It's going to take more than star power to save Burberry

Telegraph

14-05-2025

While most of the UK is basking in unseasonably glorious sunshine this week, spare a thought for the folks at Burberry who appear to be facing an altogether more gloomy outlook. The luxury British fashion house is weathering yet another storm with the announcement yesterday of more financial losses and hundreds more job cuts.
The company announced 1,700 jobs will go in the next two years in the wake of a £66 million loss in the year to April, compared with profit before tax of £383 million a year earlier. The house aims to save an extra £100 million by the end of the 2027 financial year, partly through cutting around 18 per cent of its global workforce.
The results come in what is a tough period for fashion globally, with business and supply chain challenges amidst a worldwide luxury slowdown. 'These results are very disappointing,' says The Telegraph 's head of fashion, Lisa Armstrong, 'but every brand is going through a hard time at the moment, even houses like Chanel are not having the stellar growth that they were post-pandemic when so many brands were growing unsustainably.'
Yesterday's bad results are just the latest in a long line of strong financial headwinds battering the London-listed business. The British heritage brand, founded in 1856 by Thomas Burberry to make outdoor clothing for the military, is something of a bellwether for British luxury, but has struggled to find its north star in recent years with sharp revenue decline.
Less than a year earlier in July 2024, more poor results saw off then-chief executive Jonathan Akeroyd who departed from the brand after only two years with immediate effect, to be replaced by Joshua Schulman, a Los Angeles native and former boss of American superbrands Coach and Michael Kors. There were cuts announced then too, 400 office jobs at the brand's UK headquarters.
'Akeroyd's departure last summer really shook the team,' a brand insider tells The Telegraph. 'And the fact it happened with immediate effect… We did not see that coming, and it rattled and destabilised everyone, including (creative director) Daniel Lee, who had been brought into the house by him.'
Indeed Lee, originally from Yorkshire, had arrived at the beleaguered house in 2023 following a star turn at Bottega Veneta, to take over from Italian designer Riccardo Tisci who, critics argued, had failed to capitalise on Burberry's British heritage during his five-year tenure. (Tisci has subsequently been accused of sexually assaulting a man in New York in June 2024, allegations he denies).
Lee did not have the easiest start at the house, with several poorly received collections fuelling rumours about his future in the months after he arrived. The brand's autumn/winter 2025 collection, shown in February, felt like a sea-change. 'Creative Director Daniel Lee put his best foot forward with a very British take on cosy opulence,' said The Telegraph 's acting fashion director Sarah Bailey of the collection at the time. 'It wasn't a revolution, but a purposeful stride in the right direction… There was a confidence and a conviction in this collection that seemed to blow the mist of doubt away.'
Lee himself has previously said that he thinks 'Burberry should appeal to everybody, from the street to the Royal family' and under Schulman, the label continues to seek to exploit its quintessential Britishness, notably around celebrities, with whom the brand still has phenomenal pulling power, consistently boasting London's flashiest front row at its bi-annual fashion shows.
This February, actors Richard E Grant, Lesley Manville and Jason Isaacs all walked the runway and the much-photographed Peltz-Beckhams were amongst the crowd in the front row (wearing matchy-matchy plaid). Then there are the high-profile advertising campaigns, the latest in celebration of Burberry's relationship with Highgrove Gardens, features stars including actors Elizabeth McGovern, Laura Carmichael and Sope Dirisu.
A foray into art is on the cards, too. In March it was announced the Victoria and Albert Museum had partnered with the house to rebrand the Fashion Gallery as The Burberry Gallery in 2027. Earlier this month, the label enlisted stylist du jour Law Roach (of Ariana Grande and Zendaya fame) to host a table at the prestigious Met Gala at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and dressed Roach, alongside his guests – actors Angela Bassett, Jodie Turner-Smith and singer Cardi B amongst them – for the red carpet.
If these events win plaudits from the fashion press and on social media, they are not yet, it seems, translating to cold hard cash. The house may be determined to capitalise on their unique selling point of being the only British luxury fashion house, but customers appear confused about what 'Britishness' even is in 2025 – tea, cake and weather clichés aside.
How to evoke Burberry's long and storied history (the quintessential trench was patented in 1912) without being defined by it? How to walk the line between cliché and cool – and moreover, convince an increasingly financially constrained global marketplace to invest thousands of pounds in it (one of the brand's iconic Gabardine trenchcoats now costs £1990, a merino wool, jacquard knit cardigan, £950)?
While the house says their problems have been compounded by the 2021 decision to withdraw the VAT refund scheme for overseas visitors shopping in the UK and an unpredictable US market under President Trump's tariff threats, there is a bigger brand identity problem which echoes through into the beauty space where Burberry has been under licence to Coty, an American multinational beauty company, since 2017.
'There was such a buzz about Burberry beauty when it launched in 2010, because it was the first big-time British fashion house to launch a beauty range,' says one source in the industry. 'The products were innovative and the packaging had real make-up bag appeal. Sadly it doesn't feel like the same brand anymore – there are hardly any new launches and the products they dolaunch are just cookie-cutter versions of what is already out in the market. This is what often happens when a big corporate company takes ownership of a cool brand: it loses its magic completely.'
'I think Burberry is on the right track now with Daniel Lee,' says Armstrong. 'It's just very important that Burberry deliver great outerwear, good bags and good knitwear. They don't need to do anything else. But they should stop trying to be ultra cool – this is a mistake so many houses make. Cool is a tiny market, and the venn diagram where cool intersects with money is even smaller.'
But if there is a year for Burberry to restore and reinvent their 'Cool Britannia' image, perhaps it is this, with the house's signature check rehabilitated and once again enjoying cult status on swimwear, streetwear and accessories, and a Nineties redux taking place in popular culture (Oasis reunion tour anyone?). Charlie Huggins, shares portfolio manager at high-net-worth investment service Wealth Club, says a turnaround can't come soon enough, describing the last financial year as an ' annus horribilis for Burberry.'
'Almost everything that could go wrong did,' Huggins says. And while he believes that the house's turnaround plan could tackle key issues, he cautions 'investors have seen several failed turnaround plans from Burberry in recent years. This one feels like a last chance saloon.'