American Vintage CEO on training, recruitment, and global expansion

Intensifying its presence and asserting its position to better face competition from ready-to-wear giants is the mantra of French fashion brand American Vintage, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. This anniversary is marked by growth, an exception at a time when many brands in the sector are experiencing serious difficulties.

Building on this success (turnover of nearly 200 million euros in 2024), the company is increasing its store openings this year in the US, Hong Kong, China, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and France.

To better understand this success, FashionUnited spoke with its chief executive officer, Michaël Azoulay, on topics as diverse as the importance of training within the company, the role and evolution of the sales profession, the challenges facing American Vintage and its ambitions.

American Vintage has invested heavily in training. Where is brand today?

Michaël Azoulay: We have indeed developed our university called AMV Camp. We have placed many professions there that work primarily for retail, but not exclusively, as we also do B2B, although it remains mainly for our teams. We house a lot of things there: merchandising, product, sales, back office with all the upgrades and knowledge of all the tools we have, whether in-store or at head office. So, we have developed a range of digital tools that allow teams to have data applications and real-time knowledge about their business.

We have also included recruitment, legal and HR. Today, it's a large campus that serves commerce and customers. We also develop many masterclasses each week for different professions. We will try to train our teams more and more.

Brand now has more than 1,000 employees. In terms of recruitment, what are main challenges facing an international brand like American Vintage today?

Maintaining cohesion with a company that is growing, developing and structuring itself. Maintaining cohesion between the point of sale, the field, the head office, with the values of a family business that is not guided by a financial spirit and that does business at the same time. We must be extremely good at management, forecasting and development, but with a cool and demanding management style. This means maintaining kindness and high standards, and accepting the evolution of things between people coming in and going out, and not becoming a company with cliques. Maintaining authenticity. For the moment, we have always managed to do this, perhaps also because we have remained a very present family business. But it is true that when we develop, there are times when there is a little more tension, deadlines, urgency and system.

Job of sales advisor has evolved considerably. What is your view on this position?

For me, everything starts there. I started with that and will always be a fervent supporter of this profession, which must be revalued. I am 46 and when we were young, we learned everything when we worked in a shop: contact with people, with the product, gaining self-confidence, receiving. Over the years, it is true that it has become a little ‘outdated’. In general, working in a shop is not easy, people are more keen to be in offices, whereas the real business starts there.

It is important to us to rethink the shop of tomorrow, to rethink the teams that will be, and I hope already are, more informed teams. That's why we are pushing a lot on training, to make them aware that this experience, which starts with the shop, will free them, reveal them for their future. Indeed, you won't have to spend your whole life in a shop because it's tiring, but that's where it starts. Especially since we give them access to many tools and knowledge that prepare them for tomorrow, either to be able to manage shop networks, or to be integrated, depending on their sensitivity, into offices, or elsewhere.

The shop manager or salesperson of tomorrow, today, could be someone who has graduated from a few years of business school because the shop of tomorrow will be increasingly connected, increasingly focused on trade marketing, with teams that speak several languages, have access to information tools and therefore to knowledge. We will have customer relationship management (CRM), events, it's complete. With such a dynamic, we could even imagine taking much more pleasure in a shop than in an office. I think we need to try to change the vision of the job of salesperson or chief manager. But for that, we also need, in parallel, to have shops that may outsource delivery much more, free up space, free up flows in the shop to be more focused on customer experience, knowledge and management.

Several openings are planned in Europe, but also in China and the US. What are macro objectives you are aiming for with this densification?

Presence and visibility. It is with this development that we will try to sustain things. We are in a business where our competitors are ‘monsters’. We are in competition with groups like Inditex or Chinese groups who, very easily, have access to European consumers and beyond. For us to have access to the Chinese or American consumer, we have to see the planet as one country. This will allow us to give creative teams the opportunity to have larger playing fields and to continue to pursue creativity. We are in direct contact with the consumer and thanks to this we can afford to always push creativity with new products to test constantly, and then, depending on performance, to be able to develop them on a larger scale.

Retail and expansion are a bit like mountaineering. If you don't go up, you go down. There is an eternal movement. There is no break or stop in evolution. We are not in fast fashion, we are not in competition for novelty, but we are in the race and competition for development, in the race for creativity, for new materials, for the evolution of the product, for the evolution of the state of mind, because if you don't go up, you regress.

It is this state of mind of development that must be maintained and which is also a challenge. It is about always having a moving state of mind. This does not mean developing for the sake of developing, but it is in this way, with a very sporty state of mind, that we will be able to remain competitive.

You will soon be launching technical products dedicated to sport. How will brand differentiate itself in this already competitive segment?

We don't want to do it on a large scale with dedicated shops. We just want to create departments that will help us develop our lifestyle. We think it fits completely into the brand's universe because sport has always been very present in the company for over 15 years. Here, you have to have a very sporty state of mind on a daily basis. It's not for nothing that we have had a gym with coaches for 15 years, giving our employees the opportunity to train every day.

With this new line, we will go further into more technical products while bringing an AMV DNA, a more fashion touch, through the materials, colours, or prints, something that is not found in the large specialised brands that speak to a larger number of people because it is their core business. Our core business is knitwear and collections that evolve.