Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, and thank you for joining us. I wanted to start today's event by presenting to you the team behind the preparation of the plan, so the people who will be leading its execution in the next years. We have our group functions, our CEOs of the brands, our artistic directors. Because the transformation we're driving, it's not the project of one individual, it's a project of a group, of an entire group. Our collective target will be to bring clarity, and I would say decisive action, and to ensure that execution and not just vision defines our ambition. I would also like to say how pleased I am to our chairman, François-Henri Pinault, with us today. Welcome.
François-Henri, as you know, after leading this organization operationally until September 2025, he has continued to strongly support us, and in his new role, ever since, I would say. That's where we are. We will start the thing. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Please take back your seat and let's start the journey. I have to say that to anticipate that this thing will last probably a couple of hours. Make yourself comfortable, fasten your seatbelt, and enjoy the flight of the Kering world. Good. It is a pleasure for me to host you in Tuscany. This is a region that is not just a backdrop, but I would say the beating heart of our system. This is where our leather is cut, where our creations basically take shape, and where savoir-faire meets technology, and where the heritage and creativity fuse into product.
In other words, Tuscany is the beating heart and the essence of who we are, and a reminder of what, I would say, we must also protect. Seven months ago, I joined Kering, and I did it with humility, I think, determination, and a deep sense of responsibility toward all the stakeholders, including, of course, the media and investors. I arrived fully aware of the challenges we are facing, but just as convinced of the strength of our houses, our talents, and our ability to reinvent ourselves, I would say, once more. Kering is not just a company. It is one of the most remarkable entrepreneurial success stories in Europe, and not only in the luxury industry.
It is a success that is built on the boldness and I would say long-term mindset of the Pinault family and of all of those who have supported and surrounded them over the years. 25 years ago, we were a French retail group. Today, we are a global luxury powerhouse, and this transformation did not happen by chance. It happened because they dared to take risks, to believe in creativity and scale it. When we acquired Gucci, few, I would say, could imagine what it would become. Gucci has multiplied its size by nearly 10 times and ranks among the most powerful luxury brands in the world, and the same entrepreneurial spirit drove them to invest in Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, brands that were acquired at below EUR 100 million in revenue, and each one now going into the EUR billions.
Today, we operate at the heart of the global luxury market, serving clients whose expectation in quality, creativity, and meaning are rising, and also changing. Our houses span the key pillars of luxury, leather goods, ready-to-wear, shoes, jewelry, eyewear, and beauty with one consistent ambition, to create products and experiences that combine craftsmanship, desirability, and responsibility. To me, luxury is not an end in itself. Everyone in our industry talks about luxury. For me, beyond desirability, the world that truly matters is excellence. Luxury is a perception. Excellence is a discipline. Luxury can be claimed. Excellence must be earned every day in every detail across the entire value chain. At Kering, excellence will mean uncompromising creativity, of course, but also flawless execution. It means exceptional products, but also industrial rigor, consistency, and responsibility. It is excellence in craftsmanship, in quality, in service, in sustainability, in technology, and decision-making.
Excellence is what legitimizes luxury. It is what creates trust with clients, pride for our teams, and durability and sustainability for society. This is what truly unites and should unite our houses. Not a single style, but a shared culture of excellence. We give each house, of course, the autonomy to express their visions while providing the strength, the expertise, and the discipline of the group. Even the strongest stories reach turning points, and today we are at one of them. After a decade of exceptional growth, bringing in, I would say, new consumers and consumption habits, the personal luxury industry has entered, in our opinion, into a reset. Since 2023, the market has been flat to slightly negative. China contracted by around 20% over the same period, and the rebound has not yet materialized.
In this context, Kering has been more severely impacted than most of its peers, and the financial consequences have been significant. Between 2022 and 2025, Kering revenues declined by EUR 5.7 billion, while EBIT margins dropped from 27%- 11%. Return on capital employed collapsed from more than 20%- 6%. Net debt moved from zero to around EUR 10.5 billion, before decreasing approximately to EUR 8 billion at year-end 2025. At the same time, our business has become structurally unbalanced. Fashion now accounts for more than 80% of sales, with Gucci alone representing over 40% of the total. Some brands have seen a decline in desirability, while others have not scaled despite their, I would say, creative potential. In a nutshell, a model that worked for a decade is no longer effective.
For us, growth will come first from gaining share, restoring pricing power, and executing better than our peers. This is first a market share game plan, independent of any upsides from a market rebound. Over the last seven months, we have completed a transparent, brutal, and shared diagnostic and decided a targeted reset of our foundation, organizational, operational, and financial to restore our balance sheet and to rebuild resilience, creating the conditions for sustainable performance. Now we are moving to reconquering modes. Not promises, but proof points already reshaping how Kering operates. First, we simplified the organization. We launched a transformative evolution of our leadership model, more accountable and designed to accelerate decision-making.
Today, the organization is structured around four strategic businesses. Kering Fashion and Leather Goods with Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, McQueen, and Brioni, operating with focused brand stewardship and dedicated growth levers. Second, Kering Jewelry, bringing together Boucheron, Pomellato, Qeelin, and DoDo, consolidated to accelerate scale, vertical integration, and global expansion.
Third, Kering Eyewear with its portfolio of fantastic 15 brands. Kering Next, this is our innovation engine, incubating tomorrow's growth pools, hosting, you will see, Ginori, beauty, longevity and wellness, and House of Wonders, which I will come back to. Behind these businesses, we are building a streamlined group platform structured around five hubs. Industry, that's the first, sets common industrial rules, planning frameworks, and shared foundation at the group level across purchasing, manufacturing, supply chain, quality, as well as research and development, while houses remain fully responsible for creative direction, product development, go to market, and of course, brand expression. Second, clients provide shared data, tools, and client intelligence, enabling houses to faster and better commercial decisions from creative studios to client-linked activation across marketing, merchandising, sales and S&OP, sales and operational planning, which is S&OP, I would say it's important for me, without centralizing execution.
You have technology, out of the five hubs, the third one. This is the group shared tech hub. Combining a cloud-native data architecture, augmented digital twins, and agentic AI to continuously streamline operation, enable predictive insights, and support faster, better informed decision across the whole Kering. Fourth, very important, sustainability is, in my opinion, a non-negotiable execution discipline across all decisions. From design and collection planning, to sourcing, operations, capital allocation, and governance. With measurable KPIs and no trade-offs accepted between sustainability and performance. Last one, our support functions, that they are partnered with the houses and business teams to bring rigor, clarity, and consistency to decisions, ensuring the group's priority are embedded in the day-to-day execution. Now, this new organizational model is changing the way we operate. The executive committee now meets every two weeks with a focus on both strategy and operations.
Decisions are taken faster, ownership is explicit, follow-up is systematic, and accountability is uncompromising. In parallel, we have aligned on a common KPI framework to track performance, which is reviewed monthly. Second, we reinforced the balance sheet. In 2025, we acted decisively by monetizing assets through partial sales of real estate, and by postponing the put call option for Valentino's acquisition, resulting in a net debt of EUR 8 billion at the year-end, as I said at the beginning. Down EUR 2.5 billion year-on-year. This amount excludes the EUR 4 billion cash inflow from the L'Oréal strategic partnership received two weeks ago, as well as the Via Monte Napoleone real estate operation recently announced.
This confirms that our deleveraging is firmly on track, and our ambition is to move toward a net debt to EBITDA, I would say, around 1.5 by year-end 2026. Third, we are rebuilding our retail network so fewer, better, stronger. By year-end 2025, retail including e-commerce accounts for 76% of group sales, and even 86% excluding Kering Eyewear, which has a different structure of its distribution by nature. That's the result, and I want to say it, of a successful long-term strategy to regain control over distribution and reinforce exclusivity. Now that wholesale rationalization, I would say, is largely completed, our focus shifts to the retail network with a shared and centralized practice and governance balancing group optimization with the brand needs.
At the same time, we had to resize and strengthen our footprint. The network expanded too much, impacting productivity with sales density, I would say, well below the benchmarks. We launched a structural reset, closing or transforming low return stores, renegotiating leases, and rebalancing wholesale. By year-end 2025, again, our retail network stood at 1,719 stores, which is a net reduction of 75 versus last year's.
In 2026, we will accelerate to at least 100 net closures with more, I would say, under review. We will close the most diluted doors and use a, I would say, city-by-city format-specific recapture plan, so that the stronger store absorbs the activity of the one that we close, protecting the P&L and lifting sales density. Net-net, fewer doors, better doors, higher productivity. In parallel, we are adopting a more strategic approach in terms of store clusterization, focusing on client experience, service excellence, and business potential in each one of the locations. Between now and 2030, we have locked in a CapEx to renovate up to 2/3 of our boutiques.
We are also investing selectively in high-impact flagships, such as Bottega Veneta, Bangkok Central Embassy or the future Gucci Montaigne in Paris, which are designed as immersive brand environments that reset expression and upgrade the client experience when we feel it is necessary to make a statement on the ambition we have for the brands. Our new real estate strategy will deliver higher sales productivity and stronger conversion, but also it will act as a media and a cultural asset, amplifying brand desirability far beyond the sheer size of the footprint. Fourth, we are taking control of inventory. The challenge is not only the volume, but also the quality of the inventory. We created a multi-brand task force and initiated a structural reset that is already visible. Our target, EUR 1 billion reduction within 12 months starting last September.
Over time, a group operating with 2/3 , I would say even more, Armelle, of the current stock ratio. This is not a one-off reduction. It is a fundamental shift in how we manage inventory, underpinned by a complete revision of our governance, processes and tools. We are implementing advanced capabilities such as sales and operations planning and AI-driven forecasting to anticipate demand sooner and run a leaner, more productive inventory. Over time, this will bring us, I would say, closer to the best-in-class industry standards. This discipline is not only critical for performance, it is also central to our sustainability commitments. Producing less and producing better and to a much more rigorous management of capital employed, ultimately supporting, I would say, stronger returns, but we will come back to this a bit later. Fifth, we began rebuilding pricing and product structure.
We identified a misalignment between perceived value and pricing, which was impacting profitability and brand equity. Across the group, full price sell-through was below expectation, while off-price penetration had reached level we considered unsustainable. To reinforce pricing power and restore clarity, we launched a comprehensive reset based on elasticity and client value. This includes simplifying SKU architecture. For example, Gucci reduced its SKU counts, I'd say roughly 20% versus average in the past years, redesigning product grids to sharpen assortment strategy, and deploying AI-enabled tools to optimize pricing and allocation. In parallel, we are increasing investment in product quality and craftsmanship to strengthen perceived value and support our long-term pricing power. I will come back to this more in detail later when discussing about our brand strategy. Where this approach is, I would say, really embedded brand by brand. Sixth, we have strengthened our marketing productivity.
We are correcting structural imbalances in marketing spending, where cost reduction had disproportionately impacted non-working media, while non-working and structural costs remain very, very high. We are optimizing our events and flag activation, reviewing our agency contracts, tightening asset creation planning, and rebalancing budget toward high impact media. In parallel, we are exploring AI adoption to structurally improve effectiveness and cost discipline without degrading our creativity and client experience. These actions of efficiency and improved marketing ROI will already generate benefits this year and are expected to represent roughly one point of EBIT margin starting next year, fully reinvested in our houses. Seven, finally, seven in seven months, we recreated the condition to reboot Gucci. Even though Gucci, I would say, should not carry the whole group alone, it remains a brand poised to play among the leaders of our industry.
That is why it became one of my priorities in my first month, well, with Francesca. Gucci had lost some of its shine and performance. Performance has deteriorated, as you know. We acted, I think, decisively. We renewed the leadership team, restructured the operating model, clarified business priorities, presented Demna's first collection, and reactivated core clients. These actions are already translating into tangible early signals with sequential improvements in performance and a clear trajectory emerging, I would say, if you look at the numbers quarter after quarter. Gucci's recovery will be real because it will be structural. I will come back to Gucci in more detail, as well to our other brands. Before that, let me take you one level up and share how these actions are reshaping the group as a whole. These seven moves are not isolated decisions.
They are opening, I would say, moves of a much deeper transformation. The real question now is how we turn this progress into a durable competitive advantage, and how we build a group that grows faster, performs better, and stays ahead in an industry that is being rapidly redefined. This brings me to the next chapter: how we will build the next Kering. We are pursuing a strategy that is, I would say, bold but actionable, that's important, and anchored in disciplined execution. It is a transformation designed to secure Kering's position as the undisputed challenger in the luxury industry. I use the word challenger deliberately, not because it's fashionable, but because it reflects a mindset. Leaders tend to protect what they've built. Challengers focus on what still needs to be invented. They question habits, move faster, and remain uncompromising in execution.
This is a mindset we want in Kering. One that allows us to outperform, to innovate, and to capture opportunities others do not see or cannot seize, and is rooted in our belief that we should stick to the idea that we are building a group well-anchored in true luxury. The luxury that starts with creativity, craftsmanship, cultural relevance, and very important, product excellence. This is what gives our houses their legitimacy, as I said at the beginning, and it's the foundation on which everything else stands. Through luxury, we've continued to drive the growth, but we want to take the opportunity to create a system that better understands what next luxury will be. The luxury that embraces new technologies, new client expectations, new markets, and new forms of engagement.
A luxury that is more connected, more intelligent, more experiential, a luxury that innovates, that stays ahead of culture and ahead of time. All of that, of course, before the others. True luxury and next luxury frame the direction of the group. They define what we must protect and amplify and where we must innovate and accelerate. They are the lens through which we drive, and we will drive our strategy. From these convictions flow our two priorities of the group. First, reignite growth by restoring desirability as its source, creativity, cultural impact, and product excellence. Second, boost efficiency to build a higher performance group, which is leaner, faster, more integrated, and able to scale what truly matters across our houses. These two dynamics move together and fuel the true and next luxury. Strong economics fuel both empowering better creativity, better products, and superior client experience.
Let me begin with the way we intend to reignite growth. Kering portfolio was particularly exposed to the luxury downturn due to, I would say, an above-average reliance on aspirational customers. Over time, the group brands have narrowed into a more polarized categories and occasions focuses, overexpanded retail footprint, as we said before, and became too dependent, I would say, also on designer-led steering. Together, these factors increased sensitivity to fashion cyclicality, weakened the client engagement, and eroded desirability. The next chapter of our history is about building a more resilient and complementary portfolio of brands, expanding market coverage while reducing internal overlap, both within each house and across group. Rebuilding growth requires a framework, one that restores desirability, and its source and translates into growth that is more resilient, more predictable, and very important also, value accretive over time. This framework is built around four value-creating levers.
Let me start with the first one, which is a consumer-centric brand strategy. We are building desirability by putting the client back at the center and aligning brand and product and execution around what drives emotion and purchase. At the group level, we have instituted, and this is very important, a consumer-centric portfolio framework that clarifies the role of each house, sharpens differentiation, and removes duplication. For the first time in Kering, we have developed together with the team and with the brands, and under the leadership of each one of the CEOs, what we call a brand playbook. This goes beyond the brand books we already had, which define the brand's identity, the codes, and the creative territory. The brand playbook takes us, I would say, one step further.
