When Patrice Louvet first stepped into Ralph Lauren Corp. as president and chief executive officer in July 2017, the company was in a delicate spot.
The brand had long been at the vanguard of American fashion, but the business underneath was relying on outlet sales and price promotions. Changes were under way, but the company's first effort at bringing in an outside CEO was cut short after just 18 months.
Louvet, a mild-mannered veteran of Procter & Gamble Co., had a balancing act on his hands. He needed to both be in sync with the founder and designer -- an iconic figure who still serves as executive chairman and chief creative officer -- and in charge of the transformation the company needed.
How did he do it?
"Very thoughtfully," said Louvet during an interview in his Madison Avenue office.
"Ralph and I spent a lot of time together before we both signed on the dotted line," the CEO said. "We wanted to make sure we had the same vision for the company. We valued the same things.
"We learned that we were both Libras. So that was a reassuring data point. Libras play well together," he joked.
At least, they can play well together.
According to Cosmopolitan: "For a Libra-Libra couple, the relationship can go either way. Either they bring out the best in each other and become a charming, stylish power couple...or they bring out the worst in each other."
Louvet, who turned 61 in September, and Lauren, who hit 86 this month, turned out to be the ultimate corporate power duo, methodically strengthening both the brand and the business over the past eight years.
In fiscal 2025, revenues increased 7 percent to $7.1 billion while adjusted operating income hit $990 million with a 14 percent margin, an increase of 150 basis points from the prior year.
's stock has risen 350 percent on Louvet's watch -- well ahead of the 170 percent increase seen in the S&P 500 -- leaving the company's market capitalization at an all-time high of $20 billion.
Louvet has pushed the brand to reach higher and average unit retail prices have increased 107 percent after 33 straight quarters of gains as the company leaned in on premium and tailored its offering.
For grabbing the pony's reins, calming its nerves and building a business profile to match its brand profile, Louvet is taking home this year's WWD Edward Nardoza Honor for CEO Creative Leadership at the WWD Honors gala.
The honor recognizes leadership skills that Louvet has spent a lifetime honing and has sharpened further at Ralph Lauren.
Part of that is his work with Lauren himself.
"Very early on I spent time with Ralph in Telluride," Louvet said. "I go there every summer to think, enjoy Colorado and drive his cars. And he drives on the way out and I drive on the way back. A different car every time. Every time. He brings about 10 different cars from his collection. [Lauren has one of the largest vintage car collections in the world.]
"My favorite is the McLaren P1," said Louvet, adding that Lauren has one in yellow and another in silver, "as people do."
In between all that high-powered driving -- the F1's top speed is 217 mph -- Louvet said he and Lauren "reflected a lot on what business are we in."
"We concluded that we were in the dreams business, not in the apparel business, not in the fashion business," the CEO said. "We're in the dreams business, more akin to Disney than to traditional fashion or apparel brands. That really gave us a launching pad for this journey."
In 2015 and 2016, Louvet said the brand was not connecting with younger consumers and that the company had "kind of lost its confidence."
"If you're in the dreams business, what are you doing as a brand on heavy promotion in off-price? If you're in the dreams business, why is your quality of product deteriorating? If you're in the dreams business, why is the consumer experience in your stores actually not that great?" Louvet said.
But before Louvet spoke, he listened, something the executive really learned to do when P&G sent him to Asia in 2002 to run hair care and health care as a general manager for Japan and South Korea.
"There's a great quote that I use all the time with the teams around, 'We have two ears and one mouth,'" he said. "There's a technical reason for that. So I applied that to myself coming into this company.
"You've seen a lot of people come from other companies and say, well, here's the game plan. I know how to do this. I've done this before. We're just going to run through this series of actions," he said. "That generally doesn't work out."
Louvet instead chose to come in very intentionally.
"On my first meeting, on my first day, I wanted to signal that everybody mattered in this company," he said. "So my first meeting was not with Ralph, was not with my leadership team, it was actually with the executive assistants in the building."
Twice -- once at P&G and a decade later at Ralph Lauren -- independent analyses of Louvet's leadership style described him as, "A Transformation Architect."
"It resonated with me because my family includes generations of well-renowned architects," Louvet said. "Architecture is often regarded as the highest union of art and science -- imagination with structure, beauty with discipline. I suppose those values carried through the generations, because that's exactly how I think about brand leadership."
The CEO's great-great-grandfather Louis-Victor Louvet was a Paris-trained Beaux-Arts architect who served as Charles Garnier's principal deputy on the Palais Garnier opera project. And his son, Louis-Albert Louvet, was one of three lead architects of the Grand Palais in Paris.
If that puts Louvet's architect roots in the 19th century, his approach to being in charge is significantly more modern.
"I believe in servant leadership," Louvet said. "So my style is not to take a document, throw it back at you and say, 'This is really horrible.' I don't work that way. That's 20th-century leadership."
Even his imitation of 20th-century leadership lacks a certain verve. It's just not who he is.
