“Burberry has always been at its best when it balances the heritage with innovation,” Joshua Schulman contends.
“Fashion is not a solo business, it’s a team sport,” said Joshua Schulman, chief executive officer of Burberry, citing a “high-performance culture grounded in creative and commercial alchemy” as a key goal for propelling the British luxury brand, and describing its current creative director Daniel Lee as a “great partner” in that effort.
Speaking at the WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit in New York City, Schulman said he long had eyes on Burberry when he was leading such diverse companies as Bergdorf Goodman, Jimmy Choo and Coach.
Earlier in his career, when he was overseeing women’s merchandising at Gucci, he collaborated with Christopher Bailey, the longtime chief creative officer of Burberry, who was then women’s design director of the Italian label under Tom Ford.
“Burberry had a tradition of creative and commercial alchemy and that goes back to Rose Marie Bravo [former Burberry CEO] when she hired Christopher,” Schulman related to Samantha Conti, WWD’s London bureau chief, during a fireside chat. “That became a real priority for me [when I became CEO] because the business was underperforming.
“One of the first meetings that I had at Burberry was with all of our design, product development and merchandising teams to bring them together to share the state of the business and what we needed to do together,” he said.
Fast forward two years to 2026, and Schulman continues to apply his Burberry Forward strategy , which juxtaposes 170 years of history with the unexpected.
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