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PPI Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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PPI | Fortune

PPI Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Facing brand dilution and declining wholesale sales in the 2010s, Ralph Lauren has sought to reinvent itself and win over a younger generation. Under CEO Patrice Louvet, the company pulled back from heavy discounting, doubled down on its own stores and digital platforms, and refocused on core values like authenticity and timeless design. Today Ralph Lauren is seeing renewed growth, topping $7 billion in revenue the first time in nearly a decade. Fortune's Phil Wahba sat down with Louvet to learn about the strategy behind the turnaround.

Inside Ralph Lauren’s Big Comeback — And How it Won Over Gen Z

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We had lost touch with the younger generation, and a lot of the questions I got when I started was, is Ralph Lauren still relevant? For years, Ralph Lauren leaned heavily on discounts and overexpansion, eroding the exclusivity that built its name. But in recent years, the company has worked to overhaul its strategy and win over a younger generation. Now the brand is back in the cultural spotlight from the US Open. To elaborate fashion shows and even a viral Taylor Swift dress moment. So Taylor Swift's dress that she just got engaged in is on sale for Miles Lauren for under $350 right now. For the first time in nearly a decade, the company's revenue topped $7 billion and growing segments like women's apparel are taking off. percent of our shoppers and stores online are actually Whitman, and now Ralph Lauren is looking ahead, experimenting with AI. If we can figure out how to do what we do better with the aid of technology, fantastic. Here's how Ralph Lauren pulled off one of fashion's biggest turnarounds and what it takes to stay relevant in a rapidly shifting luxury market. Here on Madison Avenue sit two of Ralph Lauren's most iconic flagship stores. The sprawling retail locations carry men and women's polos, sweaters, and other preppy mainstays the brand is famous for, alongside growing segments like handbags, outerwear, and luxury home goods. Since taking the helm in 2017, CEO Patci Cove has doubled down on Ralph Lauren's roots while expanding into new categories and rethinking the retail experience. Let's talk a little bit about the branding because here we are in in the mansion, it's opulent, it's luxurious, it could seem exclusive, but in fact it is welcoming. So can you tell me a little bit about how the company manages that balance of being luxury and high-end but without being, you know, unfriendly? Well, about philosophy from the beginning has been this concept of Inspiring the dream of a better life irrespective of where you come from, what your income level is. And so our price ranges today go for, you know, a pack of tennis socks that might be $15 all the way to, we recently sold a $320,000 watch. We want to create an environment that's aspirational but engaging and inviting, right? And this notion of inclusive luxury is really important to us. You have 15 year olds coming in here. And you have billionaires, but Ralph Lauren's luxury empire didn't start this way. In 1967 from a small office in the Empire State Building, Ralph Lauren launched Polo, wide, colorful neckties that stood out in an era of thinner styles. Over the next two decades, Ralph Lauren branched into full men's and women's collections. And created cultural touch points like outfitting Team USA. By the 2010s, the company was stretched too thin. Ralph Lauren was suffering from brand dilution with excessive discounting, multiple sub-brands, and an overreliance on struggling department stores. By 2018, revenue had fallen more than 16% in just two years. The Ralph Lauren story was growing by leaps and bounds for years, and then One could argue it overextended itself. What was your feeling about how to address that? Yeah, I think it happens to a lot of companies across industries, right? Great success, high expectations of continued great success, and when there's pressure like that, there's a temptation to broaden distribution. There's a temptation to increase promotional activity. I think of it as the boiled frog phenomenon, which is you say, just do a little bit, just a little bit more. It'll be fine. It won't impact us overall. But as you do more and more of that little bit, ultimately you're damaging the brand. Our challenge was here in the US where we went too broad, we were too promotional, and um we had to pull back. And yes, it's painful, but it's mandatory. Now Louve is steering Ralph Lauren into an era built on brand elevation. In recent years, the luxury brand has sharpened its focus on core products, attracted younger customers, improved the shopping experience, and pulled back from its heavy. Reliance on discounts and wholesale. So far it appears to be working with margins rising and revenue at a 9 year high. How did you get young people on board with this brand? We did a lot of work to understand what was relevant for the younger generation, where they wanted to shop, how they wanted to engage. Which values matter most to them and what we're finding is the Ralph Lauren values of authenticity, family, optimism, quality, timelessness, those resonate with that younger generation, and they resonate with that younger generation here in New York or in Shanghai or in Milan. Ralph Lauren reinforces those brand values through experiences from in-store coffee shops designed to draw in younger shoppers to long running sports partnerships that spotlight the brand. G's partnership with the US Open started 20 years ago. Wimbledon Australian Open, the Olympics. So if you look at where we are now, what we're finding is we want to celebrate what's on the court, but actually the thing that's most interesting is showing style in the audience, or the fans and how the fans dress and and how the styles varyond sports, Ralph Lauren shows continue to lean into spectacle. The 2024 Hampton show turned equestrian stables into a runway with supermodels Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell walking before a celebrity packed crowd. At the same time, Ralph Lauren is wrapping up marketing and sharpening its retail strategy. In 2022, it singled out 30 global cities as key markets. It's fueling that push with its largest ever marketing budget, over half a billion dollars. There are a lot of cities in the world, there are, um, and a lot of cities that have a lot of shoppers. 