Welcome to The Scoop, a weekly email series in which I ask fashion insiders to give me a piece of news they haven’t shared elsewhere.
This week’s guest is Guess Inc.’s chief new business development officer, Nicolai Marciano. Nicolai has officially worked for the company for 13 years, but as the son of co-founder Paul Marciano, that really means he started the job when he was zero.
After spending a few years at the company’s factories in Los Angeles, Asia, and North Africa, Nicolai made his first creative stamp at Guess when he led the brand’s A$AP Rocky collaboration.
It was the first time Guess worked together with what he calls “an opinion leader” to create products that celebrated the archive and a campaign focused on storytelling. All things Nicolai stands for, and that are at the core of the new Guess campaign, which he just gave me the scoop on.
Hi Nicolai, what’s the scoop?
Becky G will be the new ambassador for Guess’s B Jean. The campaign is coming out on October 13, and we’re excited because it’s a different format for us. Guess has been known for traditional film photography, still images, often black and white... This campaign is very looped into music, movement, and film, which feels in line with the spirit of Guess, but also organic for someone like Becky.
Why did you choose Becky G as your ambassador?
Guess has always defined what sexy looks like for each era, and today that means a woman who’s confident and in control of her own image. We feel that Becky really embodies that completely.
She is also from Los Angeles and is contributing to the Spanish-speaking music movement growing right now. We were one of the first brands to put a reggaeton artist on a global campaign with J Balvin in 2019.
We have worked with Camila Cabello, Jennifer Lopez... So this is familiar territory for us, and Becky was the perfect fit.
You said earlier that the format of the campaign is different. Did you have to tell a lot of people that black and white doesn’t work on social?
It has to be the right content for the right channel. We still believe in traditional advertising, especially outdoor billboard advertising — we are based in LA, and Sunset Boulevard is still Sunset Boulevard. But this is about adding a layer to the organization and the expression of the brand that wasn’t there before. It’s about introducing the brand to a younger audience and being where the customer is.
I just got back from Paris; before that, I was briefly in Milan, and the main thing I came back with is that the collections were commercial. I don’t know that they were all desirable.
However, we have seen that it is possible to create a commercial collection that also feels creative — take, for instance, Chanel or that one collection Dario Vitale did for Versace. I guess my question is, how do you make a commercial collection that is also exciting design-wise?
Is there a secret recipe?
It’s our job to create a product that inspires people; that should always be at the core of what we’re doing. It’s tough to compare what we do at Guess to a brand like Versace or Chanel in terms of our customer base or our product, but I’d say it’s about celebrating and evolving the codes that your brand is known for.
When you tap into that and evolve it with the right talent, the right casting, and the right product, that’s the magic. You also need to triangulate all the pieces — sometimes a collection will be stronger on the product side and maybe less so on the talent side.
But if you find synchronicity between all the components, that’s when I feel a collection is received best.
What’s the marketing strategy for that?
At Guess, we are taking more of a hero product strategy. Focusing our marketing on one bag or one pair of jeans gives us more control than trying to promote an entire collection. There’s just so much on everyone’s feeds and minds; we believe making a few products very famous will bring in the customer, and they will shop the rest of the brand.
What are the products that you’re focusing on?
Right now it’s the Allegra handbag, which came out a few weeks ago with [Irish influencer and reality star] Maura Higgins as the face of the campaign. And it will be the B jean we are about to launch with Becky.
Those are the two hero products that we are highlighting this season. It starts with the campaigns on a macro level, and then over time, you will start to see the bag and the jeans on influencers at a more local level.
There is no question fashion is cyclical, especially when it comes to jeans. The B Jean is a low-rise flare, exactly the silhouette I wore when I was 16. What’s next?
Well, we’re working on that now. I think next fall, you’ll see something skinnier. Something that feels closer to the realm of 2004 or 2005. The great thing about Guess is that we have such a rich archive, and each decade is truly different from the last. We’ve been making jeans for 45 years. So to be able to pull from our own history is a luxury we really celebrate.
I have an emotional connection to Guess because they were some of the first jeans I bought for myself. Who is your customer now?
Everyone today is going for a younger customer, but that’s very general. A big part of the work I’m doing for the company right now is going deep on the consumer in a way that we haven’t before.
I think you can only understand where your brand is and where it can go through market research. It’s a big focus for me, and I really want to lead from a data-driven standpoint.
I’d say over the next 12 months, this data work will give us the right sense of direction for the company’s next chapter.
Is that the brief: to create the next chapter for Guess?
I’ve been working here for the last 13 years studying the brand every day in every different scenario, whether that was at a product level in the factory or a board meeting. Now the brief is to shape the company’s future.
We’re in our fifth decade. What does the rest of the fifth decade and the sixth decade look like?
I do really feel that it should all be centered around the consumer, and that’s what will really determine where we’re going.
What’s the best way for commercial and creative teams to work together?
At the end of the day, it has to be a great partnership. For business leaders, it’s about offering both teams the same lens.
Maybe the creative team has a more intuitive sense of what they should be creating. And maybe the commercial team is looking at a P&L and saying, “We need to be doing more of this.” But I think the throughline here is the consumer.
If you do consumer work, you can ground both teams in the same purpose, through the lens of the consumer.
Did you have any standouts from the SS27 shows?
Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann. Big fan.
Catch up with last week’s Scoop with Cyrus Veyssi here.