Burberry Lost Its British Soul—An American Is Bringing It Back

LONDON—Soon after taking over as Burberry’s chief executive last summer, Joshua Schulman popped into the company’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. The shop floor was cavernous, minimalist and showcased select $3,000 handbags.

What he didn’t see were any $500 umbrellas—the type of higher-volume accessory that, along with trench coats, made Burberry an icon of functional, aspirational luxury for well over a century. As an American who had long admired the British brand, Schulman was puzzled.

“I’m like, why don’t we have hats or umbrellas on the floor?” he recalled. A store employee told him that went against the company’s visual guidelines, which called for sparse setups and no mannequins, another thing that struck Schulman as odd given that Burberry sells a full wardrobe. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t we try?’”

Employees quickly retrieved some from the stockroom and propped them up prominently. As luck would have it, a rainstorm soon blew through, and several shoppers bought umbrellas with Burberry’s signature check pattern within the hour.

One year in as Burberry CEO, Schulman is taking a back-to-basics approach to reviving the cachet of a company that once helped define British culture around the world. He is unwinding some of the brand’s overly ambitious detours and refocusing on what built Burberry’s name: classic British style and clothing designed to withstand the elements. A new ad campaign proclaims “It’s Always Burberry Weather” and features Olivia Colman, who played Queen Elizabeth II on “The Crown,” in a quilted jacket and Liam Gallagher of Oasis in a parka ahead of the ’90s British rock band’s reunion tour.

“Some of this is about slicing and dicing the numbers and looking at deep analysis,” says the 53-year-old in an interview in his office at Burberry’s London headquarters near the Thames. “And some of it is just leaning into the assets that we have already and celebrating who we are.”

Since its founding in 1856 and Thomas Burberry’s invention of weatherproofed gabardine fabric designed to withstand the British climate, Burberry has outfitted polar explorers, soldiers and royalty. A young Princess Diana was frequently photographed in her Burberry trench, establishing the coat as a symbol of understated aristocratic style. By the late 1980s, it was becoming the uniform of London’s club kids and fashion outsiders. The shift diluted its luxury image; it was too everywhere. In the 2000s, the brand mounted a comeback, running ads with the likes of Kate Moss and aristocratic model Stella Tennant that blended heritage with edge.

In recent years, a series of CEOs and designers tried to catapult Burberry into the top tier of the fashion world with avant-garde runway looks and bags at prices that rivaled Louis Vuitton.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. As Burberry tried to push upmarket, the luxury industry turned. Consumers cut back amid economic uncertainty and balked at prices that had soared during the pandemic boom in demand. Sales were hit especially hard in China, the world’s largest luxury market.

Burberry was caught in an identity crisis.

The brand, Schulman believes, had lost focus, pursuing a niche aesthetic at the expense of its more universal luxury appeal.

And because Burberry is the U.K.’s only global luxury brand—as well as the marquee name at London Fashion Week—its missteps have wider implications for British fashion as a whole.

“When it falters, it exposes how heavily the system depends on a single brand to lead,” said Andrew Groves, a professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster.

Other fashion rivals are privately owned (Chanel) or part of sprawling conglomerates (Gucci or Dior), but Burberry is on its own as a company and publicly traded. That puts more pressure on Schulman to turn things around, despite the weaker luxury market, and fast.

In May, Burberry announced a second annual decline in sales and a net loss for the fiscal year ended in March. Burberry’s share price is down more than 50% since early 2023. Schulman moved quickly to overhaul the executive team and announced plans to cut roughly 1,700 jobs by 2027—nearly 20% of its global head count.

The oldest of six children, Schulman grew up in Los Angeles. As a boy, he had his nose in Women’s Wear Daily, known in the industry as the “fashion bible,” and corporate annual reports. He would memorize the layouts and square footage of major department stores from company filings.

“I was a very strange child,” he admits with a laugh.

When Nordstrom announced it would open a store nearby in West Los Angeles, Schulman, then around 13 years old, wrote to one of the company’s leaders to say he was “ecstatic.” The executive wrote back, and he’s kept the letter ever since.

Around the same time, Schulman got his first job at a children’s clothing boutique in Beverly Hills. Kris Kardashian came in to shop for her young children. So did Kathy Hilton, for her daughter Paris. Schulman knew the regulars by name and paid close attention to their tastes. He joined the owner on buying trips, bringing back Versace and Moschino for kids.

“A lot of what I learned was in those four walls,” he says. He was convinced he’d rocket straight to being CEO of Bloomingdale’s.

After college at New York University and then Parsons School of Design, Schulman landed his first job in fashion at Perry Ellis, an American menswear brand known for its dress shirts and slacks. The company was in turmoil. It had just parted ways with Tom Ford—who would soon reinvent Gucci—and brought in Marc Jacobs, whose now-legendary Grunge collection also got him fired.

Schulman quickly learned the risks of misalignment between creative vision and corporate leadership.

