In the months that followed the Spring/Summer 2026 season, we have seen a series of new hires in the communications, marketing and design departments of all major houses. Our new series ‘Fashion s Real Reset Starts Now’ looks at all these changes and how they will redefine the fashion industry in the years to come.
When a new creative director takes the reins of a luxury fashion house, attention naturally focuses on the runway debut. But for brands seeking a significant turnaround, there’s a long way to go before the clothes reach the shop floor. At the heart of that is the merchandising team, which plays the crucial role of translating the new creative vision to consumers.
“Merchandising is probably more important than it’s ever been now, because we’ve seen so much change in designers,” says retail consultant Robert Burke.
Merchandising is a balancing act, protecting the core business while introducing newness. Stakes are high as new designers’ collections begin to hit stores. “Top clients are not as loyal as you’d think,” says Tiffany Hsu, chief buying officer at Mytheresa and group fashion ventures officer at parent company LuxExperience. “They want to wear what’s cool, what’s new, what’s trending. A brand that was trending two years ago might not be trending now.”
Experts agree that during periods of creative transition, the designer’s vision has to lead over the merchandising. In practice, that means the new creative direction must be visible in the commercial offer.
But there’s an important caveat: it’s a mistake to drop existing core products — those best-sellers that predate the new creative director — without a plan to replace the function of that product, and the business it brings in.
Many luxury brands have struggled in recent years amid perceptions of creative stagnation and brand fatigue, often prompting a turnover in designer leadership. Overpowering merchandising plays a harmful role in this vicious cycle: designers are put under commercial pressure; then merchandising teams take a heavy-handed approach, focusing on a narrow range of styles and slapping a logo on; then customers become uninspired, and sales struggle even more.
But the original purpose of merchandising wasn’t to flatten creativity. “Merchandising used to be about translating a highly creative vision — like McQueen in the early days, something you see and think, how on earth do you commercialize that without losing the essence of the brand?” says consultant and board advisor Sarah Crook, who started her career in merchandising and worked her way up to CEO of Stella McCartney, before taking on the same role at Christopher Kane and Dundas. Crook hopes that the creative reset era signals merchandising will return to its original purpose, helping to usher in an era of greater creativity for the fashion industry.
The pace of change
Merchandising typically operates on two parallel tracks — collection merchandising and retail merchandising. Collection merchandisers are involved from the earliest stages of development, working with the design studio to shape the structure of the collection: the overall category mix, rough SKU counts, and early pricing and production considerations. Retail merchandisers, by contrast, engage much later. While budgets and targets are set in advance, they usually discover the collection around showtime, building the store assortment based on what they see in the showroom and what they know about current business performance.
The pace of change affecting both sides of merchandising depends heavily on scale. Smaller brands can sometimes afford a clean break; larger ones often need several seasons to recalibrate. “With some bigger brands, the size of the buy is so big that you can’t do a total reset because there are different businesses in different regions, there are hundreds of direct retail stores, so a total reset takes years because the product range is so big,” says Hsu. “If you’re a smaller brand, it’s easier to do a total reset. Either way, it’s about the end consumer, but the speed of the transition and what needs to be developed does take time.”
For Alberto Caliri — a Missoni veteran who was appointed creative director in October 2024 — it’s always a balance of continuity and innovation. “There are distinctive and unique aesthetic codes that represent the core of Missoni’s identity and the foundation of our business — expressed through eveningwear and beachwear — where the objective is to consolidate what works, reassuring the customer while remaining constantly capable of surprising and evoking new emotions,” he says. His new creative vision involves enhancing the daywear offering, which is a new area for growth. “In the main collections, we focus on ensuring commercial continuity and addressing the specific needs of each market, while in the runway show we allow greater creative freedom and experimentation — always in a Missoni key, without drifting into sensationalism.” This approach has led sales to grow at a double-digit rate since FW25 (Caliri’s debut), despite market challenges, he says.
One of the biggest mistakes brands make is cutting hero products without a plan in place, says Crook. She cites the example of Hedi Slimane discontinuing the popular Tribute sandal when he joined Saint Laurent. “The business was insane, so it was like, ‘We needed to bring it back because we don’t have a substitute.’ That’s the important thing: when you’re transitioning, you need time to update the core product. You can’t just eliminate it — you can evolve it in line with the creative vision, but it still needs to deliver the same function.” In a similar vein, Crook says it’s a mistake to let creative freedom run too wild at the expense of the pricing architecture. “If customers come to a particular brand to buy a certain category at a certain price range, and the prices have gone up by 40%, they’re not going to understand it.”
Ultimately, it’s important to recognize that merchandising is only one piece of the puzzle: storytelling, pricing, marketing, customer service and many other factors are at play. For this reason, Hsu’s advice to merchandising teams in the midst of a creative transition is to understand what’s selling, making sure that the product and the price point line up.
The power dynamics at play
A creative director’s early seasons are about establishing identity and impact, and overly conservative merchandising can dilute that message before it has a chance to land. Conversely, strong merchandising leadership can bring discipline and coherence, but when taken too far, it risks homogenization. Most experts agree that in a creative luxury fashion brand, merchandising should not dominate. One merchandiser at a luxury fashion house with a new creative director noted that when leadership appoints a creative director, it often signals a broader desire for change across the business. Merchandisers who want to succeed in that environment need to be agile, rather than anchored solely in past performance.
“With the new creative director coming on board, they have to be given the freedom and space to cement that vision, because it’s not an easy task,” says Crook. “But they should also come on board with an understanding of the objectives of the business, an open relationship with the CEO, investors and the shareholders, the ability to create their team, and a support structure to set them up for success.”
Strong communication, trust and respect are essential, from the early stages through to the evaluation of sales data and reactions from customers and retail partners after the collection hits stores. “Our approach is based on mutual listening and constant dialog between people,” says Caliri, noting that Missoni’s merchandising and design teams work side by side from the early stages of the design process. Having worked at the brand for many years before taking the helm has allowed Caliri to understand the brand’s core product codes and develop strong relationships across the company. “The agility of communication across departments is crucial, as it allows us to quickly understand whether a new idea is working or whether it needs to be adapted for the next collection,” says Caliri.
While experts note that it’s not necessary for the creative director to be present across every step of the merchandising process (a member of their design team will suffice), they emphasize that many of the new generation of creative directors do care about the commercial success of their products. “It’s a mistake to exclude them because you assume they don’t have time to think about a little shop in Italy or the music we play in-store or the shopping bag we’re using,” says Sarah Andelman, founder of consultancy Just An Idea and formerly Paris concept store Colette.
Success requires departments not be so siloed, Andelman continues. “It needs to be centralized, and everyone needs to be speaking the same voice,” she says. “The challenge is that the bigger the brand is, the more difficult it is to make sure the decisions are validated by the creative director and their team. But you have to test things and take a risk, and if it goes wrong, at least it was all under the same umbrella vision.”
For many in the industry, the current wave of creative resets could encourage a broader rethinking of how creativity and commerce should interact. “I think the industry became so addicted to commercial success post-Covid. We forgot we are a creative-led industry and we need to dream and inspire customers to get emotional about clothes again,” says Crook, noting a more positive and creative atmosphere in Paris last season. “I think we need to get back to creativity, and when we do, merchandising will take the old-school function of making that beautiful item viable for everyday wearability without losing its uniqueness. It’s more than a reset, it’s a fundamental change of mindset.”