30 only hits obviously a very small portion of it. What's the rationale for that? I think our experience and when you look at the industry. when you overextend yourself, you end up diluting the brand, you end up diluting your resources and therefore you end up diluting your performance. So listen, we're, we're not here for another quarter. We're not here for another 3 years. We're here for another 50 years. So we have plenty of time to go hit the other cities in the world. China for me is a wonderful example. I think there's still a lot of growth to be had in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Taipei, Hong Kong, right? Those are massive cities, tens of millions of inhabitants. Once we feel like we're fully established, then we'll continue to drive that business and then we'll start to open the white space. You dilute yourself. You might see the benefits short term, but, but ultimately, it impedes your ability to perform consistently. Clothing and fashion, by definition, there is the risk of misfires. Tell me a little bit about for you, where's the balance between not playing it too safe, but also not going crazy with wild stuff that could flop. So we have the benefit of decades of Presenting core items that consumers know and recognize really well. Our cable knit sweaters, our polo shirts, our Oxford shirts, right? Our tree jackets, like quintessential RA one. That's job one. Job one is how do we continue to present that, animate that, engage the new generation with these types of products, right, and this ability to leverage our core products across generations, I think has served us really well. Women's wear and handbags have also become major growth engines. Women's Wear alone now brings in about $2 billion a year, and in the last fiscal year, Ralph Lauren's bag sales jumped by a double digit percentage. 56% of our shoppers and stores online are actually Whitman. It's less than 1/3 of our business. So for us it's a massive opportunity. Within that, we realized that the handbag category was significantly underdeveloped for us. It's part of the overall lifestyle, and we've gotten some really nice traction behind some of the more recentensitization. These moves have helped Ralph Lauren sidestep the challenges facing much of the luxury market. In 2024, the luxury industry saw its first major slowdown since the Great Recession, as shoppers questioned whether high-end fashion still delivered on quality and creativity. Luxury giants like LVMH, Burberry, and Caring all missed revenue targets that year. While some companies responded by pushing prices higher, Ralph Lauren says it doubled down on its core values. What do stores need to be for you? What does a typical Ralph Lauren store have to? Do to really justify its existence. It needs to be an experience, right, because I can get the products online. It needs to be a place where, you know, you, you, you want to come, you want to discover it, you want to have an amazing engagement with sales associates. You want to discover the different dimensions of the raw For lifestyle. You might not buy the first time, but you'll come back and want to feel that. And that's the bar that we set for ourselves. Like many companies in the luxury retail space, Ralph Lauren is also experimenting with artificial intelligence. We dreamt of the day when we'd be able to do something like this. That's David Lauren, the company's chief branding and innovation officer, and the son of founder Ralph Lauren. In September, he helped launch Ask Ralph, a generative AI shopping tool that lets customers ask style questions and get product recommendations. David, tell me a little bit about Ask Ralph, the AI style assistant. I mean, how long have you been working on it? What customer did you have most in mind when this was being developed? Yeah. Well, the idea for Ask Ralph really started 25 years ago. We launched Ralph Lauren.com, which was really the first luxury fashion website. At the time, we had a sort of archaic version of Style Guide, where Ralph Lauren himself actually answered style questions and it was very popular. When you get dressed in the morning, clothes help give you a sense of confidence, a sense of identity, a sense of who you are and who you want to be, and the ability to pull out of your back pocket. You know, a companion to help give you that sensibility is Ralph. So literally our dream one day is that Ralph himself will be using this to gut check an idea. The company says that what sets this tool apart is its use of Ralph Lauren's full inventory to suggest complete brand approved outfits. Ask Ralph can answer prompts and offer curated looks pulled directly from its collections. Do you see this as a tool that in-store employees could use as they help a customer as well? I think the goal of this is to not only help our our customers, but to help our own employees. The better educated our team can be, the more consistent our voice can be all around the world, the more valuable it's going to be. In many ways. Ask Ralph is a new employee. Even as Ralph Lauren regains its cultural cachet, the wider fashion industry is battling economic headwinds. Shoppers are becoming more price conscious, especially in the US, where discount and value-focused retailers like TJ Maxx are thriving. That pressure has forced Ralph Lauren to rethink how it reaches customers. During COVID, Love leaned into his strategy to open more Ralph Lauren stores and continue exiting weak department stores. As for supply chain, it now stretches from Vietnam to Peru, and the brand is well positioned to weather global trade disruptions, including tar force. Before all the terrorist drama of 2025. Ralph Lauren had done a lot of work to not be too reliant on the same suppliers. Can you tell me a little bit about what that looks like now and what was the rationale for doing that? We were very dependent when when our team started some 89 years ago on A few geographies from the sourcing standpoint, uh, and a few suppliers. And in an environment that's uncertain and volatile, you cannot do that, right? So significant diversification. Now, there's not one market that's more than 20%. We generally have dual sourcing, if not triple sourcing. Across our entire portfolio. The other piece is agility, and I don't think people would have used the term agility to describe Ralph Lauren 10 years ago. And I think in a world that's so dynamic, the ability to be nimble, move production from market A to market B, and I'm actually really proud of the work that teams have done on this one because I think agility is a is a unique strength. Ralph Lauren Ralph Lauren also carries the weight of being a symbol of Americana at a time sentiment abroad towards the US is shifting. Despite these pressures, Ralph Lauren continues to anchor itself in the vision laid out by its founder. So I want to ask you a little bit about um your working relationship with Mr. Lauren himself. Tell us a little bit about how you work with him. Ralph and I spent a lot of time upfront, making sure we're on the same page, making sure we had a consistent ambition for the company, making sure that we valued the same things, value with a big V, and making sure that we were all, we were going to push the same direction. And we talked about what business are we in, right? Because I think that's a fundamental question for all companies is just clarity on what business are you really in. And we concluded that we were in the dreams business, not in the apparel business, not in the fashion business, we're in the dreams business.

