A family-controlled European group uses innovation, automation, and clever branding to rush its clothes to demanding young customers via stores on every high street and in every shopping mall worldwide.
This could be a description of the modern champions of fast fashion: Zara, owned by Inditex of Spain, or Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz. But 25 years ago, this was Benetton, a company my fashion-conscious teenage daughter has not heard of.
One of my first assignments as the FT’s Milan correspondent in 1994 was to interview lion-maned Luciano Benetton, oldest of the four siblings who created the business in 1955, in its elegant 16th century villa-headquarters near Treviso. From there, he oversaw multiple factories and 7,000 shops in 110 countries.