The challenge

To introduce a leadership mindset, behaviours, commercial and operational understanding to high-potential sales associates, enabling them to develop their skills and fulfil their career potential. By investing in their best people, Ralph Lauren was looking to nurture and retain internal talent, strengthen their management capabilities and continue to drive business performance and outperform the competition.

“To grow a company, it takes more talent, it takes more care, and it takes more professionalism. It’s a constant development. You have to have people who want to keep learning, keep improving, keep succeeding. I have those people.” Ralph Lauren

The outcome

With the pilot year completed, the course is now being rolled out across EMEA, and has been recognised across the business for its invaluable and inspiring content, unprecedented support and quality of materials. Meanwhile, the Ralph Lauren business continues to go from strength-to-strength, with FY25 results showing strong revenue growth of 11% to $2.2billion with 1.5million new direct-to-consumer customers, strengthening its luxury positioning in Europe.

Our solution

We developed a 12-month development programme for c. 15 high-potential sales associates per year across EMEA. The programme aimed to give participants insights into goals and tasks of a Department Manager.

The course covers five core areas: The Role of a Leader, People Leader, Commercial Performance, Customer Experience and Retail Operations. Over the year participants learn and explore about everything from psychological safety, belonging and motivating team performance, to how to elevate the customer experience and understand and influence the commercial numbers.

We developed a blended learning programme which mixed training (through workshops, elearnings, 1-1 sessions) with on-the-job activities (demos, shadowing) and exclusive experiences (attendance at key events, access to senior leaders, exclusive previews and insights).

We created supporting materials including interactive session decks, animations, and ‘Try it’ activities as well as detailed participant and manager’s guides which encouraged further reflection and reinforced the learning for those taking part. In an ideal reinforcement opportunity, the manager’s guide also reminded existing leaders (mentoring their participant) of the skills, mindset and behaviours expected of them.