As Hugo Boss works through a year of falling sales and changes to its distribution strategy, CFO and COO Yves Müller is leaving the German fashion company. Ivica Maric, who is currently its executive vice president of business operations and has spent 21 years at Hugo Boss, will take over both roles on Oct. 1.
In its announcement Monday, Hugo Boss said Müller stepped down from the managing board at his own request and was leaving for personal reasons. The company gave no further explanation.
During nearly nine years at Hugo Boss, Müller’s responsibilities extended beyond finance. He joined as CFO in December 2017 and added the COO title in May 2022, taking responsibility for IT, logistics, production, procurement and purchasing. From July 2020 to May 2021, he also served as spokesperson for the managing board.
Maric has followed a similar path across finance and operations within the company. After holding leadership roles in controlling and accounting, he became senior vice president of controlling in 2012 and took responsibility for business operations in 2022. Supervisory board chairman Michael Murray pointed to Maric’s work on digitalization and efficiency projects in announcing the appointment.
The turnaround Maric inherits
Under a strategy introduced in December called “Claim 5 Touchdown”, Hugo Boss is trying to generate more profit and cash from its business even as sales decline. The plan follows an earlier period of rapid expansion and calls for a more selective approach to products and distribution through 2028. As Marketing Week reported in August, the company has also focused its marketing spending on campaigns intended to strengthen its brands and support sales at full price.
Evidence of the sales pressure appeared in the first quarter, when currency-adjusted revenue fell 6%. Sales at the Hugo brand dropped 21%, while wholesale revenue declined 10% as the company narrowed assortments and became more selective about retail partners, Vogue Business reported in May.
By the second quarter, currency-adjusted sales were down 9% to €905 million. Earnings before interest and taxes fell to €59 million from €81 million a year earlier, though the result beat the €52 million average analyst forecast in a company-provided poll, according to Reuters. Hugo Boss also widened its gross margin by 200 basis points to 64.9% and reduced inventory by 15% from a year earlier.
For the full year, Hugo Boss expects currency-adjusted sales to fall by a mid-to-high-single-digit percentage and operating profit to land between €300 million and €350 million.
The company is targeting a return to profitable growth in 2027, through goals Müller helped set. In December, he described the anticipated sales decline as temporary while laying out plans to improve efficiency and cash generation. “2026 will be a year of consolidation and realignment and an important step toward positioning Hugo Boss for long-term profitable growth,” he said.
His departure also follows a change in Hugo Boss’s ownership and board leadership. Frasers Group, a gargantuan retail holding company, held almost half of the company’s shares and voting rights after its takeover offer concluded in August. Murray, who is also Frasers’ CEO, became Hugo Boss’s supervisory board chairman this month. Hugo Boss has not connected either development to Müller’s departure.
The company, founded in 1924 by Hugo Ferdinand Boss, is going through unprecedented sales and ownership shifts since it became the behemoth it is now. Early on, the company got a substantial footing in retail production by manufacturing military uniforms for the German armed forces and the Waffen-SS during World War II. Its factory used 140 forced laborers and, for a shorter period, 40 French prisoners of war, according to a historical study published by Hugo Boss.
The company’s later rise as an international fashion business came after the war, through men’s suits and the Boss brand it is known for today.