It is a detailed document touching all business dimensions where we formalize the strategy and the action plan. A sort of contract between the houses and the group that everyone has agreed and signed internally. The outcome is a clear brand positioning, greater consistency across all the touchpoints, and the higher execution standards with measurable synergies. Also a common segmentation of businesses and consumer, a common set of KPIs, and therefore a well-defined path to maximizing the full potential of the Kering portfolio. This consumer-centric approach is underpinned by a strong focus on retail excellence, ensuring that in-store execution, service levels, and brand expression consistently translate strategy into compelling, high-quality clients experiences. At the house level, this translates into ability to decide within a frame and full accountability of the business owners.
Sharper positioning anchored in defined client targets, well-prioritized categories, value-driven pricing, and tailored go-to-market plans built around end-to-end client journeys. This is our first formal brand portfolio strategy. Not a theoretical exercise, but a decision system that guides creative direction, assortments, pricing, client development, and media, house by house. The objective is very, very clear to everybody. Lift relevance and mix quality, drive higher full price sell-through, and compound margin over time while maximizing the portfolio's potential. But restoring desirability is only the first step. Client intimacy is how we make it last. Our client strategy is built around three segments with distinct roles, but a single goal, build a more stable, more valuable client base over time. We have first, top-tier clients. They are few, but disproportionately powerful. They represent a quarter of luxury spend and keep growing even when the market slows down.
Our ambition is to expand high-end offers and upgrade experience to double the business with top clients. You have core clients. They are the backbone of the luxury industry, sometimes forgotten, steady, consistent, and resilient across cycles. Here, we are refining our approach to loyalty programs and to retention. Sharper recognition, more relevant assortments, and a stronger continuity of service to grow frequency, share of wallet, and long-term value. Aspirational and younger clients is the third category. They remain critical for renewal, but they are structurally more volatile. Our approach is selective and will be selective and disciplined. Drive desirability, cultural relevance, and targeted recruitment. Brands like Balenciaga, for example, they will play a key role here as a cultural entry point with the ambition to increase by at least 30% recruitment over time while protecting, of course, brand equity.
Across all segments, growth comes from quality and stability of the client base. This is why we are investing in the most sophisticated database on luxury consumer that will include advanced CRM techniques, powerful loyalty tools, and access to unique experiences, a single client view, more targeted clienteling, consistent service standards everywhere, and experiences designed to build lifetime value, not one-off transactions. Client intimacy is not about doing more for everyone. It is about doing the right things for the right clients consistently at scale at the right moment. Precision in client engagements can only deliver value if the product itself is right. Across all houses, we are resetting collection architecture to restore clarity and impact. Fewer, stronger products and a clean balance between icons, heroes, and essentials, and explicit roles for each one of the segments.
This discipline directly addresses the price versus sell-through equation, where we have historically lost efficiency. Icons, the first category are the brand symbol of authority, high pricing power, high sell-through, exceptional materials, and tightly controlled supply to protect long-term desirability. You have the heroes. They translate creativity into commercial momentum. The season's core proposition that drives traffic and carry the emotional impact. Essentials is a high-rotation, functional products designed to deliver structurally high sell-through. Build loyalty and support productivity across the network. This clarity is accelerating the business. By simplifying decision and sharpening priority, we are cutting time from runway to store, with the ambition to roughly double speed to market while improving consistency and quality. This strategic reset translates into clear category priorities and of course, associated investments.
Building a more iconic leather goods offering across the portfolio, driven by a strength in Gucci proposition, an expanded high-end offer at Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, and the continued momentum of Balenciaga icons. We have accelerating men's, building on Saint Laurent's strong potential on the category, while scaling already visible traction with double-digit growth in men's ready-to-wear projected for the group by 2030. Consolidating the classics territory by elevating Brioni's formal wear offer and expanding our comprehensive day wear wardrobing offer at Gucci, at Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, complementing their more seasonal collection. Fourth, unlocking jewelry growth with the ambition to double the jewelry business by accelerating pure jewelry maison and scaling fashion jewelry across the group, starting with Gucci.
Ultimately, product excellence will be measured through improvements in full price sell-through, with the objective of structurally increasing it by around 20 points between 2025 and 2030. Even the best product needs the right market to scale its potential. Which brings me to our final lever, which is new geographies. Some markets demand more than local execution. They require a coordinated group-level approach, sustained capital commitment, and strategic patience over time. Greater China will remain a critical market for luxury, but it is entering a new phase, in our opinion. Growth will be more selective, more domestic, more experience-driven, and I would say also more digital. Success in China will depend less on expanding footprint and more on strengthening brand desirability, cultural relevance, and execution excellence. Our priority is to rebuild resonance with Chinese clients.
This means a renewed China-specific brand narrative, dedicated campaigns and shows, a more local talent strategy, and a fully integrated 360 activation designed for Chinese audiences. At the same time, we will sharpen our offer by developing hero products category aligned with local taste and demand. In support, we are committing in the plan a double-digit increase in marketing and commercial activation budget for our leading houses in China to accelerate awareness, quality reach, and conversion. We are also investing to understand and serve the market better. Through Kering CRAFT, a creative residency for artisanship, fashion and technology, launched in partnership with Shanghai Fashion Week, we are building a long-term creative and cultural bridge between China and Europe to nurture next-gen Chinese talent and deepen our local insights. Finally, we will manage our retail network with greater discipline, right-sizing the footprint in China by around 130 net closures by 2030.
Concentrating on high-potential, attractive location and ensuring that every store delivers both brand elevation and economic performance. Beyond China, a new cohort of high-potential markets is structurally gaining relevance. This emerging six-pack includes the Middle East, notably the UAE and Saudi, India, and fast-developing Southeast Asian countries, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, but also Mexico, Brazil, and new markets in Africa, with Nigeria at the forefront. Though it's heterogeneous, I would say, and a different stage of development, these markets share common supportive underlying dynamics. Rapidly expanding affluent population with a growing influx of young consumers first entering market, the luxury market, and in many cases, additional momentum from rising tourism flows. Taken together, this market represents a major growth relay for our brands. Today, they account for an estimated EUR 34 billion in luxury personal goods, compared with EUR 42 billion of Mainland China.
At the current growth trajectories, the combined six-pack is expected to be a size comparable to China in 2035. There is an opportunity for the group to play a catalytic role in this market, particularly where scale will take time to build. Our presence in the regions will lead the coordinated group level approach to accelerate growth in those markets. Together, these four levers realign brand strategy, client management, product architecture, and geography focus around a single objective, improving sell-through, mix, and capital efficiency. They restore discipline in decisions, what we design, for whom, at what price, and where we invest, reducing volatility, reducing markdown exposure, and execution risk. With this framework set, let me now show how each fashion and leather goods house is executing it to restart growth, of course, beginning with Gucci.
[Presentation]
As an Italian native, it's very easy for me to understand that Gucci is more than a brand. It is one of the most admired expressions of the culture of this country. If you ask ChatGPT what's the most popular Italian brands, it will tell you Ferrari, Gucci, and Nutella, and not necessarily in that order. This is a reality. Just try. We're talking here about an institution, almost a monument. I say this for two reasons, because they tell us a great deal about both the challenges and the opportunities that lie ahead. The first reason is awareness. Based on our data, Gucci is the second most well-known luxury brand in the world. Awareness is something you build with money and with time. Two things you cannot compress. Everybody knows Gucci. That's a huge competitive advantage. We do not need to invest to be known.
The second reason is desirability. Gucci remains in the top five in desirability worldwide, down from number one a few years ago. That is the place we want to reclaim. Awareness is about money and time. Desirability is about doing the right things. We must recognize with humility that over the past years, we have not always done the right things. Creative direction lacked stability and clarity. Our offer became too uneven. We sometimes diluted our identity by trying to be everything for everyone. We discussed a lot of times with François-Henri about this. In some regions, we overextended our distribution, no? And we were not always consistent in the quality and execution that clients expect from a house like Gucci.
We acknowledge these shortcomings, I can tell you, and we have already begun to correct them with focus and discipline. Gucci is one of the best reflections in the luxury industry of what this country stands for. Warmth, color, sexy, witty, also cheeky. With all its paradoxes, its contradiction, its masterpieces, its miseries. Sorry, but Gucci is not vanilla ice cream. It is spicy, sometimes bitter, sometimes super sweet. That's what makes it totally unique, and precisely what's always made it one of the most beloved luxury brands in the world. The brand has suffered in recent years. It has been misinterpreted. We understand Gucci, I can tell you, and we know what we have to do. As a team, we went back to the essence of the brand and to what people expect from it.
In the U.S., people say, "I feel Gucci" to mean they feel good, attractive, optimistic, upbeat. In short, Gucci is a feeling, not just a logo. This is what we need to give back to people. We call it Rinascimento Gucci. If we want to relaunch Gucci, desirability is the starting point. It is the foundation on which everything else rests. Our priority is to make Gucci unmistakable again. Not louder, not more complex, simply unmistakable. This work has already begun. We are refocusing the brand around fewer narratives, but narratives that are sharper, stronger, and more coherent. Gucci's recognizability is one of its greatest assets, and we are now codifying our signifier with a far greater discipline. Double G, interlocking G, web, flora, bamboo, horse bit, Jackie. In one second, you must know it is Gucci, and that does not mean covering the world in GG.
Being unmistakable can also be quiet, discreet, and refined, expressed through craftsmanship and identity codes that are immediately Gucci, even when they are just subtle. We are activating this renewed identity through La Gucci Vita. This is our cultural expression that turns codes into culture, from Palazzo Gucci to Villeggiatura, from sport to ephemeral celebration and generation Gucci. Each of these territories is already bringing the Gucci feeling to life and projecting it back into the world. This is how Gucci becomes unmissable again. Icons made recognizable, culture made actionable, and desirability made timeless. Reinventing our heritage is also, I think, essential. Our heritage is not meant to be preserved under glass. It must be reinterpreted boldly with modernity, clarity, and coherence. This evolution is underway.
We are injecting newness into our most iconic shapes and signatures, no, Francesca and Demna, as we did, for example, with the latest Jackie, and as we will do with future expansion, such as, for example, the Bamboo, which I saw. This is how we reconnect Gucci with its stronger roots and make those roots relevant again. We do it with ambition. We aim to double the contribution of icons in women's handbags by 2030. Icons should represent around 20% of leather goods, up from 10% today. We will do it without losing, as this important message, our fashion authority, because at Gucci, heritage and fashion must coexist. Restoring desirability requires also restoring strength in our product offer, and I think that begins with clarity. We are rebuilding the entire architecture with a structure that is consistent, legible, and modern.
We have already reduced the number of SKUs, as I said at the beginning, by roughly 20%. A concrete step that simplifies the offer and reinforces clarity, coherence, and impact across all categories, and will continue. At the top of the product architecture sits now Guccissima. This is the highest expression of Gucci craftsmanship and exclusivity. At the center, we are establishing a core offer, which is a coherent wardrobe that is already gaining traction into the stores. Core will expand its role structurally by 2030, anchoring Gucci in a more coherent and more profitable architecture. In leather goods, we are focusing on fewer families. Stronger identities, more functionality, and higher quality. We are anchoring the core of the business in a strong mid-price proposition between EUR 2,000 and EUR 3,000, elevating the top tier with richer materials and distinctive details, and redesigning the entry-level without compromising quality.
We are also rationalizing the carryover assortment by around 20% by 2030. The ambition is to deliver more than EUR 1 billion of additional revenues in the leather goods by 2030, powered by a more distinctive, iconic offer. In ready-to-wear, we are rebuilding the silhouette, of course, with Demna and the team, with a stronger stylistic intent. We are improving fit, proportions, and construction, and bringing back recognizability in every single piece. In menswear, we are constructing a modern wardrobe anchored in refined essentials. In shoes, we are rebalancing the offer around lifestyle models, refreshing iconic shapes, and tightening the architecture across tiers. The ambition is to grow ready-to-wear and shoe by more than EUR 600 million by 2030. In jewelry and watches, we are refining the offer, unifying codes, and elevating the storytelling.
Our objective is to grow jewelry and watches from EUR 200 million to around EUR 700 million euros, of course, creating EUR 500 million of additional revenues and making it one of the most dynamic engines of Gucci next chapter. In watches, we will consolidate our proposition around pillar lines with a particular emphasis on the EUR 2,000, EUR 3,000 women's jewelry watch segment. Less noise, more coherence, less spreads, more impact. I want to talk about quality and pricing. Clients notice quality. They notice, of course, inconsistency, and they remember. We are elevating quality everywhere and putting the money for it. Materials, manufacturing processes, suppliers, finishing. Bags are becoming more functional. Ready-to-wear now has better construction and better fit. Shoes offer great comfort and durability. The value proposition is visible from the moment the client touches a product. This quality upgrade will be very meaningful.
Across core categories, full price sell-through will improve by around 20 percentage points on average. In parallel, we are renewing the price architecture to ensure that perceived value and price remain aligned in every region. Quality and clarity in pricing are essential, of course, as you know, to rebuild trust, and trust is essential to rebuild desirability. All in all, talking about a more productive network and a rebalanced geographical footprint, I said before, all in all, we had too many stores, too much excess, too much discounting. We have begun to correct all of this. We are right-sizing the network with fewer stores and better stores at Gucci. Worldwide, 2/3 of the network will be refurbished or relocated. Overall selling space will decrease by around 20%, and outlets will be reduced by 1/3 to protect brand equity and full price performance.
Across the brand and abroad, the footprint will be streamlined by around 1/3. This is a distributional model built for clarity, quality, productivity, with sales density that are meant to double from now to 2030. Desirability is not the same everywhere. In the U.S., Gucci regained momentum because the brand is understood, its identity resonates strongly, and its fashion authority remains relatively intact. Clients there instinctively grasp what Gucci stands for, and this clarity fuels both engagement and cultural relevance. We are using this renewed momentum as a springboard to strengthen our position in other regions, where Gucci desirability often follows the cultural waves that begin in the U.S. In Asia, and especially in China and Korea, desirability weakens because our discipline faded. There, we will fuel desirability by shifting to high-yield activations, culturally relevant storytelling, and high-touch client engagement.
Across Asia, we are ramping up new collections and reinforcing core icons, pairing this with tighter distribution and improved clienteling. Everything I described depends, obviously, on execution, and execution begins with the client. Gucci should become and is becoming a truly client-obsessed organization with a very precise understanding of who we need to win now. We are reconnecting first with fashionistas and opinionated clients, the style leaders and cultural voices who reignite fashion authority and desirability at the top of the conversation. As the momentum builds, we are earning the loyalty of more discerning buyers, clients who expect quality, coherence, and longevity across categories. To support this, we are embedding a customer-first mindset across everything we do, merchandising, assortment, pricing, clienteling, and content, all guided by shopper segmentation. Data is becoming, in this case, I would say, an advantage.