"I believe in 21st-century leadership, which is, 'OK, my job is to set you up for success,'" Louvet said. "I've experienced 20th-century leadership, when I worked at Procter & Gamble in the beginning in France. It doesn't work today. Gen Z, they don't respond to that kind of management. They're like, 'If this is how you're going to lead this company, then I'll go work somewhere else.'"
P&G -- where many of Louvet's luxury CEO peers have also gotten their starts -- figures prominently in his development as a leader.
"Very early I became a brand manager on Pampers. I think I was 30," Louvet said. "Pampers at the time in France was close to a billion dollars -- it's a complicated business. So you learn to manage complexity early. You need a plan to manage complexity. You learn to focus on what really matters. Remove the noise, focus on what really matters, focus on outcomes, not activity."
Louvet recalled one of his first bosses at P&G telling him: "'You're like a duck. On the surface you're gliding. It looks very elegant and calm. And then I know below the surface you're paddling like crazy.' And it's true. I mean, it's not easy. I work pretty hard. I take this very seriously."
During his nearly 30-year stint at P&G, Louvet rose to become group president of the global beauty business, which drove $11.5 billion in revenues across 12 brands annually.
Louvet is used to running big businesses and managing everything that comes along with that.
"I don't think it's helpful for me to come into a meeting super stressed and for the team to feel it," Louvet said. "If my boss comes in super stressed, I'm like, 'Well, should I have confidence in him or her?' It just doesn't create the right atmosphere to get the best out of people.
"Keeping my stress to myself is probably the most effective way to do it," he said. "Now, the downside of that is sometimes people go, 'Well, it's hard to tell what you're thinking.' That's part of my journey to be more expressive. And then as people get to know me better, they also know that when I flinch, something bad's about to happen."
But Louvet is too calm to flinch too often.
"I'm a big believer in managing energy," he said. "We are corporate athletes and everything that applies to professional sports actually is very relevant for us. Except -- take tennis. You don't play a match every other day. You play every day [as a corporate athlete]. Your match is not three hours, your match is probably 10 hours. Your career is not 15 years, it's likely 30 years, etc., etc., etc.
"The whole premise for athletes is how do they manage their energy and how do they have the right energy at the right time?" Louvet said. "I actually believe life is about managing your energy, not managing your time. There's physical energy, emotional energy, psychological energy."
Louvet, an avid cyclist, is a self-described weekend warrior when it comes to exercise, so has what looks like a mini treadmill that he can walk on while at his standing desk.
"Chip [Bergh, former Levi Strauss & Co. chief and another P&G vet] was always a good inspiration for me," Louvet said. "I saw what he did at Gillette before I took over from him and he would take a two-hour or an hour-and-a-half break over lunch [to] work out."
Of course, there have been times when Louvet's stress management has been tested.
"Probably the toughest thing I've had to do in this job is to furlough about 80 percent of the organization" during the pandemic, he said. "There's a big risk when you do that, that you lose that entire organization and that even when you call them back, they're like,' 'you know what? We don't want to work here anymore because the values of this company, the way you treated us.'"
Team Ralph turned back up and carried on.
But Louvet came out of the pandemic a different leader.
"You're operating in a lot of uncertainty with decisions that impact people's lives, literally and livelihoods. So I think I've come out of that as a stronger decision-maker. Better decisions. I think greater confidence in making these types of game-changing decisions where you have a lot of different points of views. We could have waited until the government said, 'You've got to close down your stores.' We closed our stores before that."
Louvet also sharpened his focus further during the pandemic.
"There was a lot of noise during COVID and lots of points of view, just like there was a lot of noise when [President Trump's] tariffs started," he said. "This industry just has a lot of noise. The ability to just laser-focus on these are the three or four meaningful things -- don't get distracted by the noise. Just run your play. Run what you believe in."
At Ralph Lauren, where "timeless style" is a mantra, those beliefs have stayed constant.
"Part of the challenges you've seen in the industry for many other firms is they've kind of lost sense of who they are," Louvet said. "You bring back the designer and he or she probably wouldn't recognize many of these companies. So I think just continue to bring Ralph's vision to life, continue to be true to the purpose that we have. Are we inspiring the dream of a better life for our employees, for our consumers, for our partners, for our different stakeholders?"
Louvet knows Ralph Lauren -- the company and the man. And along the way, he's learned more about himself and grown.
"I'm much more of a dreamer now than I was when I arrived here," Louvet said. "Ralph has also been a wonderful partner in defining what really is important and what we need to stick to.
"We found, I think, a good balance of magic and logic together, which as you know in this industry is critical," he said. "Part of our success and sustained success is because we're striking this balance. There was a risk with me coming in that we would over-index on logic, and this doesn't work in this industry. Now if you over-index on magic and you don't have the operational discipline, the strategic focus, that doesn't work either or it doesn't work at scale."
Ralph Lauren works because it has both that magic and that logic, the Lauren vision of design and the Louvet vision of management.