When Richard Dickson arrived at Gap Inc in August 2023, he was coming off a career high: Barbie was dominating the box office and pop culture in a way movies rarely do these days. Mattel, where he served as president and chief operating officer, had played a pivotal role in making the movie happen, as well as its myriad marketing deals.
Gap Inc, which owns the Gap brand, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta, was in a much different place. As president and CEO, Dickson was tasked with a turnaround project. While household names, each brand in the portfolio had seen sales decline and relevance slip in the face of intense competition from digitally native upstarts and fast fashion behemoths. A new playbook was needed to not only refresh each brand for today’s consumers, but to make the case as to why they still needed to exist in today’s landscape — one much different than when Gap was first founded 55 years ago in 1969.
I sat down with Dickson for the Vogue Business Executive Summit, where he shared how he rolled up his sleeves and got to work on a strategy to turn around the company’s financial health. It paid off earlier this year when, in June, all four Gap Inc brands reported sales growth for the first time in years.
“It is no secret — we were challenged, and we still have a lot of work to do in that regard, but we’re extremely focused at this point on our strategic priorities,” Dickson said. “Fixing the fundamentals of our business was the first call to action; recognising that, through financial and operational rigour, getting the company back on solid financial footing would enable us to actually look to the revitalisation of these iconic brands.”
Now, with a little over a year under his belt, is where the magic happens. Design, innovation, storytelling — all of that can only develop with a solid top-line, Dickson said.
Below, watch the full interview, and find a recap of our conversation. To watch all of the interviews from this year’s Executive Summit, Members can click here.
Brand, personified
It used to be that one standout ad campaign splashed across TV and billboards could catapult a brand into the cultural stratosphere — something Gap once knew all too well. But marketing has changed dramatically, Dickson explained. “We’re all living in a digital dialogue, in a fragmented world of communication. And so reaching your consumer has a lot to do with recognising that there are multiple platforms that need to be in dialogue at the same time with different creative assets that appeal to different generations, when you’re talking about a generational brand.” That’s part of the reason why Gap Inc found a new agency of record in Omnicom Media Group back in May. “Our main mission is to be where our consumers are. The more that you can move at the speed of culture with creative assets that speak with authenticity, the more your consumer relates to it.”
Key to such movement is a brand point of view, which Dickson wagers Gap Inc’s brands were lacking. “When I first joined, if you went to our online brand presence it didn’t look great, and it almost looked the same [across brands]. A site needs to have a point of view, and ours was more promotional and transactional. You saw a lot of stuff,” he said. To solve for that, Dickson charged each brand with cleaning up their product mix and refreshing their creative. “And so early on we took an accelerated approach to creating brand identity.”
In many ways, fashion today is a race to the bottom. How can brands like Gap Inc’s stay above the fray of fast fashion?
“We are not fast fashion. We are fast. We could be faster with newness on the floors and newness on our sites, which we are accelerating,” Dickson said. Part of that is reflected in how customers shop now, which is less seasonal. “We remain very focused on quality. We remain incredibly focused on the integrity of how we make what we make. We ensure that we create enduring fashions that have a timelessness to them, even though they may always reflect timely trends.”
‘Calculated swings’
How do Gap’s brands stand out in a noisy industry? One way is to make compelling product that gets people talking. One of Dickson’s big moves this year was to appoint American designer Zac Posen as executive vice president and creative director of Gap Inc and chief creative officer of Old Navy. Posen has since dressed stars including Anne Hathaway and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in his red carpet designs for the brand. (Maybe the closest so far to Gap having its own Barbie moment?)
These moments, along with Posen’s presence, are a positioning play. They get people talking about and looking at brands like Gap and Old Navy differently. That then trickles down, is the hope. “One of the greatest challenges was our ability to unlock creativity,” he added. “There’s an enormous amount of creativity in the company. Having a champion of creative design and cultural conversation like Zac Posen coming into the organisation symbolises the importance of creativity at large.”
Collaborations serve a similar purpose with more immediate payout for the consumer. Gap has gone big with collabs this year, partnering with brands like Madhappy, Dôen and Cult Gaia — each one causing a splash online, with the tendency to sell out. It’s a different approach to collaborations since the ill-fated Gap x Yeezy partnership, which hinged everything on one celebrity brand. That partnership ended before Dickson joined.
“Recognising that collaborations have a place in our brand strategy with the right framework ensures that we recognise the cultural conversations that come with them. It’s strategically well-intended decisions but flawed execution,” he said. “How far do we dial up, how far do we go? We take swings, but they’re calculated. If you don’t take a swing you’ll never hit.”
Risks must be calculated, Dickson said, and not at the expense of brand integrity. Building that back has been a main course of action over the past year — and can allow for more room to grow and experiment down the line.
“We believe we’re on a road to becoming a high-performing apparel business that has a house of iconic American brands that shape culture,” Dickson said. “And the journey is going to be long, but we’ve been at it for 55 years and I’m excited to lead it into the future.”
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