Our AI-powered synthetic customer is helping us sharpen buys, allocations, and client action with a far greater precision. Clienteling is evolving, too, with hyper-personalized rituals in the stores, deeper outreach, curated appointments, tailored looks, and more thoughtful post-purchase journeys. Assortments are being constructed with a more explicit use and a more legible codes so that recognition converts to purchase in seconds. Targeted acquisition programs are bringing new audiences into the brand and expanding them into multi-category clients. At the very top of the pyramid, we are creating exclusive experiences for our most engaged clients with curated drops, made-to-measure propositions, and privileged access to Gucci's cultural territories. This is what success looks like. Stronger retention, higher value per client, and a client base that compounds over time.
Retention is also improving significantly in the plan, and VAC contribution is progressing toward the 25% threshold that will anchor quality growth over the long term. In parallel, we are simplifying the organization with fewer layers, better defined roles, and faster decision. Agility is becoming a core principle with more test and learn, faster cycles, and teams that move at the right pace. Importantly, this new operating model is already delivering real speed. In the last development cycle, we reduced the time needed to design and produce a collection by around six weeks, right, Francesca? Technology reinforces the shift. Gucci is becoming the group's first laboratory for innovation in AI and client intelligence. New tools are being tested and refined here before being scaled across Kering. We have already streamlined structures and refocused talent and products, client, and execution. Execution is how we rebuild credibility.
Gucci does not need to be reinvented. It needs to be refocused, re-anchored, and repositioned. We are not building a new brand. We are unlocking the extraordinary potential of the brands we already have with coherence, clarity, and discipline. This is the meaning of Rinascimento Gucci, restoring desirability, rebuilding clarity, delivering results. We feel Gucci today, and we want the world to feel it again. Beautiful Saint Laurent. Beautiful. Saint Laurent today stands as a brand of exceptional desirability. This is what we see from the numbers. Distinctive and deeply anchored in its Parisian couture heritage. The image is powerful and refined, and I'm saying that from data, not just gut feeling. Built on instantly recognizable codes. Saint Laurent is part of the fashion aristocracy because of its history. Saint Laurent is sharp, is well-positioned. We know it, again, on the numbers.
I think nobody will argue if I say that Saint Laurent was, and is still today, a fashion authority. It enters this next phase from a position of strength, with a solid foundation to scale and reinforce its business relevance. Saint Laurent does not need to be redefined or to redefine what it is. What it needs to do is to magnify what already makes Saint Laurent pretty unique. Our focus and enablers are therefore very well-defined. Saint Laurent is one of the richest reservoirs of authentic icons in the industry. A wardrobe of timeless signatures the maison truly owns, such as, for example, Tuxedo. The next chapter is how to reawaken and reinvigorate these icons to transform them into iconic products that go beyond fashion cycles, give them renewed visibility, sharpen the storytelling, and rebuild desirability over time. We are already seeing proofs.
The 2026 relaunch, for example, of the Mombasa bag, originally introduced by Tom Ford in 2002, is already among the top five best-selling lines in our flagship stores. Our focus is on sustaining this momentum through a broader, stronger, and more diversified portfolio of icons. In leather goods, these icons products should represent around 30% of the revenue in 2030. Leather goods is a strategic key pillar for Saint Laurent and will continue to be developed across the full value ladder with a sharper focus on top clientele. The offer will be enriched, adding more functionalities and higher quality, while continuing to nurture the accessible entry segment. Handbags will play a more central role in communication and in brand expression, reinforcing their place within the Saint Laurent silhouette and fashion image. This effort is supported by a strengthened design organization in leather goods and accessories.
Quality standards will be further strengthened towards a thorough high-end positioning, and the ambition is to increase women's handbags revenue by 40% by 2030, right, Cédric? Men at Saint Laurent has, we think, a significant and untapped potential. The next phase is to make men a true pillar of the Maison. We will reassert men's offer, building on momentum already materializing, we see it. We have double-digit growth year to date in ready-to-wear, luggage, and shoes. The men's studio has also been strengthened with key appointments. In addition to the show collection, we are working towards the introduction of a new men's pre-collection, reconnecting Saint Laurent prêt-à-porter roots, more wearable, more versatile, with a compelling value proposition. This push will be supported by dedicated campaign, ambassadors, and high-impact activations. We will more than double the segment and make it a core engine of Saint Laurent scale and desirability.
Saint Laurent has a unique opportunity to deepen engagement with its existing clientele and expand its reach to a broader audience. That's what we know. The top of the pyramid, our priority is actually to grow share of wardrobe. Saint Laurent already owns strong equity in occasional wear, built under the vision of Anthony Vaccarello over the last 10 years. We will build on this strength to expand the full 24/7 wardrobe in women's ready-to-wear and shoes with greater season-to-season coherence and sharper brand recognizability. For VICs and core clients, we will drive stronger conversion through a full wardrobe, full category approach, reinforcing core pillars such as women's handbags, and continuing to strengthen perceived quality. At the same time, we will accelerate recruitment with a more compelling, accessible offer, leveraging the proven strengths of eyewear and fragrance to broaden brand resonance, scaling small leather goods, accessories, and lifestyle.
We will also reinforce jewelry as a full growth engine with the business set to triple by 2030, building on the house heritage, especially in costume jewelry and the group ability that we are building. In parallel, we are targeting a doubling of the VIC by 2030 to reach 25% without alienating the aspirational clients. By having the objective to achieve more than EUR 500 million sales in an entry price category. Today, Saint Laurent image, presence, and sales remain predominantly Western-centric. In Asia, and particularly in China, we're still subscale relatively to the size of the opportunity. The next phase is about amplifying Saint Laurent global resonance with a strong and deliberate acceleration in Asia, with China, South Korea, and Japan as the key priorities. We are doubling marketing investments in the region, supported by more locally relevant communication.
A brand show in Asia, right, Anthony, will soon mark a symbolic and visible shift in the brand's global presence. We will strengthen our talent plan to build influence and proximity in the region. Commercial and product activation will become more frequent and better tailored to local needs, starting with key moments such as Qixi. We will reinforce and continue to reinforce brand expression in store, accelerating the rollout of our new retail concept, so over 1/3 of APAC stores within 12 months versus less than 20% today. Thus, we are building the conditions to double the business in Asia by 2030, driven by sharper relevance, higher visibility, and a step change in execution so that Saint Laurent speaks China and China recognizes Saint Laurent. In short, Saint Laurent path towards and forward is not about transformation, it is about magnification in a way.
It's about magnifying Saint Laurent, magnifying desirability, magnifying iconicity, magnifying global relevance, all while remaining, of course, unmistakably as Saint Laurent. We move to Bottega.
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I love it. I love Bottega. I love it. Bottega has built a truly distinctive position in luxury, defined by an ethos of discretion, restraint, and self-confidence. Built on Italian craftsmanship and defined by Intrecciato as its iconic signature, the house has earned a position of global leadership in leather goods. Today, Bottega is one of the most desired luxury brands among those who truly know. The next chapter is about scaling this deep luxury without compromising its essence under the creative leader vision and leadership of Louise Trotter, that is today with us. Discretion is our code, but discretion does not mean to be invisible. To recruit next generation of clients, especially in China, we must increase visibility by positioning Bottega Veneta as the ultimate symbol of luxury craftsmanship in leather goods without ever, I repeat it, ever compromising its brand expression.
We are accelerating the pace, a higher number of shows and high-impact global events, and a continuous cultural pulse. Venice will be firmly anchored as the house cultural platform for partnerships and citywide activation that root the brand in its unique heritage. Communications will gain impact and coherence with stronger campaigns and across channels, including social media. At the same time, the house will continue to develop targeted culture and artistic partnerships carefully aligned with its goals. At the end of the day, Bottega Veneta should rank among the top 10 luxury brands in brand equity. That's the target. Looking ahead, growth will be driven, I would say, less by geography than by Bottega's ability to connect with emerging affluents and influential cultural elites wherever they take shape. In markets such as China, where these communities are expanding very rapidly, we will accelerate through locally resonant communication, refined brand expression.
Marketing investment will increase selectively, I would say, by around 10% every year to sharpen visibility and influence within those circles. Client engagement will deepen through high-touch experience activation, including exclusive Bottega Veneta residences designed for our most important clients. Leather goods will continue to power the house. Intrecciato will continue to sit at the center as the house ultimate icon, enriched through new expression and interpretation. We will deepen the offer too, for top clients, expand men and travel, and strengthen our presence across key occasions. Creative codes will gradually extend beyond Intrecciato while preserving enduring icons that really anchor the desirability of the house over time. We will deliver steady growth through 2030, continuously fueling the category. To unlock its full potential, Bottega will broaden its relevance beyond leather goods, affirming its position as the ultimate expression of luxury craftsmanship across categories.
This includes building a complete ready-to-wear and chic wardrobe for women, for men, spanning daywear to evening wear, right, Louise. Classic and collection pieces you want to invest in and you want to keep forever. That's the spirit. Jewelry will be reinforced across both fine and costume jewelry, leveraging the platform that we are creating on the category. The maison will also structure a distinctive gifting and art of living proposition targeting entry clients. The plan is to more than double non-leather goods revenue in Bottega by 2030. Client development will be firmly VIC-led. Bottega Veneta will reinforce the top of the pyramid through targeted product offers, broader occasion coverage, including made to order, and increasingly differentiated experiences. At the same time, desirability among core clients will be sustained through icons and cultural visibility.
Recruitment will come through carefully managed entry categories, small leather goods, costume jewelry, and the art of living, always protecting brand equity. The ambition is to increase the share of VICs by 50% by 2030. In essence, Bottega's future lies in scaling through a deeper exploration of what true luxury means, exclusivity, excellence, and desire. Bottega Veneta will continue to stand for what is more rare, most refined, and most enduring in luxury, just more visible and with more dimensions.
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Cool brand. I think it's one of the most distinctive houses in global luxury. It was, as you know, born from Cristóbal's heritage in couture, and has been continuously reinvented through successive creative eras that revived, reshaped, and reinterpreted that legacy. Very few houses have shown the same ability to create entirely new market segments. From redefining modern streetwear to shaping the global luxury sneaker landscape, Balenciaga has repeatedly been ahead of the curve. It also holds a distinctive strength in men, when you look at the numbers, which remains, I think, a structural asset for the house. You can state that Balenciaga has become the most relevant luxury brand for Gen Z. That's what it is. This is a generation that will account for 20%, 25% of the luxury market by 2030, versus 14% today. They're growing, yes, but they were Balenciaga customers.
Over time, Balenciaga has built one of the most loyal VIC communities in the industry, representing 25% of their sales. This is a community grounded in emotional attachment, strong identity, and deep engagement. Beyond product, Balenciaga commands real cultural relevance. Its influences in fashion, youth communities, and digital platform worldwide, and it has repeatedly proven its ability to create silhouettes that define entire eras and has been constantly innovating in marketing. Balenciaga, therefore, enters this new phase, I think, with credibility, legitimacy, and a strong reputation for creating trends. The next chapter is about channeling Balenciaga influence with confidence and stronger balance between categories and genders. The house will reaffirm itself as an innovative house. The uniqueness of Balenciaga lies in the fusion of couture mastery and cultural relevance.
We speak to the new people that are willing to jump on the main stage in this world and want proudly to stand ground. That's the claim. We want them to feel unique and relevant even before they will become. This is, let's say, for everybody. Everybody that wants to stand out independently from who they are or where they come from. Going more concrete, leather goods is rapidly becoming one of Balenciaga's most powerful engine of growth, and its weight in the business will continue to increase. We are scaling across segments and functionalities. We are building coherent leather goods families that drive repeat purchase, loyalty, and long-term client value, and the proof points are, in fact, already there. We are delivering consistent double-digit growth with around +20% sales year-to-date in leather goods. No, Gianfranco, that's the case.
We have two distinct icons: the Rodeo and City relaunch, both of which became bestsellers in under two years. Now they have new lines like Bolero and Seven, that they are already contributing to this momentum and building the architectural, let's say, depth of the category. This is the blueprint of our strategy. It's fewer, stronger families, iconic potential, and disciplined innovation. We will double leather goods business by 2030. Balenciaga has also built a strong structural foundation in men, as we said before. The next phase is about restoring balance and resilience by scaling women as a primary engine of growth. Men remain one of Balenciaga's structural strengths. The priority now is disciplined evolution, protecting our legitimacy, while reigniting the spirit of innovation that has always set this house apart.
We will reinvent men's ready-to-wear and men's shoes through new territories, from technical wear to hybrid footwear, consolidating Balenciaga leadership in building the next wave of luxury segment. Women's ready-to-wear is central, in our opinion, to reassert Balenciaga fashion authority and expanding the role of women within the business. The brand has already started to rebuild a distinctive women's wardrobe. Collections have been re-anchored in architectural shapes with a very distinctive outerwear and dresses, fully leveraging Cristóbal's legacy, while maintaining a sophisticated sportswear vocabulary that bridges the house's different creative eras. A more distinct and more readable feminine wardrobe identity is being codified across seasons, and the recent acceleration in leather goods is being leveraged to drive head-to-toe silhouettes, increasing cross-sell from handbags clients into ready-to-wear and shoes, and strengthening both VICs and core client development.
The first signals are pretty encouraging. Pierpaolo Piccioli's first collection is already generating strong traction, resonating across clientele and generation, and recruiting new women customers. The ambition is to more than double women's ready-to-wear from now to 2030. Balenciaga will drive recruitment and desirability by activating the brand across seven cultural territories. You have TV series, music, sports, wellness, gaming, innovation, and patronage. These territories are how we expand our resonance with younger audiences, expand reach, and sustain cultural relevance beyond fashion. Innovative brand engagements in these seven territories will fuel recruitment across segments, strengthen entrance categories, and consolidate Balenciaga's position as one of the brands that better understands the vibe of the new generations. Balenciaga maintains distinctive positions in Asia, in reality, where the Maison has a very strong momentum. The priority now is to strengthen balance across regions and increase overall resilience.
It means accelerating development in North America, in the Middle East, and in Europe. The plan is to nearly double the Americas business by 2030. Ultimately, Balenciaga enters in the next chapter from a position of strength with influence, with legitimacy, and with creative depth. The path forward, I think, is pretty well articulated. It reaffirms couture authority, rebalance women and men, scale leather goods, and converts cultural affinity to youth into sustained growth. Now McQueen.
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McQueen was built on a bold expression of, I would say, individuality, empowerment, and a bit subversive. The London-born house, as you know, defined by sharp tailoring, strong silhouettes, emotional intensity, and I would say exceptional craftsmanship, brought to life through very powerful storytelling in British heritage and contemporary culture. Over time, this edge was diluted. Growth became too dependent on a very narrow offer, mainly sneakers. At the same time, the brand overextended its network and its structure. Gradually, McQueen drifted away from its core DNA. Growth lacked substance, and the position lost its sharpness. It became clear this model was no longer sustainable. We, therefore, launched immediately a deep reset of the brand, restructuring operations, and reassessing the business model to make McQueen fit for the future. The starting point is to reassert McQueen's legitimacy as the emblematic British luxury fashion house.
