Product Desirability The New Metric

Kering restructured CEO incentives around desirability, not revenue. The signal is clear: category sameness is now a board-level problem. The old playbook of finding your bestselling SKU, riding the hype curve, and replacing it when it flatlines is being openly retired at the top of the market.The brands scaling fastest lead with brand-specific creativity, not imitation of another brand's bestseller or single-product hype until overexposure turns it sour. The question has shifted from whether desirability matters to how you actually build it.

‍What it costs to get it wrong:

‍Alexander McQueen: 60% revenue decline, half its stores closing, 20% of London HQ cut. A brand hollowed out by scale before desirability was fixed. Saint Laurent tops the Lyst index but lacks the product depth of the Slimane era. Heat without depth is wasted equity. Scale without desirability is a liability dressed as growth. Both outcomes trace back to the same root: structure.

‍How to actually build it:

‍The answer isn't a capsule, a campaign, or a creative refresh. It's the right people in the right structure.Desirability starts with obsessive attention to detail, and obsessive attention to detail only comes from structuring design and creative leadership top down, with bottom up reflective of product strategy. At mega brands with significant human capital budgets, design and creative functions have the luxury of full time teams and unlimited access to outsourced specialists. That isn't the reality for the vast majority of brands. Being creative with less still delivers results. The unlock is a renewed approach to structure within budget constraints, where desirability is achieved through the right roles and the right split of full time leadership and external specialists.What this means operationally: senior creatives empowered to drive consistent desire, not executors tasked with iterating bestsellers. Product category leaders in harmony with creative, not competing against it. Commercial teams that read brand heat as a leading indicator of revenue rather than a lagging one. And a leadership structure of roles, reporting lines, and the full time versus specialist mix, calibrated to your budget, your stage, and your category.

‍The work we do:

‍We help brands hire Creative Design leaders aligned to brand continuity and cultural zeitgeist, place product category leaders in harmony with creative, and design the structure around them so desirability is an output of how the business is built, not a hope pinned to one collection.The industry has named the problem. The brands that move first on how to rebuild, not just what, will own the next decade.