A few years later, in 1997, he joined Gucci. There, Schulman was responsible for the commercial side of the ready-to-wear business, working closely with Christopher Bailey, who was head of women’s design. Bailey later jumped to Burberry.

Schulman kept a close eye on Burberry as Bailey led a revival of the brand, and Schulman’s interest deepened when he relocated to London to run Jimmy Choo from 2007 to 2012.

“Burberry was like the shining city on a hill,” he said.

A succession of CEOs—five since the turn of the century—have tried to push Burberry higher up the luxury ladder, with some experimenting with less traditional styles like an urban, sports-luxe aesthetic.

Burberry built out a network of global flagships and tightened control over its image. It gave up profits from high-volume licensing deals in Spain and Japan, pulled back from discount-friendly department stores in the U.S., and stripped out promotions from full-price boutiques.

The push accelerated during the pandemic. In late 2022, the company hired designer Daniel Lee and leaned hard into expensive handbags. Burberry increased prices on leather goods by 60%.

“It’s been a mistake for them to raise prices like they did and to try to carve out a whole new lane for themselves,” says Pete Nordstrom, president of the Seattle-based Nordstrom department store, one of Burberry’s most important wholesale partners in the U.S. “That’s going to have a negative impact with customers—and it has.”

Meanwhile, Schulman was on a fast track through some of America’s biggest fashion names, including Coach and Michael Kors.

Schulman was in talks to bring more fashion know-how to Burberry as a potential board member in spring 2024, just as Burberry’s strategy was unraveling. The company had issued a profit warning and seen its share price tumble. Shareholders were losing patience.

Instead of a board seat, Schulman was named CEO.

On his first day, he stood before staff at Burberry’s London headquarters and delivered a blunt diagnosis: The brand had drifted too far into niche fashion. It needed to capitalize more on its roots—trench coats, scarves, the classic red, white, black and tan checks.

Within weeks, Schulman convened a 200-person session of designers, merchandisers, product developers and marketers. Burberry had narrowed its appeal too drastically, he told them, focusing on the “opinionated customer” while neglecting others who he called investors, aspirers, hedonists and conservatives.

“We had left behind the broader universe of luxury customers,” he says.

One symbolic casualty of that shift was the classic Burberry polo, historically with an embroidered equestrian knight or checked trims.

“We had replaced that with a more anonymous polo shirt…at a much higher price point,” Schulman said. “Our customer didn’t respond to that.”

Pricing has been recalibrated: Schulman is charging a premium where the brand has authority—particularly outerwear and trench coats, which can run upward of $3,400—while pulling back in categories like handbags, where Burberry’s credentials are weaker.

He is also highlighting globally recognizable symbols of Britishness—but with a sharper eye on how they would resonate internationally with, say, an American like himself. Internal data revealed a recurring problem under the previous leadership: Campaigns aimed at showcasing Burberry’s “modern British luxury” aesthetic struck a chord in the U.K., but often failed to resonate as strongly abroad.

In the fall, Schulman unveiled an ad campaign tied to the reopening of Burberry’s New York flagship that featured British model and actress Cara Delevingne in front of London’s iconic Big Ben. “It may not be the most subtle reference, but it’s globally recognizable,” Schulman said. “You can see the Eiffel Tower in ads for three or four of our French competitors all the time.”

Nowhere is Schulman’s shift more visible than in how Burberry displays scarves, once tucked away in drawers. New “scarf bars” prominently showcase cashmere scarves in an array of patterns and colors that can be monogrammed on the spot.

Investors are optimistic. Same-store sales fell 5% in the six months to March 29—an improvement from the 20% drop in the previous half. Burberry’s share price is up about 30% this year.

At a showroom in Paris shortly after Schulman joined Burberry, Nordstrom says his buyers and merchandisers were ready to lay out everything that wasn’t working. Before they could start, Schulman cut in: “You don’t need to tell me. I know. We’ll fix it.”

Schulman and his team are eager to work collaboratively, says Nordstrom. “Their time to shine is really the second half of the year, especially fall and winter. I think we’ll know a lot more then.”

With its recent focus on more accessibly priced products, some warn the brand risks drifting into “affordable luxury” territory—a profitable but less rarefied space, closer to Coach. Two former Burberry executives contend that the shift to the higher end would have worked if given enough time, or if the broader environment hadn’t changed so dramatically.

“It takes years to elevate a brand,” said one. “Burberry started that process, but it’s very hard to achieve when you’re a publicly listed company. Shareholders want results.”

Schulman insists he has no intention of turning Burberry into a “British Coach,” emphasizing that the ambition remains firmly rooted in full luxury positioning. First, however, he needs to lure more customers with the kind of classic coats and scarves that made Burberry famous.

“We could be among those top five luxury brands in the far future,” he says. “That is the North Star for this business.”

Write to Nick Kostov at nick.kostov@dowjones.com