CASTRETTE DI VILLORBA, Italy — Luciano Benetton is back in full force, and he knows what he wants.
“We are confident, we are working and we know the turnaround won’t be fast, but we hope we will reach that level that we deserve,” said the entrepreneur, 82, in a rare public appearance on Friday. “I am back as representative of the family, flanked by good managers, but the time of the managers is over.”
Although the former chairman of the family-owned group retired in April 2012 and no longer has any operative role, he has decided to take matters into his own hands and has become newly involved in United Colors of Benetton after years of declining sales. Revenues fell 15.4 percent to 1.37 billion euros in 2016, from 1.62 billion euros in 2014.
The entrepreneur is behind Oliviero Toscani’s own return to the group and, on Friday, Benetton showed his support to the photographer by attending the official launch of the new course of Fabrica, the think tank created by the latter in 1994. The two men famously collaborated for years on controversial ad campaigns in the Eighties and Nineties, and Toscani photographed a new communication campaign for the brand that bowed in December,
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