Mulberry | The making and breaking of a brand.

This week's headlines shared a gloomy picture of a brand that has lost its way. The 2024 net loss of £33.5m on a declining revenue of £152.8m is a far cry from the £1.5bn valuation of 2012, when share value topped out at more than 20 times this year’s low.

Discussing the current state of the business and wider market, Emma Hill – the former Creative Director of Mulberry – shared that the brand has the rare 'privilege' of being used as a case study for both the success and failure of brand strategy in this sector.

Construct played a pivotal part in the 2008-2012 transformation of Mulberry; a period during which we were the fashion brand’s retained agency and our Founder, Georgia Fendley, was the Brand Director responsible for the turnaround vision the brand would employ.

Construct and Georgia were already part of the Mulberry story. Georgia had been part of the team tasked with a strategic realignment in 2000 (then at FOUR IV) and Construct began to support Mulberry with the implementation of developed brand strategy since 2005 – the studio’s founding year.

This historic engagement placed Georgia in a unique position, having met and worked with the brand’s visionary founder, Roger Saul; Christina Ong, the heavyweight fashion investor who acquired a majority stake in the British brand; and the incumbent Mulberry leadership team left to manage the brand’s future.

Mulberry was founded in 1971 by Roger Saul and was inspired by an alchemy of Britishness, its countryside sensibilities, a pioneering vision, a passion for honest craft and the brave world view of a 21-year-old with an uncanny knack of knowing what the world's most stylish wanted next. It was an authentic brand grown out of these roots and it was that authenticity that most resonated with the audience whose hearts it captured.

Mulberry was very unusual: not really a fashion brand, it belonged to the world of craft, culture and lifestyle. Its bags enjoyed diverse appreciation, very few brands have been simultaneously admired and carried by hipsters, grandmas, A-listers and accountants!

What connected the brand to this diverse audience was the anchored authenticity of the brand positioning. A place in the market Mulberry created organically and naturally under Saul’s stewardship in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s however the brand had lost its way, it had moved too far towards and fallen out of fashion, lost its identity and was suffering with declining relevance and therefore miserable performance.

This is an important point: brands can lose their way and later re-find their path. By the early 2000s Mulberry was in a position not unlike that in which it finds itself today.

In the fashion sector problems like this are typically attacked with new CEOs and new Creative Directors, the benefit being a fresh take, valuable networks and a creative step-change. The risk is a disconnect with the truth of the brand, which is then palpably felt by consumers, resulting in minimal success engineered through operational changes such as spending more on marketing, diversifying distribution, licensing categories and concealing underlying performance.

In 2008 Mulberry did something unexpected: they allowed the brand to lead the change, making no change to the leadership team other than the appointment of a Brand Director (initially an interim appointment) who went on to appoint a new Creative Director more in tune with the authenticity of the brand.

 “[Roger Saul] speaks with genuine warmth and appreciation for the stewardship of Georgia Fendley (brand director) and Emma Hill (creative director), the pair overseeing a period when the brand channelled a candy-coloured Wes Anderson/Grand Budapest Hotel charm (they both exited in 2013): ‘They understood the magic.’” – The Telegraph, July 2024.

These changes were made quietly and in a moment of economic instability, in the midst of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis (the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression). Georgia and Construct had inherited responsibility for a failing brand without any funding, in a hostile financial climate where all consumers were extremely cautious about any non-essential expenditure. The outlook couldn't have been worse.

Undaunted by this challenge, Construct began a robust strategic process. Leaning on a deep understanding of Mulberry’s heritage the agency deconstructed the values the brand could authentically claim and married these to the values a new generation of consumers cared about. This is Construct’s unique approach and Mulberry isn’t the only beneficiary: our studio has quietly worked its magic on brands from Aman to Boodles, Claridge's to Carolina Bucci, Hotel Bel Air to Harrods. Category-defying brands trust Construct to direct change, create commercial success and deepen a defendable position through brand strategy, identity and communications.

What Construct identified in this process was a very clear set of values that resonated with the next generation of consumers. Generosity of spirit, authenticity of craft, Britishness as an emotional connection to the landscape and a subversive wit and creativity, democratic appeal and an honest price/value relationship.

We decided to action change in an unusual way, beginning inside out. The reinvigoration of Mulberry began with a manifesto for change and this manifesto was first shared and published at the heart of the business, in the factory in Somerset. Pages were papered on walls in the factory and the launch was celebrated with discussions with every member of the business in small groups and accompanied with tea, cake, deep strategic discussion, two-way idea sharing, warmth and humour. This process mobilised every member of Mulberry to be part of the change, empowering positivity, confidence and innovation.

Having understood and aligned values, the challenge was then to understand how to turn this context into an actionable plan for success. The approach was planned with military precision and can be understood in three key phases. Firstly, uniting the business around a clear understanding and mission facilitated by a central manifesto and aligned tactical departmental planning. Second was product development, including a brutal merchandising review to focus on those products with the highest quotient of brand resonance and the development of new product building on this DNA.

It was key to ensure a range of product pricing, adding more accessible products (under £300), retaining current key price points (circa £595) and adding special product with justifiably higher pricing (circa £995). The third part of the plan was communication, without the budget to support a marketing campaign the plan was network-facilitated narrative demonstrated through actions, initiatives, partnerships and events.

In behaving in this way Mulberry could partner with complementary creative businesses to reflect the key facets of the brand and by doing so building an organic swell of interest, allowing the partners, media and customers to tell the Mulberry story for the brand.

This was about building a magnetic brand, and when actioned effectively this creates a substantially better ROI on marketing budget. What we are describing here in the broadest sense as communications included returning to London and New York Fashion Weeks with intimate shows and unexpected events; forming natural partnerships with already engaged celebrities like Alexa Chung; and pursuing creative collaborations in design, art, photography, craft and music putting Mulberry at the heart of a vibrant creative ecosystem. All delivered on a profit-funded budget carefully planned and organically grown year on year.

This four-year process saw sales increase exponentially, Mulberry became part of the zeitgeist and attracted new customers while continuing to delight diehard brand fans. Key to this success was a transparency, a humility and a genuine enthusiasm for a community of great British creative and craftspeople.

A magical four years of authentic brand building was captured in a dedicated 40th anniversary book published in 2011. Created by Construct, the book contained three years of reportage of the journey described above. The book’s forward, written by Georgia, celebrated the heritage of the brand and its founder, demonstrating the natural progression of Mulberry over a forty-year history and the red thread binding the future to the past.

In 2012 Georgia left Mulberry and Construct exited stage left. Mulberry appointed a new CEO and embarked on a very different strategy, hiking prices, eschewing craft for fashion and distancing itself from the grass roots creative community. The humility and humour of the last four years were left behind and the result of all these changes was an immediate disconnect with the brand’s core customers.

At the heart of Mulberry's success had been that careful balance of authentic values the brand could claim and those things the audience valued. Changing this created a distrust and cynicism the brand has struggled to reverse ever since.

Financial information sources: The Telegraph.