“To tour the Burberry flagship store on London’s Regent Street – with its beautifully stacked clothes, its ‘magic mirrors’ that illuminate with runway images, its signs in Arabic for Gulf tourists and its ‘VVIP’ room on the top floor – is to enter as sweet a world as Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory,” John Gapper writes for The Financial Times.
“Its Wonka is Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer, and designer of all the contents, including a £70,000 ‘limited edition’ white alligator skin jacket. His theatre of luxury is a few notches up the price scale from the nearby Apple store, outside which a queue formed yesterday for the iPhone 5s, but they are related,” Gapper writes. “The appointment of Angela Ahrendts, Burberry’s chief executive, as the head of Apple’s online and retail stores, is proof of that. Ron Johnson, the man who created Apple’s highly successful shops, failed spectacularly when he moved from computers to clothing, trying to work Apple’s magic on JC Penney, the US department store. She is moving the other way.”
“I rate her chances of success higher than Mr Johnson’s because Burberry and Apple have more in common,” Gapper writes. “Ms Ahrendts and Mr Bailey are equals to the late Steve Jobs and Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s designer, as control freaks. From early in their joint tenure, they realised the need to hold authority over everything, both online and off.”
Read more in the full article here.
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