A non-compromising brand, confident and powerful, with a unique ability to subvert British tradition and tailoring codes, and always grounded in unconventional craftsmanship and brand expression. Women's ready-to-wear sits at the heart of the brand. Tailoring and evening wear are anchor categories, sharp silhouettes, distinctive cuts, a contemporary attitude with strong emotional impact. Mastery of tailoring codes remains, in our opinion, central to McQueen's identity. Leather goods, shoes and accessories must also fully reflect this uncompromising spirit. This also means simplifying and clarifying the SKU architecture, right-sizing collections, focusing resources on the categories that really matter, and driving a more disciplined assortment around SKUs, efficiency, and strategic price bands. McQueen doesn't need reinvention. It just simply needs focus and sharper choices, greater selectivity, and a bold McQueen identity. The latest show already signaled the shift with stronger creative direction visible in the winter 2026 collection. Right-sizing McQueen is already underway.
The next step is to push toward a leaner, more focused business model. In retail, we are downsizing the store network, concentrating on a very selective number of key markets and locations. By end of 2026, we will have completed the right-sizing of our distribution network with 50% less stores versus the year-end 2025. Half of them in a year. In distribution, we are rebalancing the channel mix by expanding wholesale only through very selective partners aligned with the brand's positioning. In organization, we are reshaping the structure to match this reset, right-sizing all functions, and refocusing the business on product, image, and client experience. Headquarters were reorganized in Q4 2025. Italian operations are being restructured in H1 2026. Regional consolidation is progressing in parallel with the store network reduction.
Finally, McQueen is strengthening collaboration with the group, leveraging shared services to increase efficiency and to reduce structural complexity while fully preserving, of course, its creative identity. This is how McQueen reconnects with its essence, sharpens its positioning, and builds a credible path toward long-term, profitable growth. Now, the McQueen team has a window of opportunity to go back to the times when the brand created sensations.
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As the movie says, Brioni was built for mastery. It is the reference of Italian sartorial excellence, Alta Sartoria, as we say here, in ultra-luxury menswear. Rooted in Abruzzo, a bit so far away from here, its authority comes from unmatched tailoring, where everything is about time, precision, and human touch. This debt of know-how, accumulated over decades and internalized across the house, is what makes Brioni genuinely rare and actually globally credible. At the core stands Brioni Maestria, our signature customization platform, spanning from made to measure, made to order, and bespoke, is the purest expression of the house philosophy and the key value creation lever, driving higher margins, stronger client loyalty, and long-term brand identity and equity. More than 660 artisans craft 100% of Brioni's formal wear internally. An exceptional level of vertical integration, and that anchors quality, scarcity, and pricing power.
From this foundation, Brioni's sartorial intelligence now extends into a full lifestyle wardrobe. Formal, leisure, evening wear. This is the natural extension of Alta Sartoria into every moment of a client's life. Brioni diversification beyond traditional formal wear presents an opportunity to enhance client value while maintaining the brand's very exclusive positioning. Every new product category is introduced with uncompromising tailoring standard and a premium pricing strategy. Women's is being developed selectively, rooted in the house tailoring DNA and representing, I would say, a meaningful long-term opportunity for us. Clienteling is Brioni's most powerful growth engine. Maestria goes beyond the atelier. Trunk shows, private appointments, in-house services. We build long-term, high-touch relationships grounded in intimacy, discretion, and exceptional service. Brioni is, by nature, a house for those who lead. Global decision-makers, ultra-high-net-worth clients, men and women for whom excellence is actually non-negotiable.
We will reinforce this authority selectively across key geographies where ultra-high-net-worth demand is structurally growing and the Alta Sartoria offer remains underserved. We will do this while preserving rarity through selective access and highly curated experiences, making Brioni the most desirable lifetime wardrobe in ultra-luxury. Brioni's mastery of tailoring and customization is unmatched within the group. It is therefore a strategic asset. Beyond its own development, Brioni will play a broader role as the natural reference for sartorial excellence within Kering, serving the needs of other brands when it comes to made-to-measure bespoke tailoring. This means embodying the highest standards of craftsmanship and client intimacy, safeguarding and elevating the culture of tailoring, fit, and service excellence across the group. Know-how and capabilities will be selectively shared where it strengthens the whole, while fully preserving Brioni's autonomy, rarity, and exclusivity.
This is how Alta Sartoria will become a distinctive group capability with Brioni as its natural authority.
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Good. Jewelry is a large and fast-growing category, as you know, representing around EUR 30 billion globally for luxury jewels and the branded part of it, and expanding faster than most of other luxury segments. It benefits from a powerful structural driver, rising self-purchase, demand for recognizable design codes, growing unisex appeal, and I would say long-term premiumization of the product. In 2025, jewelry proved to be the most resilient category within personal luxury goods. Jewelry also offer superior fundamentals, preserve pricing power, cultural relevance, resilient margins, and exceptional emotional engagement that reinforces brand equity and drives client loyalty. Yet, the market remains highly concentrated with room for challengers like us. Beyond a handful of global leaders, the category is still fragmented, leaving substantial runway for high-potential players. Today, jewelry is structurally under-penetrated across our fashion houses, representing around 2% of sales, versus mid-single digit to low teens for peers.
This gap for us and for me, represents a significant upside. Kering already generated EUR 1.2 billion in jewelry, with around 75% from Boucheron, Pomellato, Dodo, and Qeelin. Four houses, I think with strong creative identities and complementary position. They have momentum, but historically operated without a unified strategic backbone, limiting scale and synergies. Combined with a structurally premiumizing market and a EUR 20 billion-EUR 30 billion addressable 24 karat gold market in China at the category level, the conditions are firmly in place to scale jewelry through a coordinated group-wide approach. Our priority is to unlock the full potential of each house by reinforcing what makes them unique and leveraging on what already resonates. This means strengthening each house identity and creativity, scaling iconic lines and hero collections, and expanding high jewelry as both an image and a value creator. Each house follows a differentiated growth path.
Boucheron continues to consolidate its avant-garde leadership on Place Vendôme through the development of, and animation of its pillar lines, the acceleration of high jewelry also, and international scaling, and a global scaling. Growth combines market share gains in core markets with expansion in some under-penetrated market like the U.S. The opening of the Shanghai Xintiandi flagship at the end of 2025, I think it's a strong illustration of this kind of strategy, positioning Boucheron as a leading challenger in the global high jewelry. To support this growth, sustained and disciplined investment in communication, I think are essential. Hélène, this is the issue, both to fuel expansion in high-potential markets and to maintain momentum and desirability in mature markets, including Japan and also Korea. Finally, building on its existing offer and rich archives, watches represent an additional opportunity to extend Boucheron's creative territory and support long-term growth.
We have Pomellato. Pomellato is strengthening its role as the benchmark of contemporary, colorful, fine jewelry rooted in Milan, in Milanese craftsmanship and bold design. Growth will be driven by an enlarged and upgraded product, let's say offer, increase store productivity, and control distribution expansion. DoDo continues to reinforce its position in gifting jewelry driven by strong recruitment, category breadth, and soulful creation that carry emotion and connection. First in its domestic market is Italy, obviously, and in selected international geography where the brand already has a meaningful traction. We have Céline. Céline builds on exceptional momentum right now, and I would say in the past decades, with sales that multiplied by 11 between 2015 and 2025. The focus is now on enriching and upgrade the product portfolio, supported by higher investment in marketing, strong storytelling, cultural relevance, and emotional connection.
The brand still has a significant potential, and to expand, especially in Greater China, while exploring, for example, the structural 24 karat gold opportunity, which is a major growth engine for the house. Beyond our jewelry houses, we see also a major opportunity to scale jewelry as a materially larger contributor to our fashion houses over time, doubling to tripling its weight. We start with Gucci. A few years ago, Gucci jewelry, including watches, was around EUR 600 million-EUR 700 million sales. Today it's EUR 200 million, right? That is a room we can recapture and grow, leveraging Gucci's global network and category equity. This expansion is a dual level. It lifts desirability and different cost category engagement, while also supporting margin expansion as jewelry structurally requires higher communication intensity than fashion.
On the client side, it creates an immediate opportunity to convert fashion VICs into high jewelry clients with the same brands. This is the dynamic already proven by leading peers and competition. What truly changes now is the way we operate. We are moving from four independent jewelers to one coherent, powerful activity that is Kering Jewelry under the, let's say, leadership and the stewardship of Jean-Marc Duplaix, that everybody knows. This is a critical step in the gradual integration of Raselli Franco Group. This is a world-class Italian manufacturing partner bringing exceptional craftsmanship technology and also end-to-end production expertise. This provides us the industrial backbone to scale jewelry across the group, including in-house sourcing and manufacturing of diamonds and precious stones, which optimizes, obviously, cost and enhances traceability. This is not about standardization. It is about vertical integration. Each house retains full creative autonomy and a very distinct territory.
The diversity of identity remains, I think, a core strength and a typical habit of Kering. In short, what we do is one integrated jewelry activity, more scale, more margin, more speed, and more brand power without ever losing the uniqueness of each one of the houses. With this approach, jewelry complements fashion, eyewear, and beauty in a pragmatic way and is positioned to make a meaningful contribution to the group's growth over time when we look at the numbers of the plan.
As I said earlier, the jewelry business is set to double in the origin from now to the end of the plan, with its contribution to the mix increasing by around five points in total on the mix, driven by the acceleration of our pure jewelry houses and the scaling of the fashion jewelry across the group, starting, again, I repeat, with Gucci while operating at market-level profitability standards. Let me now turn it to a business where this approach is already fully at work since years, and this is Kering Eyewear. Kering Eyewear, a great entrepreneurial story from Northeastern Italy, from Roberto Vedovotto and the team, because around 10 years ago, we made a choice at Kering. That was François-Henri at that time, I guess. Made a choice that most people thought was impossible.
It was to build a luxury eyewear company inside a luxury group from scratch. We committed to leverage design excellence, product quality, distribution control to drive category integration across the Kering portfolio with Gucci at the time as a primary driver of global cross-brand synergies. That decision has positioned Kering Eyewear where few newcomers ever arrive. But the real story is not how fast we grew. The real story is about how we built a distinctive foundation for the long term with brands, industrial assets, innovation, and teams that make this business unlike any other in our industry. We started from a blank page, no design, no product development, no factories, no distribution. What we did was a conviction. Eyewear industry deserved its own luxury house, so we built one. An integrated model, end-to-end design, product development, supply chain, and distribution under one roof.
We partner with luxury powerhouses like Richemont, you've seen on the movie, who not only embrace our innovative business vision but also strengthen our venture by enriching our brand portfolio with very highly desirable top-tier brands, including Cartier, just as an example. We invested in industrial capabilities, then strengthened the platform with Lindberg and Maui Jim. These are two proprietary powerhouses. Today, we operate the most balanced and resilient portfolio in luxury eyewear, iconic houses, fashion accelerators, and high-margin proprietary brands. The results speak for themselves, from zero to EUR 1.6 billion in wholesale revenue, with strong, steady profitability proving this model is differentiated, durable, and is scalable. Today, Kering Eyewear stands on a set of unique strategic assets. We operate a global portfolio of 15 brands. This makes us one of the most attractive and relevant partners for optical retailers and distributors worldwide.
We manage a tightly curated distribution network, reaching up to 60,000 doors. This presence is managed brand by brands, with each maison defining the right level of distribution to maximize desirability and productivity. We have built a flexible and balanced industrial platform, delivering world-class craftsmanship, quality, speed, and traceability. We benefit from proprietary lens expertise, giving us a technological edge that is unmatched in this industry. We have developed a strong culture of innovation, which is now taking us beyond eyewear into AI-powered connected luxury products through our recently signed partnership with Google. Looking ahead, we will continue to build every brand into a long-term platform. That means sharpening each brand's eyewear identity and storytelling, strengthening hero lines, optical pillars, and innovation cycle. It also means unlocking Valentino's eyewear full potential from day one, leveraging all synergies with L'Oréal fragrances business, and global footprint.
We will accelerate Lindberg's global development, building on one of the most distinctive product propositions in the market, its uncompromising quality, cutting-edge innovation, and a unique design language, extreme customization, attracting a highly qualified and discerning clientele. We will build on Maui Jim's strength as a leading sunglasses brand, supported by a powerful legacy in lens technology and optical performance, scaling its global footprint through hero products and optical launch, and reinforce brand authority. Execution, not footprint. Growth will come from how we run the business, not from adding doors. We have 60,000, it's just enough. Higher productivity per door, deeper cross-selling, stronger luxury execution in store. We will build strategic subsidiaries only where control creates value, and we will harmonize training, trade marketing, and service standards across every region. Margin will expand through industrial mastery. We'll scale proprietary lens capabilities as a structural differentiator.
We will automate replenishment to keep bestsellers always available. We'll enforce a strict cost discipline and best-in-class cash conversion, and we will increase the share of proprietary brands to reinforce margin resilience. In line with our ambition to stay ahead of the curve and strengthen our leadership in the luxury eyewear market, the next phase of our growth will also be driven by investing in technology. In this context, we aim to lead the luxury smart eyewear segment. The partnership we have established with Google will be instrumental in delivering the ambition, enabling us to build the first true luxury smart eyewear ecosystem, desirable, wearable, and meaningful.
Our approach will be fundamentally differentiated from existing market propositions, because by combining Google's unique technology and ecosystem with its leading position in search, video, AI, and agentic e-commerce with Kering's eyewear unparalleled design capability, exceptional product development expertise, and highly selective and controlled distribution model, we will elevate smart eyewear from a tech accessory to a fully integrated luxury product experience. This will be further reinforced by the seamless integration into our maison's ecosystem, from boutiques to global communication platform, ensuring consistency, desirability, and relevance across every touch point. Through this model, we will address the industry's long-standing challenge, the balance between design, battery, functionality, setting new standards for the category, and defining the role for connected eyewear for our brands. In 10 years, we have proved eyewear is a true luxury business and that's something we can lead.
Today we have the portfolio, the industrial power, and the innovation roadmap to shape the next decade. Tomorrow, we will scale Kering Eyewear from EUR 1.6 billion to a multi-billion euro platform, setting the standard for craftsmanship, technology, and desirability. With the mind-set of a challenger, as they've always been, but at the same time, with the confidence of people that proved they could be leader in that category. I think, Roberto, you're all ready for the next leap. Now, I spoke about the brands. Reigniting growth is essential, but sustaining it over time requires some strategic choices. The ability to scale where it matters, and the discipline to invest where we have a long-term right to win. The ambitions I am about to share are not about diversification for its own sake.
They are about unlocking new value pools, reinforcing the relevance of our houses, and positioning Kering at the forefront of how luxury evolves. Let's begin with actually a very old brand, but reinvented. This is Ginori, and we have a small movie, I think.
