2. Angela was born and
raised in a small town in
Indiana. She acquired
her Merchandising and
Marketing degree from
Ball State University,
Muncie, Indiana, from
where she also received.
an Honorary Doctor of
Humane Letters degree
in 2010
3. Executive positions
Angela Ahrendts joined Burberry in January 2006, and
took up the position of CEO on July 1, 2006. Under the
leadership of Angela, Burberry is now widely regarded as
one of the leading British brands in the world.
Prior to joining Burberry Angela was Executive Vice
President at Liz Claiborne Inc., where she joined the
executive team in 1998. During her tenure, she oversaw
the Contemporary, Casual, Bridge and Menswear
businesses, comprising more than twenty brands and
representing 40% of total company revenues. She
previously spent six years as President of Donna Karan
International.
Burberry, which is headquartered in London and listed on
the London Stock Exchange, was founded in 1856.
4.
5. AWARDS AND MEMBERSHIPS
Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Honorary Fellow
(2011)
St George’s Society of New York, Medal of Honor (2011)
Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group, Member (2010 -
present)
CNBC European Business Leader of the Future (2010)
Oracle World Retail Awards, Outstanding Leadership Award
(2010)
Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women in the World (2006, 2007,
2009, 2010, 2011)
Fortune’s Businesspeople of the Year (2010)
Financial Times Top 50 Women in World Business (2010, 2011)
Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business (2007, 2008,
2011)
Crain’s New York Rising Stars 40 under 40 (2000)
6.
7. Five Questions for Several of FORTUNE's 50 Most Powerful
Women
TIME asks some today's most powerful women business leaders about
their best and worst decisions, barriers to female leadership and the
women who have inspired them
What is the best and worst decision you've ever made?
Best: Joining Burberry as CEO to revitalize this great brand. Worst:
Leaving a job prior to having another.
What was your dream job as a kid and why?
President of Donna Karan, because it was a great company and brand
for women.
What do you think is the most significant barrier to female
leadership?
Being taken seriously and handling three jobs simultaneously — CEO,
Wife and Mother.
What woman inspires you and why?
My Mother, as I trust her implicitly and know she will always be open
and honest, and always has my best interests at heart.
What will be the biggest challenge for the generation of women
behind you?
The ability to multi-task as life and careers demand more.
8.
9. Angela Ahrendts
Burberry's Angela Ahrendts: High tech's fashion
model
FORTUNE -- Last May, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts
flew to California from her London headquarters to
introduce herself to an executive she thought could be
critical to the future of her business: Salesforce.com CEO
Marc Benioff. When the two met at the Ritz-Carlton in Half
Moon Bay, they stood in the hall batting around ideas for
15 minutes before even sitting down. Ahrendts explained
her vision: to create a company where anyone who
wanted to touch the brand could have access to it. She
just needed a digital platform to make it happen.
Benioff sketched a diagram of how Burberry could become
a "social enterprise," overlaying technology like Salesforce
(CRM), SAP (SAP), Twitter, and Facebook (FB) atop the
entire company.
10. The two might seem an
unlikely pair -- the brash
tech entrepreneur and the
polished CEO of a 156-
year-old luxury retailer --
but Ahrendts has been
boldly reinventing
Burberry's image and
operations since she
arrived at the British
company six years ago.
Her moves have paid off
handsomely: Annual sales
of some $3 billion are
more than double 2007
levels, and the stock has
returned nearly 300%
since Ahrendts' arrival,
while Britain's FTSE All-
Share Index is up 24%.
11. To keep Burberry growing, Ahrendts recognized she
needed to woo younger and more global consumers, who
communicate and share information -- and shop -- in the
digital world. She set out to develop a comprehensive
technology strategy, one that utilizes obvious tools such as
Facebook and Twitter, and also incorporates enterprise
software from companies such as Salesforce and SAP.
The approach makes Burberry a standout in the luxury
business, which has historically shied away from
technology for fear of eroding its aura of exclusivity. "What
they've done, that no other organization in the fashion
industry has done, is put a relentless focus on digital
innovation," says Maureen Mullen of tech think tank L2.
The employees scuttling around Burberry's Horseferry
House in London are too well dressed to allow the
company's headquarters to be mistaken for a tech startup,
but the building does exude the same kind of feel. Seventy
percent of the employees at Horseferry are under 30 and
are encouraged to peruse Facebook and Twitter during
work hours. Ahrendts, 51, spearheaded the office's free-
lunch perk à la Silicon Valley.
12.
13. Ahrendts likes to say that the members of her young
employee base act as her interpreters for today's
digital world. But Ahrendts herself is an early adopter,
often discovering the latest tech advancements
through her three children. She was one of the first in
the office to acquire an Apple (AAPL) iPad, and she
has since outfitted staff across corporate offices and
all mainline stores with the device. (Not surprisingly,
Burberry makes a line of iPad cases.) During a recent
visit by Fortune to Burberry's offices, Ahrendts
Skyped with a group of Burberry scholarship winners
at Indiana's Ball State University, her alma mater. She
told the students to check out an article about Zynga
(ZNGA)CEO Mark Pincus. If they had trouble tracking
it down, they could find the link on her Twitter feed.
14.
15. Technology plays heavily into employee
communications too. Ahrendts and chief creative
officer Christopher Bailey do regular webcasts for her
workforce, and recently decided to up the frequency
from quarterly to monthly. Her talk at a leadership
conference in Atlanta in May was streamed at
Burberry's offices. Reg Sindall, executive vice
president of corporate resources, jokes that at
Burberry "we film ourselves filming ourselves filming
ourselves."
When Ahrendts arrived from Liz Claiborne in 2006,
Burberry, which had licensed its name around the
globe, lacked a cohesive image, and was
underperforming the luxury market. (Retail and
wholesale sales were up just 2.2%, vs. the sector's
roughly 13% the year she arrived.) Ahrendts started
buying back the licenses and moved to find the right
positioning for the brand.
16. Ahrendts and Bailey recognized that the company's British heritage and its iconic
outerwear (Ahrendts likes to say the company was born from a coat) had to play a key
role in defining the company going forward. But they also decided to pursue
millennials, a group its peers were ignoring. It was an emerging-markets play as well,
with the company's research showing that high-net-worth individuals in the developing
world were 15 years younger than in markets such as the U.S. and Britain.
17. But how to communicate with this new demographic?
"What is their language?" asks Ahrendts. "And that's
when we looked at each other and said, 'It's digital.' "
Burberry started filtering everything through that lens.
"We just naturally started asking ourselves on every
single thing we did, how do we make it more
connected, how do we make it more digital?" Ahrendts
explains.
18. She points to her own kids as an example. A few
weeks ago when her niece was in town visiting,
Ahrendts told her teenage daughter to have her cousin
meet them for brunch in an hour. Rather than pick up
the phone, she chatted with her on Facebook. "She
knows she's on Facebook because they never turn it
off," says Ahrendts. "Doesn't call, doesn't e-mail. That's
their English. That's how they communicate."
Today, Burberry has more Facebook and Twitter
followers than any other luxury brand of those tracked
by consultancy Stylophane. The company spends
about half its media budget on digital but concedes it
isn't easy to calculate a return on the resources poured
into Burberry's technology.
