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Benetton appoints former Ferragamo CFO Ugo Giorcelli to management
Italian fashion group Benetton continues to reshape its top management team, and has appointed as its general staff manager Ugo Giorcelli, Ferragamo’s former CFO. Giorcelli resigned from his position at Ferragamo on December 13 and will start at Benetton by March 2019.
At Benetton, Giorcelli will oversee a series of administrative departments, from finance and accounting to IT, HR and organisation, centralised purchasing and general services.
Giorcelli has a degree in economics and an MBA from Milan’s Cattolica University. He was SVP of finance for US group Danka and CFO of Spanish company Service Point Solutions. Before starting with Ferragamo, he spent over 10 years as CFO of Italian hearing aid retailer Amplifon.
Following Giorcelli’s arrival, Sandro Saccardi, until now the CFO of Benetton Group, will take on a new position at Edizione, the Benetton family’s holding company, which controls 100% of the Italian fashion group.
Benetton was founded in 1965 by the four Benetton brothers - two of whom, Gilberto and Carlo, recently passed away - and is engaged in an all-out effort to regain market share. Earlier in the year, Luciano Benetton, one of the group’s co-founders, who handed over the reins to his son Alessandro in 2012, took back control of the group, and called up renowned photographer Oliviero Toscani, whose name is associated with Benetton’s most famous advertising campaigns. The leadership team is completed by French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, 68, the new creative director of Benetton’s menswear and womenswear lines.
The Italian group is resorting to some of its former greats to get back on the growth track, after losing much ground in the last decade, hit by the Italian economy’s weakness and an increasingly challenging market, now dominated by multinational fast-fashion groups. Benetton’s sales have plunged by 35% since 2011, falling from €2 billion to 1.28 billion in 2017, while the brand lost 1,500 stores, and is now available at 5,000 retailers worldwide.
Benetton’s relaunch should begin to bear fruit from the Spring/Summer 2019, and was given a major boost by Edizione itself, with a share capital increase of about €100 million, to shore up the group after its record €180 million loss in the 2017 financial year.
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