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Good. This kind of sounds strange to talk about Ginori, to talk about Kering Next, but you will see that we have some idea. Now, for me, Ginori represents the activation of one of the most singular assets in our portfolio. It's a maison, almost 300 years. Craftsmanship, artistic heritage, and cultural relevance. What changes today is how decisive we are activating this asset. Our strategy for Ginori is deliberately dual. We are activating two complementary growth engines at the same time, each one reinforcing the other. First, Ginori is being built into a major global reference in fine porcelain and tableware, consolidating its leadership in Italy and pursuing its successful expansion selectively across key international markets. Tableware remains the core, the economic, creative, and industrial backbone of the house. Around this core, Ginori strengthens its industrial capability, including selective porcelain developed for all the Kering houses.
Thanks to this kind of Tuscan heritage, it has built a close and long-standing partnership with Gucci, typically, and selective collaboration with other houses. Intercompany activity only today represents 4% of the total of Ginori business in 2025. Leaving a huge upside if we play the game differently. Second, Ginori is expanding into a true home, that's our wish, and lifestyle design house rooted in Italian art de vivre. With experiential luxury as a core expression of this evolution. This evolution is a natural extension of its DNA, so we're working with Mehdi on the concept. The house has a long tradition of collaborating with artists, with designers from Gio Ponti in the 1950s to contemporary style like Luke Edward Hall, and leveraging design language that's kind of decorative knowhow and cultural relevance.
I think the brand expands into a different home and lifestyle category. We're also developing things like cafes, terraces, residences, et cetera. Through these initiatives, Ginori will act as we do in jewelry, just to make it clear, as an incubator for lifestyle and experiential concept for all the Kering houses. This is the idea, enabling immersive brand expansion and cross-maison opportunities. This evolution is coherent and design-led, not volume-driven, and remains asset-light and I would say, partnership-driven. Over the past five years, Ginori has almost multiplied by four in size and is on a critical path towards breakeven. Looking ahead, the ambition is to deliver 10% double-digit growth year-on-year over the next five years, supported by also the activation we will do and the investment we'll do on the group.
In a nutshell, Ginori 1735 is becoming the Italian reference in porcelain, fine art, cultural maison with global reach, design-driven, craft-led, with a distinct role in strengthening Kering's portfolio and long-term growth for everybody. We have beauty, that's part of this Kering Next. Beauty is a category with tremendous potential for our houses. It is also a category where scale, science, and industrial power determines the winners. Over the past three years, we have built, I think, a solid foundation with Creed and with the first launch of Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga. This led us to a conclusion that to unlock the full beauty potential of our brands, the most value accretive part is a long-term partnership with L'Oréal, thanks to the disposal of Kering Beauté, which we acted a few weeks ago. Why?
Because this partnership gives us immediate access to the world's most advanced beauty platform in research and development, in manufacturing, in global distribution, as well as an unmatched media reach because of their investment. It positions our brands for accelerated growth and long-term success while delivering meaningful royalty potential. As a result, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga, and later Gucci, when the license expires, will reach their full beauty potential with a far greater speed, I am convinced, with a far greater scale, and with an impact that we could not achieve on our own. This is not a leap of faith. This is a proven model. The extraordinary success that L'Oréal has built with Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, I think, is the clearest demonstration.
They transformed a strong brand into one of the most powerful and scalable fragrance businesses and beauty franchise in the world, a business that is now generating around EUR 3 billion, let's say, in annual revenues. This is really impressive. The potential of our houses starting with all of them, but including Gucci, it's very substantial. YSL Beauty's scale shows what a strong brand can achieve. It is a benchmark of possibility, not a ceiling, particularly for Gucci. For a brand with the Gucci equity, the long-term opportunity is very, very meaningful. The choice we made is therefore a value-driven decision, faster growth, significantly lower capital intensity, and a far more powerful way to support our houses over the long term. This is not the end of the journey. This partnership gives us a strong foundation. What matters now is how we build on it.
Living longer and aging better is becoming the ultimate need for affluent people, alongside a shift from ownership to optimization. People want to feel better, not just own more. Supported by powerful demographics and valued around more than EUR 6 trillion as a market, the wellness and longevity market is one of the fastest-growing adjacencies to luxury, driven largely by top-tier clients and showing strong natural complementarities with personal luxury in services, in experiences, and in costs. Despite the size of the market, longevity and wellness remains a highly fragmented sector, with today's offer falling short to provide an end-to-end, always-on luxury experience, offer disconnected protocols, lack of standardization, and experiences rarely meet luxury expectation. Destination clinics and urban services operate in silos with limited continuity, with limited integration or community.
Our objective is to break this compromise and to develop urban and destination-based centers built on safe, scientifically validated and proven protocols, continuous monitoring, and high-end frequency subscription approach that supports long-term engagement. Luxury client experience, human connection, and community being really central to the experience. In a context like this, leveraging L'Oréal's expertise in beauty and Kering know-how in delivering luxury experiences. Our goal is to combine personalized wellness and longevity programs with cultural experiences and exclusive product access anchored in privacy, in excellence, and in community. With Nicolas Hieronimus, that I think everybody knows, we share the same vision, both for Kering Beauté and for what we want to build in longevity and wellness. I let you hear directly from him.
Ciao, Luca, and hello to all of you from Paris. I hope you're enjoying your immersion into the world of Kering. Together with the L'Oréal Luxe teams, we are very excited to be entrusted with the beauty business of Kering's magnificent brands. They join us at a perfect moment, as they will benefit from the momentum, drive, and vision that Luca has instilled. This is a true win-win partnership. For L'Oréal, it represents a strategic reinforcement of our luxury leadership, allowing us to bring our unique beauty expertise to Kering's couture DNA. Adding these new jewels to our crown, including Creed, a true royalty in luxury fragrance, creates a powerful engine for increased growth and profit.
For Kering, this means higher royalties, enhanced global visibility for its iconic houses, and the opening of new frontiers in wellness and longevity in partnership with the world leader in beauty. We have every reason to be excited about the journey that lies ahead. With that, back to you, Luca.
L'Oréal, a very strong organization, very strong leadership. The only thing I beat him, Nicolas Hieronimus, is on paddle, when we play together, but the rest, they are a machine, marketing and product machine. As you will have understood, Kering next wave of growth will not come exclusively from scaling individual brands, but also from expanding the portfolio. We will select actually emerging brands adjacent to our core, as well as in new categories and new geographies. All brands will have to display strong future cultural relevance. Our mission will be to scale them, to their full potential within their category, but never beyond. To support this strategy, we will set up a new operating model that delivers the platform effects of a large group to emerging brands across the entire value chain. Clients, marketing, real estate, manufacturing, supply chain, retail, and of course, others.
This is with the House of Wonders. That's the name we finally gave to the whole thing. Kering is kind of time traveling, right? We will enable brands to achieve in five years what you normally need, maybe the double or three times the time, while dramatically reducing execution risks. Our objective is not to chase scale for its own sake, but to support brands that complement our portfolio by addressing new categories, new geographies, new audiences, notably subculture, and new business models. Our priority is first and foremost, to invest in the development of our houses. I want to say it very loud and clear, but we also look ahead selectively backing the opportunity that will shape the future of luxury. That's also very important. Our investment approach remains flexible, I would say pretty prudent, ranging from minority stakes with strategic influence to majority position.
We will do it where this thing is relevant. Maybe we will do some venture-style investments, but always a strict return framework, fully aligned with our capital allocation discipline and with investments that are sized appropriately for the group. To this extent, we are also very pleased to announce a minority investment in ICICLE. This is the most recognized Chinese luxury brand today. Through this investment, we are not only backing one of the great success story of the Chinese luxury ecosystem, but also aiming at providing ICICLE the capabilities to continue its development, specifically in Europe and the U.S., and maybe onto new categories. Reciprocally, we are convinced that our operations teams can learn a lot from the high-tech manufacturing, logistics, and supplier ecosystem ICICLE has been developing over the last years, particularly in China.
The next phase of our journey requires, I think, more than creativity alone. It requires a leaner, more connected, and technology-powered organization, and operating with intelligence, discipline, and the speed of the world's best-performing companies. The ability to combine what I always say, art and science. Concretely, we are redesigning Kering with one integrated group platform, activating efficiency levers across the entire value chain, from design to distribution, so that every step becomes faster, more precise, more resilient. This transformation is structured, in fact, around the five hubs I mentioned before at the beginning. First one is the industry. For decades, Kering has built extraordinary craftsmanship, world-class Italian and European artisanal ecosystem and strong internal manufacturing capabilities, that's for sure. This highly specialized savoir-faire, patiently developed over generations, is at the very heart of our product excellence and delivery. That's for sure.
Over time, however, we have also accumulated a lot of complexity. Industrial and sourcing models have been largely developed brand by brand, leading to a lot of fragmentation, duplication, and limited scalability. To accelerate performance, we are fundamentally rethinking our industrial backbone to serve our houses while keeping their specificities. Concretely, what does it mean? It means that harmonized planning, industrial sourcing, and purchasing processes, common KPIs, and the simpler ways of working across houses. Across purchasing, supply chain, production, we are strengthening our product engine end-to-end with one ambition, better planning, faster execution. We are deploying data-driven demand signals, AI-based forecasting, and real-time data sharing to improve our order sizing, reduce waste, and tighten capacity planning across all categories and across all sites. We are also rolling out an AI-powered tool that dynamically rebalances products across stores, improving full price sell-through while raising client satisfaction.
We are accelerating factory digitalization, deploying predictive analytics, and centralizing governance to gain end-to-end visibility across the entire industrial chain. This will strengthen decision-making rhythms, improve responsiveness to demand shifts, and increase saturation of internal production capacity. At the same time, dedicated capacity, AI-assisted planning, and digitalized manufacturing allow us to materially shorten development and production cycles. We aim to halve the time to market for both collection and carry-over products and improving costs to serve through better sequencing and load management. We are already demonstrating what it means. For example, on the day of the Gucci show, there were already around 80 products from the runway that were available immediately online and in selected boutiques, what we call the see now, buy now. Behind that is part of the work that we are doing on the industrial part, and it, of course, will scale.
Our supplier base, this is in global luxury. It embodies, as I said at the beginning, decades of highly specialized savoir-faire that are essential to our brand desirability. Our evolution is therefore not about weakening this ecosystem. It's a very important message from my side because a lot of people will listen to that also outside, but about strengthening and preserving it through more solid long-term partnership. Today, we work with 4,200 direct suppliers. Here's the reality. Around 25% of them, they do 98% of our purchasing, exiting cost and operational risk. This is why we are reshaping our supply ecosystem around a more selective and more strategic partnership model built on the notion of preferred supplier, which as a result, also reduces our reliance on subcontracting, where control and compliance are more challenging.
A preferred supplier is not simply based on demanding group-level criteria about excellence in quality and craftsmanship, full compliance with social and environmental standards, industrial reliability, agility, and of course, the capacity to develop and innovate alongside us. This is a two-way relationship with them. By offering visibility, by offering them joint planning capability and long-term commitments, we position Kering as a preferred customer, the one that attracts and accelerates the best ideas and R&D from our supplier ecosystem. With these partners, we move away from short-term transactional relationship toward long-term, multi-year partnership. This brings shared planning horizons, joint investment in skills, tools, and sustainability, and deeper integration into our industrial and sourcing processes. Volume concentration is the consequence of this choice, not the starting point. It strengthens control, improves resilience, secures critical know-how, and gives supplier the stability they need to invest, innovate, and grow responsibly.
Today, our internal industrial assets comprise 37 entities and workshops covering all major product categories and representing around 20% of fashion houses' production in 2025, on average, across all categories. Alongside this progressive optimization and saturation of our internal assets, strategic partnerships are a core pillar of this industrial transformation. We are building, as I said before, long-term collaborations with a limited number of industrial players who share our values and our standards. A good illustration of this approach is our partnership with HModa. This is a leading industrial hub within the fashion ecosystem here in Italy. This strategic joint venture aims at investing in key industrial assets. We will be built on shared priorities like excellence in craftsmanship, industrial skills, flexibility, supply chain, compliance, and you name it.
By saturating our internal assets and leveraging those kinds of partnerships, we target basically to double internationalization rates within Kering over the next two years. The thing will be relatively quick. The financial impact of this organization is expected to be globally positive. That's the math that we made, though probably not necessarily linear. Investment to improve product quality and further enhance our standards when it comes to suppliers selection, supply chain quality will generate costs, that's for sure, but these are largely offset by the synergies and the efficiency gains that we see. At the group operations level, we expect at least one point of EBIT margin gain because of this movement, and it includes everything, just for the synergies. Just based on the synergy, just based on supply chain synergies, logistic optimization, and indirect procurement centralization.
This target represents the starting points for Stéphane Noël, who just joined us from the automotive industry, who is our new Chief Industrial Officer sitting on the frontline there, with hopefully further progress expected for the future. The second hub is client, and I think interesting message for you. Client-centricity, as I said, will be at the heart of everything we do, from designing the most desirable products to delivering the most amazing experiences, but to ensure it remains at the core of our culture or it stays there while updating this vision, leveraging new technology. The group has launched what we call KORE. K-O-R-E. This is a translation of Kering Omnichannel Recruitment Engine. KORE ambition is to take our existing client database capability to the next level by building a fully integrated and comprehensive view on luxury consumers. Okay?
Deepening our understanding of preferences, behavior across all categories, leveraging our brand proprietary data, and enriching them with external behavioral sources. Yet KORE is not only about data and AI, but also truly about rethinking our decision-making process and our organization to put the client at the center of what we do across the value chain, from product out to client in. KORE rewires Kering around a single demand signal, this is the client, ultimately ensuring everything we design, we buy, we allocate, and activate is inputted also by client data. Concretely, we have five carriers. Identifying and activating the right audiences across acquisition channels, optimizing every euro we spend, in particular leveraging first-party data to target high-potential audiences and optimize spend allocation. This first pilot that we made at Gucci in the U.S. are already delivering 30%-50% of ROI. The betting works, right?
Second is client engagement. Delivering personalized and contextual client journeys at scale, that's important. At scale to drive traffic, conversion, and cross-sell opportunity, especially leveraging AI and behavioral data to engage with high-potential clients. This transformation has already been initiated, again, by Gucci, and I will come back in a minute on that because it's interesting. You have the client engagement, you also have the product and offer development. Addressing occasion of purchase that matter the most to current and future customer segments, reinforcing product offering and anticipating needs, more specifically leveraging internal consumer, social, and market trend data to better forecast demand and optimize production stock level. The store experience and retail performance through refined engagement model, store layouts, and visual merchandising by leveraging consumer and retail data, customer feedbacks, store journeys analysis to optimize client experience.
