Gucci’s owner lost his patience. What came next was a grand reinvention.

livemint.com:

LONDON : Hours before a star-studded runway show at the Tate Modern museum in May, Gucci’s billionaire owner, François-Henri Pinault, huddled with his newly installed leadership team at its London office to figure out where one of the world’s most iconic brands was headed. With his wife, actress Salma Hayek, preparing for the show at a nearby hotel, Pinault pushed his team to define where Gucci should position itself in the market: higher than it is but not too high. His executives presented plans to pare back the many iterations of the interlocking GG logo and better harmonize the brand’s aesthetics.

The idea was to make Gucci’s famously wild fashions a bit more timeless, a bit less subject to the whims of aspirational shoppers chasing the latest trends. Such meetings hadn’t been a usual part of Pinault’s playbook—but they are quickly becoming one. After years of ceding substantial power to brand chiefs, Pinault is asserting more control over the operations of the myriad fashion houses that make up his family’s conglomerate, called Kering.

The shift is big and difficult. Pinault wants Kering’s brands to be less reliant on buzzy trendsetters—who are influential but fickle—and favored by more enduring, aesthetically conservative big-spenders. The plan seeks to move the brands closer to luxury stalwarts like Hermès and Chanel, whose products don’t tend to go out of fashion.

To do all this, Pinault has implemented the biggest shake-up of Kering in years, designed to better manage the execution of strategies at each of the brands, which include Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. The conglomerate was founded by Pinault’s father more than 60 years ago. Under both father and son, it has been distinguished by the considerable