Safilo 2020-2024 Business Plan
The Board of Directors of Safilo Group S.p.A. has approved the new group Business Plan 2020-2024.
The new Plan incorporates the effects of the group’s most recent business developments, and in particular: the sale of the Solstice retail business, which took place on July 1st, 2019; the extension of the brand Marc Jacobs until December 31st, 2026; the exit of the brand Dior from January 1st, 2021; the exit of the brand Fendi from July 1st, 2021; the renewal of the Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss and Kate Spade licenses; the renewal of the supply agreement with Kering Eyewear; the launch of the new licenses signed during 2019, namely Missoni and MMissoni, Levi’s, DavidBeckham, and Under Armour, an iconic sports brand just recently signed; the acquisition of Blenders Eyewear, a fast-growing California digitally-native brand, which will enrich the group’s proprietary brand portfolio and direct-to-consumer business.
The strategic objectives and levers of the group’s new Business Plan are: to develop a modern and successful Customer-centricand Consumer-oriented business model,powered by a new 360° digital transformation strategy; to deliver Sales Growth, by placing customers and consumers at the heart of the strategy, and accelerating initiatives to digitally transform the Company’s business model. Over the coming 5 years, starting from 2020 in Europe, Safilo intends to strengthen and enlarge its client base by pursuing a customer-centric strategy, redesigning its Customer Experience, Engagement and Customer Care activities through the adoption of the latest technologies in the B2B, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and salesforce automation fields.
The group will continue developing a multi-segment and multi-channel portfolio strategy by also accelerating projects to build an ever-closer connection with the end consumers. Safilo is pursuing this strategic choice through a more decisive digital shift of its mix of capabilities and investments, from digital and social marketing to Direct-to-Consumer distribution, a channel in significant growth in which Safilo wants to accelerate both through strategic commercial partnerships and through the acquisition of new important capabilities, as the acquisition of Blenders Eyewear testifies. This brand has in fact built an advanced direct-to-consumer e- commerce platform with unique digital and social media skills, successfully engaging and selling to Millennials and Generation Z consumers; to deliver Margin Expansion, through an efficient cost structure, which responds to the requirement to realign the Group’s current industrial capacity to the future production needs and to achieve further costs of goods sold and overheads efficiencies, guaranteeing the Group’s economic and financial solidity and the pursuit, during the Plan’s timeline, of a recovery of the levels of profitability to which Safilo aspires.
The exit of the LVMH luxury licenses makes it necessary for Safilo to initiate an industrial reorganization and restructuring plan, promptly responding to the new production scenario that the company will be facing, by realigning its manufacturing footprint.
The plan, which is drawn up to safeguard the group's competitiveness in favour of the workers who will remain in force, identified a total of approximately 700 redundancies in 2020 in Italy.
Safilo has opened a negotiation table with the trade unions and the workers' representatives in order to identify all the available social security tools to manage the impact on the people involved in the best possible way.