automatically wrong. It's only wrong when the attention is being used to avoid a harder conversation.
And this is where it gets uncomfortable, because attention is exactly what a struggling brand should be most careful with. Attention magnifies whatever it lands on. If the product and the price and the experience are right, enormous attention is the best thing that can happen to you. If they aren't, you've just invited the entire industry to come and look closely at the thing that isn't working.
Chanel could afford the spotlight because the house underneath could withstand inspection. Gucci was asking for the spotlight at precisely the moment it had the most to hide.
Bain's research found that roughly 50 million high-end customers left the luxury market in the space of 2 years. Not drifted between brands. Left. And the reason wasn't that the designs stopped being good. It was expensive. Years of steady increases finally pushed past the point where enough people believed the number on the tag was worth paying.
So, the industry had a value problem. And it responded by changing the people who design the clothes.
Changing your creative director doesn’t make a $6,000 handbag feel worth that, to someone who has already quietly decided that it isn't. A new designer can make you want something, but it can’t make you believe the price is fair. Those are two completely different levers, and the industry reached for the one it knew how to pull.
Businesses almost always choose the problem they know how to solve over the problem they actually have. A creative problem can be fixed with a hire, and a hire can be announced. A value problem means admitting you've been charging more than you're worth, and there's no press release for that.
What makes this more than cynicism is that the people running these houses appear to understand it perfectly well. In the interview announcing Jonathan Anderson's move to Dior, Delphine Arnault reportedly agreed that pricing was a significant issue the house needed to address. And then they appointed a designer.
Which is not stupidity. It's the oldest pattern in business: the hard structural fix is slow, unglamorous and admits fault. The visible fix is fast, exciting and looks like leadership. Most organisations, under pressure, will take the second one every single time.
Chanel's heat is real, but heat and sales are not the same thing, and the house is privately held so we can't check that it’s working. The index that crowned Chanel had to rewrite its own methodology recently after being criticised for ranking a brand number one while its sales were visibly falling. Because desire isn’t revenue.
On the other hand, Gucci's story is only beginning. Demna has transformed a house before, the early share price reaction was a judgement on a press release rather than on any work, and plenty of brands have been written off on the way to being right. What we can assess now is the decision and the condition it was made in, not the outcome.
A great hire amplifies what’s already existing. It’s not a cure.
If the business underneath is healthy, bringing in genuine talent multiplies what's already working. If it isn't, you've added cost and expectation to an unresolved problem. Before you hire to fix something, be honest about whether the gap is capability or whether it's the thing the capability would be pointed at.
Be careful what you point attention at.
Attention is a magnifier, not a solution. A big launch, a rebrand, a campaign or a high-profile partner will make more people look closely at your business. That's wonderful if the product, the price and the experience hold up to inspection, and damaging if they don't. Fix the thing first, then invite the audience.
Notice when you're choosing the problem you know how to solve.
When something's not working, write down the actual diagnosis before you write down the plan. If the plan is the thing you were always going to be most comfortable doing, pause. We are all drawn to the fix that sits inside our existing skillset, and that’s almost never a coincidence.
You cannot creatively-direct your way out of a pricing problem.
If customers have decided you're not worth what you charge, no amount of new visual identity, new messaging or new talent changes that maths. Either the value needs to increase, or the price doesn’t. Both are legitimate answers. Pretending it's a communication issue is not.
The visible fix is usually the comfortable one. Interrogate it.
Rebrands, new websites, new hires and new campaigns all share one quality: everyone can see you doing them. Structural fixes to pricing, product, delivery or margin are slow, invisible and often involve admitting something didn't work. The second kind is usually the one that matters.
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