Lessons From Ralph Lauren and Coach: How to Get a Fashion Brand Back on the Growth Track

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Ralph Lauren and Coach have done it, but plenty of others are still trying and trying.

Deputy Managing Editor

Coach and Ralph Lauren have two of the best stories in American fashion today.

But they aren’t thrillers or tales of derring-do. There’s very little heart-pounding excitement, on the business side at least.

Instead, both brands are methodical, step-wise case studies on having a vision, a plan on how to grow into that vision and then the fortitude to hold on and stay the course not for months, but for years.

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That patience has paid off big time.

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On Thursday, Coach-parent Tapestry reported that fiscal 2026 sales hit $8 billion, a 17 percent increase on an adjusted basis, hitting its three-year plan in Year One. The company plans to add another $400 million to $500 million in sales this year. While investors recalibrated their sky-high expectations for the brand and traded Tapestry’s stock down, the company still has a sector-leading market capitalization of $25.9 billion.

Similarly, Ralph Lauren Corp.’s market cap stands at $23.1 billion after it said last week that first-quarter sales tallied $2 billion, an increase of 13 percent in constant currencies.

For both, that’s a breakaway stock performance in a world where very few American fashion brands ever see market caps anywhere near that. By comparison, the once-red hot VF Corp. is valued at $5.8 billion, followed by Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein parent PVH Corp. ($3.8 billion), Under Armour Inc. ($2.3 billion) and Michael Kors parent Capri Holdings ($1.8 billion).

Ralph Lauren and Coach have each taken a similar path to the top.

They have tightened distribution, focused more on their own retail, pulled back in outlets, cut the number of styles produced, zeroed in on higher-priced categories and invested more money into marketing to fuel full-priced sales.

It’s a strategy that’s easy to articulate and hard to follow.

Where Coach and Ralph Lauren have succeeded, the other companies listed above have set out on a similar path, but not seen the same results.

Why does this brand elevation strategy work? And why isn’t it working for everyone?

Interviews with the chief executive officers of both Tapestry and Ralph Lauren, a former chief financial officer who was key to both turnarounds, Wall Street analysts and retail professors suggest that it’s a moment-to-learn, lifetime-to-master kind of strategy.

The short of it is that:

Think of it as the fine art of getting consumers to spend more — and like it.

Here, a closer look at how it’s done.

If there’s a common thread between the turnarounds at both Coach and Ralph Lauren, it’s Jane Nielsen.

After 15 years at PepsiCo, she was CFO at what was then Coach Inc. from 2011 to 2016, when she jumped to Ralph Lauren for an eight-year run that started as CFO and ended with her as chief operating officer as well.

Nielsen helped start Coach’s brand elevation strategy and then took that experience to Ralph Lauren, which was starting on its evolution under former CEO Stefan Larsson. In both cases, Nielsen’s background in consumer products — where margins are slight and operations are tight — helped bring a little more rigor to the artier approach fashion companies favored.

“At both Coach and Ralph Lauren, a part of the success was clearly defining a strategy,” Nielsen said. “That strategy, I know it can be boring, but the strategic pillars didn’t change radically. They would evolve, the tactics would evolve, and your metrics would evolve as you improved. But the fundamental strategy was pretty straightforward and pretty simple and could be communicated broadly and consistently.

“What do you want the organization to do?” she said. “What are your linchpins that you are going to follow, measure, live by, edit initiatives by? And that widely communicated, well understood, not ever-changing strategy is part of the secret sauce. There’s so many things these companies can do, but just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it. The shoulds and the must-dos are articulated in the strategy.”

The process at both Coach and Ralph Lauren started with a deep dive into the consumer.

“What do they love about us? How do we stay true to that? How do we understand where we’re not exceeding their expectations and attacking that directly? And where do they love us, think we ought to be, and where we’re not?”

At Ralph Lauren, the exercise turned up the insight that consumers would turn to the brand for many categories that the company had not seen as part of its core, including outerwear, sweaters and handbags.

The idea was to get into those businesses in ways that elevated the brand, driving average prices higher, while at the same time reducing lower-price sales at T.J. Maxx and other discount channels.

“The answer is to continue growing the healthy parts of your business and accelerating into new parts that can give you the latitude to correct some areas where you may be disappointing or underserving your consumers,” Nielsen said.

“We had Purple Label and Polo, and there was a lot of white space where Polo ended and Purple Label picked up,” she said. “That was all [average unit retail price] accretive when we filled in that white space so that there was a continuous line.

“There was a lot of room for the bear sweater, the flag sweater, the washable cashmere hoodie that had a lot of AUR growth while it was meeting a true consumer need,” she said. “The consumer didn’t feel, ‘Boy, I bought a cable knit cotton sweater and I bought a washable cashmere hoodie.’ They don’t view that as a price increase. It will show up as an AUR increase. And it’s the outcome of a strategy to service the consumer for different needs, different tastes, different occasions. And that to the consumer feels great.”

Ralph Lauren has kept to the strategy, recording a 15 percent increase in AUR in its own direct-to-consumer business in the first quarter.

That marked over nine straight years of AUR growth every quarter for the brand.

But current CEO Patrice Louvet described higher AUR as an “outcome of our elevation strategy” and not an “objective.”

“AUR has four factors,” the CEO said. “First, it’s driven by region and channel mix. The second is product category mix. The third is promotional pullback. And then the fourth one, which is a much smaller part, is like-for-like pricing. That is not the key driver of AUR. The drivers of AUR are more mix and promotional pullbacks.”

It’s bringing a touch of the consumer products science, which Louvet knows well as a Procter & Gamble veteran, to fashion, where heart has historically led all.

“I found coming from a different industry that this industry was very driven by the vision of the designer, as it should be,” Louvet said. “But that really can’t scale if you’re not also really focused on who is the consumer you want to serve, what inspires them, what is their competitive set? What is the decision process? And how do you make sure you delight them through that?”

“We’ve always had quite a bit of respect for the data side of it, understanding the consumer,” said Tapestry CEO Joanne Crevoiserat, adding that Coach was once owned by consumer products giant Sara Lee.

But lately, the company has been doubling down.