Jon Blotner, president and chief commercial officer of Wayfair, credits his climb to the C-suite to a simple formula: pursue the hardest problems, demand real ownership, and work alongside smart, humble peers. That philosophy now drives Wayfair’s next phase of growth. In 2020, when homebound consumers rushed to redecorate, the company posted its first profit after years of losses, with second-quarter revenue soaring 84% to $4.2 billion and the stock price tripling. As the world reopened, however, Wayfair weathered three straight years of net losses before delivering, in 2025, its strongest revenue growth and profitability since 2021. Blotner intends to extend that rebound by accelerating a push into physical retail, rolling out large-format stores, and expanding specialty brands.

Wayfair’s President on the Power of Humility and IRL Shopping

Leadership

Ramp CEO Eric Glyman has helped build one of fintech’s fastest-growing startups — hitting $1 billion in annualized revenue, serving 45,000 businesses, and soaring to a $22.5 billion valuation in just 2,367 days. In this episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, he sits down with Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell to break down Ramp’s meteoric rise, the business model flipping corporate cards on their head, and why he believes speed and focus are the keys to scaling.

How Ramp's Eric Glyman Built a $22.5 Billion Startup in 2,367 Days

Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni met as roommates at Stanford. Now, they’re the cofounders of Phia, an AI-powered shopping agent that just raised an $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins and has participation from household names like Hailey Bieber,  Kris Jenner, and Sheryl Sandberg. For this episode of Term Sheet, Allie spoke with Phoebe, Sophia, and Annie Case, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, about what’s wrong with online shopping today, how to build a consumer company, why there aren’t more women building companies, and what AI tools can bring to the digital shopping experience.

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