I think we target a 10%-15% increase of productivity. Which is massive, by the way. Yeah, we are testing this. Strategy and portfolio expansion. This is about prioritize higher share of wallet of customers. Thanks to boosted customer intelligence like signal, services, panels, it's about customer research, we will be able to design extended journeys for the Kering customer within Kering ecosystem and also our ecosystem partners. Finally, KORE will increase loyalty, very important, and therefore the value of every relationship over time through more relevant products, services, and experiences by enabling us to innovate and offer high-value cross-brand client services such as exclusive events or exclusive products, or multi-brand private concierge to our VICs, which also makes a lot of sense. As part of this transformation, we are developing a new clienteling model.
objective is to systematize the intuitive and individualized selling approach by combining AI-driven targeting algorithms, disciplined store routines, and enhanced client advisor capabilities. We piloted that at Gucci first. The program has already delivered tangible results by strengthening commercial animation, improving the quality and consistency of client activation, and expanding the reach beyond VIC segment, notably leveraging new AI algorithms and technologies. Stores that adopted the new approach delivered nearly double, with approximately two times higher outreach sales per store, multiplied by two purchasing clients per outreach, and strong traction, especially across mid and low-tier segments. Building on this momentum, we now expand and refine the program within Gucci. In parallel, we are scaling the program to the group, adapting the proven components to each house. The goal is to establish. In this client journey, I think technology will be very central.
Let's talk about technology for a moment. We are building the group's augmented platform as operational backbones to provide the group with powerful accelerators without uniformizing the unique identity of each one of the houses. That is very clear to all of us. This architecture will be based on what we call the complete digital twin of the company, its data flows, business processes modeled and hosted in the cloud to provide a unified real-time and actionable views of all operations and scalability standards that legacy infrastructure can no longer guarantee today. It's too rigid. We will have a completely different thing. The stakes, in fact, go further, because by layering on top of this an agentic AI level on those twins, it becomes possible not just to observe processes but to.
The first one is augmented products. Upstream in product design, the objective is to implement the tools and resources capable of anticipating sociological, ecological, systemic, and technological trends, so as to feed the team well ahead of product conception. Second, the objective is also to facilitate information flow, okay? Let's say end-to-end management of each one of the houses. The complementary idea is to enrich the product life cycle, the metadata of the augmented product, enabling traceability and optimization of product referencing. Think about Asia in a few years. In an environment where stockouts might become structural, the challenge is to preserve core goods, jewelry, and eyewear. In this category, stock optimization and traceability are very critical areas. Less assortment diversity also means that each unit carries a higher individual value, making logistical precision an absolute priority.
The challenge is having no real-time sales signals and predictive models, integrated with seasonality, purchasing behavior, launch dynamics, which would enable really a shift from a reactive logic to a proactive one, allocating the right product in the right place at the right time without overstocking or diminishing perceived priority. For a multi-brand group like Kering, the challenge is even more complex and can remain very siloed within each house with its own approach and tools. The growing pressure on media investment ROI and the increasing sophistication of customers, let's say, actually calls for a new operating logic, in our opinion. We will create what we call a client hub that will amplify capabilities. This hub will bring talents that raise the collective level without diluting each one's uniqueness. We have retail experience, what we call augmented retail experience.
The clienteling tools on the market today already give sales associates powerful capabilities. You have personalized client insights, you have product suggestions, and you have real-time interaction histories. Reducing search-related friction and consolidating everything in one place, the two disruptions. Finally, we have an augmented resource planning powered by predictive footfall flows and local events that guarantees the right level of staffing at the right time, ensuring every client receives the attention they deserve. In this way, both the client advisor and the store managers see that the luxury boutique is no longer just a point of sale, it's actually a collector of signals. Performance is not explained by sales alone but by the combination of dozens of exogenous and endogenous variables. Whether footfall, trial, competitive density, seasonal tourism, you name it.
Crossing these contemplating footfall peaks, adapting assortments locally, optimizing staff, or even adjusting commercial animation in real time. For a multi-brand group, this also obviously is an opportunity to build a shared infrastructure, a geolocalization, external enrichment, a 360 view of the network, providing each development as one. In conclusion, we have 100% as one. I want to talk about sustainability. I'm looking at Marie-Claire, that is our most important expert in the whole industry. The final hub of the group is the sustainability. Sustainability has always been, I think, a defining part of Kering's leadership. We did not enter this space to follow trends, and we will not step back from it now, very clearly. In operation, in sourcing, in retail, and in how also we allocate capital. It must apply across all houses, all categories, all regions, and at all levels of governance, no exception.
To deliver on this ambition, we are reinforcing our, let's say, operating model. Each house executive committee will protect both our environmental footprint and our brand equity. To achieve this, we are shifting toward, as I said before, towards precision manufacturing and more discipline, let's say, collection architecture. The direction is set and execution is accelerating. I would like to add two essential elements here. First, eco design must happen at the very beginning of our creation, embedding lower impact materials, no, Marie-Claire, consistent with our target to get to net zero in 2050 and to have a 50% reduction already by 2033. These are not just abstract targets. They are day-to-day steering tools for our teams. Our second priority is the environment and the culture to deliver long-term value. To get there, we must start there, but only if it is protected and nurtured.
We are strengthening service and operational excellence. We also enforce strict social standards, decent, and safe working conditions. In 2025, 70% of our suppliers level of performance. Because this challenge cannot be addressed by any single company, we also, as you probably know, exercise collective leadership through action like the Fashion Pact. To deliver on our ambition, we must invest in capabilities for the long term. That's why yesterday I was here and we launched the Kering Accademia per le Eccellenze in the innovation district, close to the Sapienza University of Rome in the Expo area. The Accademia will be firmly anchored in Italy with a network activated, I think, on nine regions, Savina. We create a network that's probably the biggest one in the nation and a network of leading educational partners including Calduz or HModa or Politecnico di Milano.
It will offer training paths ranging from one semester to seven years to the kids, combining craftsmanship, design, technology, sustainability with some programs leading to diplomas that are recognized by the Italian authorities, the next generation. The idea, it will start. Our boutiques are where desirability meets reality, where we earn or lose the client. To reinforce this link, we are deploying a retail excellence model across all houses, aligning incentives with full price, sell through, sales density, VIC development, and the client experience. We're also introducing in-store immersion program for leaders. In terms of managers, that are the key thing. We made a few decisions together, okay? We have built a new, let's say, management by objective scheme that was implemented this year. All leaders in Kering are aligned on group level KPIs complemented by in-house and individual objectives.
This is also very important sometimes especially for the investors and for the analysts. For the first time in Kering, individual vision. More broadly, we are also investing in careers. We have developed a tool that we call talent match, that we are creating group-wide. It's an AI-based framework that gives our people greater visibility of what's going on, what are the internal opportunities, and encourages mobility across functions, across houses and geography, and supports long-term career. This is also why we have launched what I call AI Kering. It's AI Kering. This is a new group program designed to identify and reveal emerging talents by assigning them high-impact, cross-functional, and fruitful projects that we are running.
Finally, I would like to focus on a topic that matters deeply to us as a group and reflects a longstanding commitment of François-Henri Pinault, and this is the place of women, not only within Kering, where they represent more than 60% of our workforce, but in society at large. This conviction is expressed through the program that we call Women in Motion, which, by the way, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and actually works to increase the visibility of women creators and leaders across cinema and the creative industry worldwide. More broadly, this long-term engagement to women is embodied by Kering Foundation, which since 2008 has been fighting violence against women and children through very concrete on-the-ground initiatives around the world, notably in six countries for Kering. The foundation focuses on supporting survivors, preventing violence, and striving for broad mobilization to end violence across generations.
One powerful example is the Maison des Femmes in France, which provides care, protection, and long-term support to thousands of women, victims of violence every year. To give you a sense of the impact achieved, over 18 years, it is in 30 partnerships. It will continue to enable women and children to lead safe lives and to thrive in the years to come. Our third priority focuses on the foundation of our craft, diversifying material and inventing the next generation of luxury. Client pressure and animal welfare considerations require us to broaden our material universe. Traceability and responsible sourcing are non-negotiable at Kering. We are diversifying our material portfolio to reduce dependency on constrained resources. We are accelerating the development of our next-generation materials as exemplified by biotech and circular regenerative textile.
We are expanding value-enhancing services like repair, certified resale and trust, in our opinion, loyalty, and desirability. All in all, progress will be measured by some very few key indicators. You have full material traceability and full alignment with Kering standards and ready-to-wear, and 40% alternative materials by 2035, no, Marie-Claire? A reduction of leather intensity measured as sq m of leather purchased per EUR 1 million of revenue in leather goods and shoes, allowing us to decouple growth from leather dependency with a 30% reduction target by 2028, so already relatively quickly versus 2025. A positive nature impact in the water priority, percent of our supply chain worldwide aligned with the target. Finally, a strong innovation agenda with 20% of the revenue generated from innovation by 2035, split evenly between material but also process innovation and service and new business model.
Let me conclude with the statement section, then we go into the financial outlook. At no point will we allow a business argument on operational complexity to be used as a justification for failing to deliver on our sustainability commitment. This is how we build, we believe, resilient brands, nurture long-term trust, and deliver performance that lasts. Now we come to the money and we finish. Everything we have presented today has obviously a purpose. First one is restore sustainable top-line growth driven by desirability and mix. Rebuild profitability approach. Fourth, improve cash conversion through leaner operation and better working capital management. Delivering on this is what matters to me, and when we do, the result will follow both in revenues and in margin. I want to start again from brand desirability, and now we measure it, and I will explain why it's so important.
Brand desirability is a strategic asset and one of our leading indicators of our future growth. We have therefore adopted a robust brand equity framework developed with a recognized independent firm that's called Ifop, which serves as a shared compass to assess and steer the desirability of each house as well as the group as a whole. Rather than relying on a single metric, this approach provides a holistic and integrated view on brand equity structured around, I would say, three complementary pillars. One is visibility. We measure through spontaneous and aided awareness, as well as current weight of brands in public conversation, ensuring desirability is grounded really in market presence and recognition. Second is appeal. Visibility, appeal. Appeal is captured through indicators such as esteem, willingness to own and wear, and then you have image strength. These three things combine the formula.
By combining these three, we obtain a robust and really comprehensive measure of desirability, and that reflects not only how much our brands are wanted but also how they are perceived and experienced in the market. Each house is measured independently through a large-scale survey among luxury consumers, benchmarked against the market and the competitors, and consolidated at the group level. A house showing a positive momentum will be supported to accelerate. A decline in brand equity will trigger immediate corrective actions and a reassessment of priorities and investments. Okay? People will be paid on that. Part of the bonus will be at this one, so it's a serious part at Kering. Top line growth. We are building a group designed to deliver sustainable, profitable growth with gradual market outperformance. Our priority is to rebuild the strongest possible fundamentals, those that underpin desirability, pricing power, operational discipline, and cash conversion.
With this foundation firmly in place, we are confident in our ability to deliver sustainable growth driven by sharper execution and more relevant, higher quality product offer across all categories, supported by sustained brand desirability. At the same time, we are actively reshaping our distribution model to enhance productivity, brand impact, and long-term, let's say, value creation. Starting from 1,719 directly operated stores at the year-end 2025, we are transitioning toward a more selective, smarter, and more productive retail. This resizing, which is pretty material, is being conducted in a highly strategic manner, with dedicated initiatives in place to preserve and recapture sales from the store that have been closed. We expect a minimum net reduction of 100 stores in 2026, followed by the further reduction of net of 100 stores in 2027 and 2028. Okay?
By 2030, the group will operate a leaner and higher performing network with at least 250 fewer stores overall. Around half are in Gucci. A footprint that is better aligned with our ambition, client expectation and profitability objective. Over the same period, we will significantly upgrade the quality of our footprint with around two-thirds of the stores that will be refurbished or relocated to stronger and more relevant location. Talk about EBIT, very important. Kering will deliver, according to the plan, steady year after year EBIT margin improvement driven by every house. We are targeting midterm to more than double full year 2025 recurring operating margin percentage, supported by stronger mix, disciplined execution and operational rigor across the group. We are rebuilding profitability methodically, structurally, and sustainably. Our EBIT expansion engine will rely on three structural levels. One is it begins with full price discipline.
We have a clear ambition. This is to lift full price sales through desirability. We will enforce strict channel discipline, outlet penetration down seven points, wholesale penetration down three points, and the right size network delivering twice the level of sales density. We are restoring inventory health with a sharp reduction of excess and aged stock, normalizing levels in line with demand and materially reducing off-price exposure. With a target of seven points reduction in net inventory as a percentage of sales, thanks also to improved sell-through across the board. Third, operational power. Running the business smarter, faster, better. We will deliver continuous productivity gains year- after- year, reducing OpEx and the percentage of sales across the group, with notably specific actions on industrial synergy and marketing efficiency.
As outlined earlier, this will translate at group industrial level into at least one point of EBIT margin improvement in the years to come, driven by supply chain synergy, logistic optimization, and the centralization of indirect procurement that we will operate. At the same time, marketing will become more efficient. We'll continue to invest roughly the same percentage of sales, but far more effectively with a sharper targeting, stronger content impact and improved ROI. These are expected to represent around another one point of EBIT from next year onwards, and with those gains reinvested directly into the brands. Finally, we will run our store better. As I mentioned before, stronger economics, optimized staffing models and more efficient operating processes across the board. This is how productivity becomes a structural engine of margin expansion. We have capital discipline. This is essential as you know.
It's your money, the money of the investors, so we have to allocate it well. Every euro, let's say, needs to create value. Every euro we invest. CapEx will remain highly linked to returns with an uplift in ROIC on every major project. We will maintain a CapEx envelope around 5%-6% of the revenue, focused on what truly moves the needle. A high return retail project, targeted refurbishment, cooperation, and selective technology investment only where value creation is really proven. This is how we invest with discipline and deliver strong return. Let's talk about ROCE and give you our ambition. ROCE above 20% midterm remains our non-negotiable benchmark, the strongest proof that growth translates into real value creation. ROCE will be, of course, about portfolio discipline. Every brand will contribute to profitable growth.
I repeat, every brand will contribute to profitable growth, but our resources will be allocated to houses demonstrating momentum, discipline, and returns. Underperforming houses operate under a framework requiring them to reach EBIT breakeven within two years from now at latest. We will strengthen cash conversion through hard, tangible levers. We will restore inventory health, sharply reducing excess and targeting net inventory at below 20%. We will enforce strict CapEx discipline and our free cash flow will improve, driven by operation performance, supported by tighter inventory, selective investment, and more predictable recurring cash generation. I want to talk about M&A, because I think a question might come. Our priority is very straightforward. We will invest first and foremost in our houses to restore growth and performance. It's very clear. That means investing in what makes them win, creative leadership, product excellence, sharper, more productive retail network.
