The Business: Andrea Panconesi
The chief executive of Florentine retail bohemoth Luisa Via Roma was an early adopter of e-tail and this year reported record profits of 130m euros. After partnering with Unicef to support its annual charity gala in Sardinia this summer, we caught up with Panconesi to find out his recipe for success…
I have no secrets, I’m an open book. I have nothing to hide in my business or my private life, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud to pay all my taxes because that allows me to concentrate on my work. You need to be able to sleep peacefully.
I have three children, and I try to teach by example. If you aren’t honorable in business, how can you tell your children to be good? I stopped driving a bike - which was my great love - because I don’t want my children to die on a motorbike. Example is what counts the most.
I learned a great deal from my late friend Joseph Ettedgui. He was a great man and I knew him right from when he started his business. We travelled all over the world together, we’d find these incredible Japanese brands; that was way before Japanese brands had been introduced to Italy. He had fantastic instinct.
You take greater care of something when it’s cost you a great deal of sacrifice. If everything is easy, you don’t have the same level of care and investment. If it’s cost you a lot of effort, a lot of fatigue, it’s more precious to you.
Fashion wasn’t that familiar to me when I started. I was much more attracted to girls than clothes. I stupidly thought that fashion would be easy - I thought I could run a shop and buy and sell clothes - but I didn’t know what I was getting into. Luckily now it’s my passion; it’s the most fascinating, dynamic industry.
I consider fashion the most extemporary form of art because it embraces change - it’s born, it grows and it dies every six months. You are photographing a moment, capturing a mood, and then you move on. I love contemporary art and architecture, yet fashion isn’t made for a museum, it’s made to be worn. But fashion designers are no less contemporary artists.
Fashion is fast, and the nature of it means that every six months you have to embark on a new adventure. That excites me, I’m not scared by that. You become eager to see where it will take you next.
People forget how much fashion contributes to the economy.And in the last 20 years, it’s changed completely thanks to e-commerce. The online world is fascinating because I love things I don’t know about. If I know everything about something, I get bored. I like something that’s new and experimental, something no-one has done before.
Twenty years ago, a friend of mine said he’d built me a website. He did it for free; I didn’t understand why he’d want to do it. It was for that reason that I jumped at the chance; here was something to learn about.
I tell my employees to be inventive. When I ask someone ‘“why did you do this this way?” the easy answer is to reply that that’s how it’s always been done. How boring is that? Don’t you get bored doing the same thing day after day? I like people who try to do things differently. You might make a mistake, but you learn and get better.
I do worry that the digital world is modifying our behaviour. In the beginning, social networks had the potential to broaden the mind, but I’ve realised there’s something wrong in how we use them now. It’s changed the younger generation’s mentality and how they relate to each other.
I love travelling, and I always will; seeing the world, meeting people, having adventures. You need to appreciate what you do. If you wake up, open the window, see a beautiful sky, you can be glad, but you also need to appreciate the rainy days too.
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