It means raising our operational game, strengthening our supply chain resilience, accelerating our digital transformation, and using technology to streamline processes and upgrade, let's say, client experience. M&A will remain in the next few years, highly selective and focused on bolt-on acquisitions such as Rasselli Franco. This is aimed at strengthening our supply chain capabilities. This transaction will be targeted, operational in nature, financially non-significant at the group level, and assessed against a ROCE target that are set for each segment. Our approach is therefore, let's say, centered on precise, complementary moves that will reinforce our industrial backbone while management attention stays firmly on today's priority, turning around and reactivating our houses and preparing in a disciplined manner for Valentino integration towards 2029, 2030, which could, let's say, cohesively complement, we believe, our existing brand portfolio. Our commitment to shareholders remains strong.
Dividend growth will follow the improvement of the group's performance, supported by a payout ratio around 50% of recurring net income group share. Let me outline the sequence in which we will build it. By year-end 2026, we will be a right-sized, reset group and back on a disciplined growth trajectory, a leaner operating model, a healthier cost base, inventories under control, and strict discipline restored across pricing, cost, and capital allocation. By year-end 2028, we will have built healthy, sustainable momentum, top line rebuilt through desirability and stronger client dynamics, growth engines fully reactivated across the portfolio, and as this growth strengthens, profitability and returns will follow structurally, not cyclically. At that stage, growth is no longer fragile. It's repeatable, more predictable, and value creative. By year-end 2030, we will have reclaimed Kering's leadership as the next luxury leader.
A group defined by desirability, powered by efficiency, and built for the decade ahead. This is the financial trajectory of reconquering. Reset, rebuild, and reclaim. In conclusion, over the past month, we have taken the first decisive steps of reconquering, strengthening our fundamentals, restoring discipline, accelerating operational transformation, and defining long-term perspective that is both coherent and actionable. Desirability remains our North Star, guiding every decision and helping us balance short-term imperatives with long-term ambition. We combine art and science, blending craftsmanship and innovation with scientific discipline in business management to ensure sustainable value creation. We embed resilience into our model, restoring the right equation between retail, clients, products, while rebalancing fashion cycle and building a diversified and robust portfolio across categories and segments.
We restore operational efficiency, optimizing our cost base at both group and brand level to improve resource allocation and deliver stronger ROCE, a key performance indicator for us. We leverage group synergies in client, in tech, and operation. Harnessing the complementarity of our houses to act as one integrated platform, not just a collection of brands. We inject technology at every level of the organization, making Kering the most technologically advanced luxury group with a fully integrated structure across industrial processes, technology, software, AI, data, and talent. We create a fully integrated ecosystem built around the clients, fulfilling every expectation to live an extraordinary life. A company built around the client, the client built around the clients. We developed global models, local relevance to global scale, combining a shared backbone with the flexibility to adapt assortments, storytelling, and experiences to each market.
Above all, we invest in our people because they are the engine of reconquering. We are building a culture that rewards creativity, accountability, and collaboration, attracting new capabilities in technology and data while nurturing the craftsmanship, the excellence, and the passion that define our houses. Empowering and upskilling our teams is what makes this transformation sustainable and what will allow us to deliver at the global scale. Of course, the road ahead is demanding, but our direction is now firmly set. Semester after semester, you'll be able to measure our progress. This is not just a strategic plan, it's a collective ambition.
I'm convinced that with the creativity, the expertise, and the commitment of all our teams across the group and the houses, we have everything it takes to succeed and shape Kering's future together. This is our journey, this is our momentum, and this is reconquering. Thank you very much for your attention.
[Presentation]
We start with the Q&A. Philippine, you are the master of ceremony. Do you have an order? Where do I have to sit? Okay.
I will.
Okay. Yeah. That was tough for me. Ask the question to the others, so I can relax my vocal cords
We will now start the Q&A session. Please raise your hand if you want to ask a question, and someone from the team will come with a number. Please limit your questions to two questions maximum. We start with number two.
Pass the microphone to you.
Yeah. Hello. Edouard Aubin, Morgan Stanley. Thank you so much. Two questions. The first one is a very quick one, so I'm here.
No, it's okay.
The first one is a very quick one. Medium-term. Define medium-term. Should we understand five years, i.e., about 2030? I think that's kind of what you imply. Okay. That was a quick one. The second one is, so you talked a lot about how the group is evolving from a holding company to a much more integrated group. Could you please share with us two or three very practical, simple examples that things you're doing now that you were not doing one year ago, to leverage the scale and the benefit of the group? Thank you.
I've given one example because so we leave some room for all the questions. Real estate. We moved the responsibility of real estate to the area of Jean-Marc , who unfortunately is forced to do the bad boy and make the arbitrage between things, and every brand will want this thing. Sometimes it's not perfect. Sometimes you have discussion, but it's very clear that you have someone deciding whether that brand goes there and not goes there, and it's a dialogue. Sometimes it's frustrating, but it's certainly accelerating a lot of decision, including all the store closures where we see that there was underperformance o r, for example, the move we made on the sellout of some asset that we had built, we had bought a few years ago. This is a very good example, but we have to get organized now into S&OP.
That's another typical thing. There are hundreds. I can tell you every day it's getting more and more collective work. My thing is not about the group and the brands, right? It's about the collective work that we do. It's a we thing, right? I don't know if it was clear, the old story is we build a machine where the group is there to build efficiency, okay? The brands, they have the mission of mass and growth. It's like in a football team, you have defense and midfield, and you have attack. There's nothing, yeah. That's the way we see it, but we play as a team. That's important to me. It's happening, to be honest.
Number four.
Good morning, I'm here at Dubai. Thomas Chauvet from Citi. Two questions, please. The first one you, at the start of your presentation, Luca, you mentioned the changing Chinese luxury market. You said more selective, more experiential, more digital, less outbound travel. You also announced this morning the investment, minority investments in the Chinese ready-to-wear brand ICICLE. Can you give us an example how you adapt to that changing Chinese consumer, on the ground, particularly at Gucci very concretely? And are you seeing any early signs of traction? My second question on your financial ambition, your group EBIT margin target doubling from 11% last year, so let's call it 2022, so that's 11 percentage points expansion cumulative. How do you break that down between gross margin expansion and OpEx leverage? You gave some levers earlier.
Is that relatively balanced between the two, or would that be more gross margin, which has been quite depressed over the last two, three years? Thank you.
Look, I'm going to answer first to the second one. We said that we would more than double in percentage medium-term, so at the origin we mentioned before. That's what the models calculates right now. I think the whole idea is a little bit like, there is a lot of room for efficiency also in OpEx, right? We are trying to reduce, obviously, the retail network, because part of it was very inefficient. The money that we save, we put back on the things that matter, right? That's why we feel that we can, with the double effect of, let's say, of a top-line growth, because the thing is the 5%-6% is calculated on in percentage, and the fact that we've become more efficient.
This is true for many things, even on IT. When I discussed with Pierre, also a newcomer into the thing, I don't need more money. I think I can do that with the money. We have the money, that we can maybe have 7%-8% productivity on the thing, and then we'll invest into the stores. That's the good news. Of course, if top line grows, as it should, okay, of course, the finance of the thing will come from the margin. You want to add something, a Jean-Marc or Armelle?
Yes, improvement of EBIT margin.
Armelle is the CFO for the one and I think she's very famous. Maybe in the media.
Of course, the top-line growth will provide some operational leverage. There will be also some cost efficiency, half coming from the store, with the right sizing of the network. We are optimizing also the operating model in retail. Half of it will come from organizational efficiency and also the benefit that we will get from the group platform. Luca already mentioned what we will benefit from logistics, supply chain, but also marketing efficiency, that will provide also. In terms of raw margin, we will have some benefit, but we will also reinvest in the quality of the product. All in all, it will be a huge sub-improvement, but most of the improvement will come from the OpEx.
On China, do you want to answer because the mention was on Gucci, so.
Yeah, sure. What are we doing in China? We basically apply deeper all of those functions. China, for Gucci, is a country where more than anywhere else, you need to restore brand desirability. You see our performance in America, driven by the fact that the brand desirability and the brand equity is super high. China is a place where from being high, we went down into brand desirability. We opened too many stores, and we didn't react to that. The point that Luca made is like the capability to see and to measure your brand desirability and react immediately when you see that it's going down. It didn't happen, and we are reacting now. How? Starting the stores and closing the stores that are unproductive. Reclassifying the stores, exactly like Luca said, with the new measure and classification of customers.
The fashionista, the opinionated, the investors that he was mentioning are being activated by zone in a different way. Of course, for Gucci, the fashionista component is important everywhere, but for sure in China, the opinionated component is the one that we need to win over first. Adapting the communication, that doesn't mean changing who Gucci is. For example, if you followed what we did with the launch of La Famiglia, that was our first hint about the vision of Demna for Gucci. The communication for La Famiglia was absolutely adapted to the China market without changing the meaning of La Famiglia, of representing characters and archetypes. At the same time, we are reviewing the offer. What you sell as the bestsellers in the China market are not the same of the rest of the market.
There is a buy that is pretty common, but China is a market where icons have a value, and we have mistreated them a little bit in the past. We are working very much on communicating our icons better, working on our icons better, not all of them, the specific products that work better, but also following the trend. It's a market where some new products perform really well. I can mention to you the Borsetto, the Borsetto in black leather. It's a new item in handbags that is showing very promising signs. At the same time, icons from the past, bestsellers from the past are being improved. I can mention the Marmont, where the leather has been improved, the quality of the accessories has been improved. Emblem, where some of the shoes are very important for the China market because they represent what Luca mentioned as the core.
Those products that are not iconic, they are not for fashionistas, but they are core functions and embodying the brand. There is work to do, but we are on the right track, and the measures that we are having is that in the stores that we consider the most important, and then we call Laboratory of Retail Excellence, and where these actions are implemented first, all of the KPIs, starting from conversion, retention, number of tickets, UPT, are growing, and they're growing faster than in the rest of the network. This is for us a test-and-learn situation that we're going to apply faster to the rest of the stores.
Of course, each one of the brands has different challenges. Maybe, I don't know, if Saint Laurent has a potential to grow because that is not very well known, and that's why we say I want it to have a little bit more focus on China or Bottega Veneta. I said also potential, but Bottega is already strong, so it depends on the thing. The Gucci case is specific, I think, to China, and that's one of the areas where we really have to concentrate to bring it back where it deserves.
I thank you, number one.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Hopefully, you can hear me.
Yeah.
Congratulations on three and a half hours, I think, of marathon performance. Two questions, quick ones really.
I can go to La Scala di Milano the next time.
Absolutely.
Sing the whole Aida.
I had two questions. Firstly, if you can unpack that stunning number, the 20 points improvement in full price sales through, is that core or is that groups? Only core sales or overall group sales? Within that, can you perhaps put that into context in terms of what it would have been like, how much higher than 2025 the peak pre-COVID would have been? We can get a little bit of a sense or the historic context. My second point-
I'm not sure I understand the second question.
It's the same question.
Yeah.
Essentially, 2025 full price sales through was something like 70%. Where would it have been pre-COVID at its highest level, in essence? That we can understand the 20 points trajectory, which is remarkable. It sounds like given that it's not going to be a big lever for gross margins, there's going to be a significant reinvestment into quality of product. The second question is around, where are you going to take from the marketing budget to reinvest into China? There's obviously a big redeployment in China. What are you taking away from in order to make space for that?
The easiest one is the second one. I think when you look at the investment mix in marketing, we were very much into below the line or things that would not necessarily drive traffic. We are renegotiating all the media contracts. We are negotiating on the contract with the agency, trying to concentrate typical things that don't go to the consumer. There is a huge benefit, the huge impact, okay, coming from this, money that we can now reallocate. Of course, you have also an effect of the top line going up because marketing investment is measured on percentage of the turnover we used to do until now. Just for your, let's say, knowledge, we actually didn't really have a marketing practice at the group level. We would mix up communication and marketing. This I don't accept because these are two different disciplines, right?
We just had hired Fedele Usai, he was the managing director of one of our competitors, and he's actually establishing a real marketing practice. As we say it in French, marketing is a métier. It's about exactly doing the measure, customer measure how you put the money. I think there is a huge improvement that will happen. There are a lot of opportunities, like what money we can reallocate. On the 20 points, et cetera. The only thing if any of the colleagues who want to add because they are better than me and that, the only one built bottom-up with a very granular analysis of each one of the categories in every market, in all the channels. I actually was very impressed because we did those brand platform playbooks I mentioned before.
These are documents of 400 pages, each one of the brand teams had to do in the last weekends and vacation, et cetera. They are very granular things. It's coming bottom up because they analyze. I don't know, maybe you can, as you are very good at that, maybe you can give us the answer for everybody.
Thank you. Maybe, to build on this, just to add that thing about, we sell what we produce and produce what we sell, which is a new mantra.
Mm-hmm.
Second of all, we'll give more incentive on our teams on the inventory at the end of the season, which is also going to be a game changer when it gets to inventory and sell-through management. Last is also at Saint Laurent, making sure the share of icons, iconic product, the ones that are permanent across all categories, is increasing up to 30%. I think that's going to be about making a difference.
One more then .
Number two.
Good afternoon. I'm Laurie Smith from HSBC. I have a question about the sales outlook. When you say that you see a gradual market outperformance from the sales growth, what is the industry growth you are assuming? And going forward, would you see that evolution between the volumes, price and mix? The second question is about the jewelry business. Today, the business looks very much skewed towards Asia in terms of shares of sales. Is there a plan to make it more balanced regionally? And could you continue also some acquisition of brands in the jewelry business? Thank you.
Look, I'm going to make a short answer because I see there are a lot of questions, so I want to leave the space. But we assumed the most conservative estimation on total market development. I think it's like the lower part of the thing is around 4% growth of the market. Okay? So it's embedded in the model, just this. Okay? Also, the other, let's say, assumption we took into the plan was not to count on inflationary, let's say, phenomenon. Okay? So we actually assumed that price would not increase. Okay? This is the base of the model. I want to say one thing, which I always say also this to the people, don't worry about where the market goes, et cetera. Because the real race is on ourselves. Remember that we lost 25% of the business.
If we just go back to where we were in terms of market share, I think we'll be better off rather than worrying about what's going on in general. Yeah? It's a market share game, this thing. Market share means that if you want to take market share from others in a constrained market, you got to be operationally better than your competitors. That's why in the whole two hours, three hours, et cetera, I actually insisted a lot on many things that will make Kering stronger strategically, because we have the right intuition, we're putting the money in the right places, but also that will become a much more performant machine. Because of this, it will be a market share, or let's assume that. If we then are lucky one day, then the market goes back, but we don't count on it on the plan.
That has to be very clear to everybody. It's an opportunity.
On jewelry?
Jewelry, I'll leave it to Jean-Marc now.
Thank you, Luca. You're totally right, but I think that you have to. I wo uld start with the jewelry brands, because don't forget that in the growth of the jewelry business, there is also a significant contribution of the fashion brands, and by definition, the fashion brands have a better, let's say, balance in terms of geographical coverage. As mentioned by Luca, there is a big ambition on the Gucci side. If I come to the jewelry brands, of course, there is a distortion due to the fact that we have Chopard, which by definition is principally Asian, but also because if you think about Boucheron, which is the main one among the jewelry brands, it's a brand that has been very successful in the past in Europe, Middle East, Japan, and more recently, Korea, and good development as well in China.
However, the time horizon in jewelry is not exactly the same as in fashion, so you need first to build more legitimacy to work on the product assortment. We have some iconic lines already. We have some legitimacy as well in high jewelry, as you may assume. To penetrate further America, we need to continue to work on the lines on high jewelry. It's part of the plan to expand in the U.S., but it will be very gradual. Let's first capitalize where we are already strong to continue to build legitimacy for our jewelry brands.
Let's go to number four.
Yes. Hello. Hi, it's Antoine Belge from BNP Paribas. Two questions. First of all, specifically on Gucci. I did the math from the slides. By category, you seem to be wanting to add EUR 2.1 billion in sales. Am I correct to think that your target is EUR 6 billion plus EUR 2 billion equals EUR 8 billion?
Can you please speak stronger?
For the Gucci brand, in the slide, you mentioned that you wanted to add, if I'm correct, EUR 2.1 billion in sales, adding the categories. Is EUR 8 billion the target by 2030, or are there any other moving parts? Then, assuming you reach around 22% margin by 2030, what would be the ranking of opportunities or-
Don't take it so literally.
Yeah. Okay.
I said more than that. I mean.
Let's be qualitative or just a pecking order of which brand you think has the highest potential even beyond 2030 between Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Bottega?
Look, we don't want to give guidance on top line, right? I'd rather talk about the fact that the plan is a plan that tries to target first an improvement of the quality of our business. I think you define a luxury brand because you make money, right? That's the first thing, right? The whole thing is built to raise the level of EBIT to a threshold that qualifies you into the category of luxury brand, okay? I'm not going to be more precise. When I look at, let's say, most of the brands, of course, scale matters. Okay? Take a brand like Bottega Veneta will benefit from expanding its business, because from a certain threshold onwards, then Bottega Veneta will be able to afford a decent investment in marketing in all the regions, a very good team, building offices, paying for the store, et cetera.
That's what we see. Yves Laurent is in a good position of profitability, will continue to improve because it's going to grow. Bottega Veneta will recover because they have a relatively low level of EBIT. I think this is a brand that should be one of the most profitable because of the nature of the business. For sure, Gucci has to be in the game when it comes to profitability, especially if we recover some line, we do the right things and the right mix of products, et cetera. That's what we see. First of all, you have all the brands profitable, all the group, all of them. Otherwise, I eject them from the system, okay? All of them at the level that defines that we are a luxury house, so we make money. Is that fair enough?
This is what comes out of our, let's say, brand.
Number five.
Hi. Thank you. Oliver Chen, TD Cowen. As you think about aspirational customers, what are your thoughts for the magic and the logic, and perhaps linking to healthy aspirational customers in the context of customer lifetime value? Second question is, as we think about agentic AI and neural networks, how do you see that impacting the financials, AI, and a subtopic is longevity, luxury as longevity. Thank you.
I'm not sure I understand the second question. It's very philosophical.
Well, AI, how will it have the most impact financially? Will longevity be a big deal or a small deal?
Okay. I think, potentially, longevity could be a big deal, but we are not at the level of maturity of our thinking, also with our partners, to L'Oréal, to come up and tell you clearly this. What we see is a very fragmented market. What we see that there's no, let's say, universal, global, trustworthy, scientifically proved protocol established by anybody, okay, with high frequency of interaction with the thing. Because if you go into a kind of longevity clinic every two years or three years, et cetera, it's not the same of entering really a daily protocol where you impact your health, okay? This is the ambition, okay, that we have, and I think it's going to be a big thing, right?
I want Kering to be one of the groups that engages on things, because this is where if you look at the world from a, let's say, not from the perspective of the credit card of a person, but from, of course, the level of bank account of the person itself, people will put money on this. We already see it. We see growth on wellness that is double-digit consistent, and it's coming from top-tier customer first and then going down. I think that it's going to be big. Second on AI, simple concept. We structure the thing and also in terms of, let's say, infrastructure. What I say to the people, three things. Follow the client, follow the product, follow the money. These are the three fields of application of AI. Very simple.
Yes, I think it can fundamentally have an impact, a huge impact on the front end. This is an industry that produces two to three products to sell one. I would do that in the automotive industry. I will be bankrupt after six months. When you start to center the production with the demand, where you put the product, the speed of the thing, of course, costs of the product is not as fundamental, because it's a function, but still, it's a machine that needs to run, and I think technology can help. I really believe that, and I see it from the numbers. You had another question in there?
Of course, yes.
One of the messages that we're giving is, of course, you need to have a balanced, let's say, structure of consumer. Very important for us is that we now have a similar segmentation in the whole group. Very important. We had a different segmentation. This is not an industry where you have a kind of syndicated research, et cetera. It's very difficult, so everybody has his own thing. Unfortunately, this is the reality. We had to build our segmentation. We try to do it with independent institution. We actually have those main three categories. I believe that we have been focusing a lot on VICs and aspirational consumer in the last 10 years, maybe forgetting the core of the luxury, which is people with money that maybe they're not spending.
We take them a bit for granted.
Yeah, we gave them a bit. I think we need to go back and refocus on the core luxury consumer. Yeah, that's basically the message that I can give you now.
Number three.
Thank you very much. Chiara Battistini from JP Morgan. I have one question specifically for Gucci. On Gucci, you talked about the over-reliance on the aspirational consumer and the segmentation between amongst up-tier clients, core, and aspirational. I was wondering if you could help us on understanding right now, roughly, where the split sits, and over time, where do you want to bring that segmentation to? Just roughly as an indication. A question on margin progression, maybe more for Armelle. On how to think about the cadence of this margin progression, should we be thinking as more back-end loaded as growth accelerates later in the plan? Or maybe as the rents come out, as you close stores, we could be thinking about more regular cadence. Thank you.
Go on.
We don't give the split by customers, but what I can tell you is that most of the customers that have been lost within Gucci are the aspirational ones, because attracting aspirational customers goes with brand desirability, because they aspire to something that they desire. Whenever you lose brand desirability, the first chunk that goes away, talking about the brand itself and not the economics of the world, are the aspirational customers. We have lost most of them in the areas where the brand desirability is the lowest, typically what we were explaining before China and Asia. What I can tell you is that the part that at the moment is reacting the fastest is the top. Luca was mentioning the fact that Gucci has high teens share of the business made by the top, and the aspiration is to get to 25% in general for Gucci.
We are trending in the right direction, very important in all the markets. Which means that what we are doing resonates with the people that we know very well and that we know how to talk to. The part where we really have to concentrate is the core, because by igniting brand desirability, aspirational will come. In the slide of Luca, there was something very important. There was written aspirational and younger, because people tend to confuse aspirational just with young customers. What they have in common is the price point, but in reality, you can have aspirational customers at every age, because they simply want to engage with the brand.
What is more in our end and where we have to perform is the core, because those are people that have already shopped with the brand, that if you study and you try to engage with them a little bit better, and all of the systems that we're putting together, the trial that was done with AI for Gucci was focused on the core, helping the sales associates to engage with them will be the main focus for Gucci across the board.
Regarding margin improvement, so the improvement in margin will be gradual, based on the top line, but also on the efficiency, partly on the right-sizing of the network, but also all the other elements that Luca mentioned. It will start this year.
Let's go to number two.
Good afternoon. This is Liwei Ho from CICC, based in Hong Kong. I have one question on YSL. You have an ambition to double your revenue in Asia by 2030. Given YSL's DNA, emphasize on silhouettes, evening dress, more of a formal attire. Living in China, I felt this strong trend of casualization or dress down since COVID, which is distinctly different from what YSL represents, and some of your peers have tapped into that potential at rich rewards. This is a philosophical question to pursue this ambition in Asia, especially in China. To what extent will YSL adapt and localize? This is something that I think is very important to stay true to your own DNA, but also grasping the chance that you have in China. Yeah, that's just one question. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you for the question, which I also feel is fair. This is a question we are currently assessing at the brand level. It is true that the brand is a bit Western-centric, so we are gradually working towards making the brand more Asian, speaking more the language, being more aligned with the culture, and being more relevant for clients. It's also true that we are under-penetrated in Asia overall. When you look at China, for example, alone, we have started our first operation in 2010, so it's fairly recent. We opened our first store in 2010 in a tier two city in China, if I take China as an example. It's about doing a catch-up, and we need to do this fast. Our plan is to execute a retail rollout of the new store concept. At this point, 30% of our stores are the new image.
By the end, at the origin of the plan, sorry, will be a 90% rollout in terms of store concept. This is to build on the landmark Hong Kong store you may know, and also the one we opened in Beijing, Sanlitun, that are proven being successful with being flagship store, tier one city, and being with the new store concept. We'll also reinforce the men's pillar. Men's pillar is quite important for Asia, especially for China. We'll also make sure we will be more locally relevant, back to your question, appointing and choosing the right talent to work on our influence that resonates more locally. Last, we'll make sure the brand is also more proactive into the local cultural moments, such as what Luca mentioned earlier, Qixi, Hunan.
We are aware at this point we are doing this, but we are not fully committed to it, and this is my commitment to change that. Thank you.
I may say, if I can add this, you wouldn't want to make something that is not true to the image of Saint Laurent. Saint Laurent is very chic, so you have to stick throughout the times, and of course adapt and do the thing, but it's also true that you need to respect a certain identity of the brand and not just follow fashions, right, all the time. There is a lot of things we can do, or the team can do to adapt the thing. For example, we don't have a lot of offering in the day wear. That's what we're doing. That's what they're doing.
We will also tell our story in the market and show ourselves in a different way. You mentioned a brand event, a brand show in the coming months. This is something we'll do as well to present ourselves in a different way, not compromising nor the brand image, nor where we're coming from, who we are, and where we're going.
Let's now switch to number five.
Viktoria Petrova, Barclays. Thank you very much. You talk a lot about your network optimization being central for a turnaround of Gucci as well as of Kering as a whole. You also mentioned that some of the stores which went through these new initiatives are generating double the sales density. Do you think it's fair to directionally think about EUR 45,000 of sales per square meter for Gucci, the peak we saw in 2019 to 2021? As a follow-up of the same questions, when we think about personnel expenses, you had headcount reduction of over 3,000 employees last year. Is it also fair to assume that store optimization program could lead to another 4,000-5,000 in employee savings going forward? My second question is on all the AI initiatives, which obviously look very new and very impressive to us.
What makes you believe, and any anecdotal evidence would be great, that the organization is ready for such a technological change? Thank you very much.
The organization is not necessarily ready for that. Of course, we have some specialty inside, et cetera, but I think it's some new thing. I believe in it because I already did it in organizations that were resisting to such kind of transformation. I already did this thing. Not long time ago. I could see the impact on the way the system was working because of technology. I'm a believer into the thing. Any nation, any company that refuse technological progress, normally never ends in a good way. Technology is the base of our modern society, and why not using it? For the sales density, I think you can assume that that's a level that defines a well-working store.
Yes, of course, we are bidding for all the brands to get back to a certain level, but also because the starting point for us is very low in terms of average sales density. We are the anomaly. By doing this, we will get to a normal situation. Allow me not to speak about people reduction, et cetera, because it's very sensitive. I don't think it's the aim of the story. We also have to say that, this is one thing I learned, that in retail, you probably have 25%-30% of churn every year. Right? This is true also for our brands. In three years, you change completely, theoretically, right?
Let's say the most challenging thing is, when we close a store because in that street it doesn't work, and then there is another one at four kilometers, is how I get the best people in the store that we close and I use it for other stores. One of the opportunity we have right now is that we are doing all of that at the same time between all brands, and we are favoring internal mobility between one brand and another, which we didn't do before. Right? Maybe I close a Gucci shop and there's a very smart sales advisor, and I can move it to a shop that is 200 meters away that is from Saint Laurent. We would have not done this, and that's the advantage also of the group. They can even change categories if they want, right?
This is also the interesting part. We have to create a kind of environment also for this.
Thank you, Luca. We'll end this Q&A session with the very last question, with number three.
Anyway, we are here, and I'll add even later, so don't worry.
Thank you very much. Mariolina Esposito from Eurizon Capital in Milan. I have a question on the strategy on wholesale, but just because we see a bit more positive results, and how much is crucial to be well-organized on that side. Also, looking at the connection between the store network, so the closure, and the right wholesaler to give your product, you said, for having a better control of price as well, especially for the gray market issue we know is a reality for every of you.
Here you have big experts about the thing, so maybe I let them maybe complement on what I'm saying. I think that in general, it seems that the wholesale model in some regions of the world is entering in a crisis. You still have places like, I was a couple of weeks ago into Japan or Korea, where wholesale, big malls thing are still holding a very strong position, so there's no way you get out of this thing because it's what the consumer wants. It depends on the region, it depends on the thing. I believe personally, that having long-term partnership with a very selected number of retailers in a qualitative way, it's a good thing. It's also a way to feel the pulse of the market. What is working, what is not working. You're there in that competition with others. It's always good.
The idea of 100% realization of the thing for me is a little bit too extreme. As much as like when in luxury, they tell you against e-commerce, you know e-commerce. No, no. I think e-commerce is also important for reach. Wholesalers to feel how strong you are because you are 10 meters away from a direct competitor. If you're good there, it means that you're doing things well. That's more important for me. I don't know, maybe if you guys, some of you want to...
Yeah, I can integrate. Yes, the wholesale network allows you to reach a customer that does not necessarily come to your stores, so it's a complement of a window, let's say. Of course, allows for a closer competition, so you have also additional information that you need to steer the development of the future collections, et cetera. You need to be careful not to overheat the system with too much stock because, the brand shareability applies also to their stock, not only to the retail stock that we have, and therefore, you need to control to prevent parallel and liquidation behaviors that you don't want to have.
Luca, back to you for the conclusion.
Of course, I want to applaud to your resistance even, because it was a long section, very intense. I think Pierpaolo wants to go and smoke a cigarette longer like this. Yeah. Go, you can go. I want to take, let's say, opportunity to also, of course, thank everybody, the team, because behind this, there is a work of a lot of people. Okay? All the plan that's been written, not by me, but each one of the teams of the brands, the team of the banks, and then we kind of orchestrated the thing. It's a bottom-up story. In my experience, when plans are done like this, they work. That's what the people have put black on white, not a top-down thing, done by a limited group of people with a strategic consultant. This is done a different way. Yeah.
I want to thank everybody for the work, the patience, Alessandro that made this unbelievable presentation. This is all 3D. I don't know the complexity of this thing. Philippine, Joel, everybody, because everybody contributed. Laurent and the team, Bérenger. It was fun, but now the most important part of the story comes, which is execution and delivery of the plan. We are all united. We are all convinced, motivated, realistic, humbled by the task. Yeah. That will be not my first turnaround in my career, and I hope, yeah, that can be the best one. I hope so. Thank you very much, and thank you, François-Henri, for being with us.