You've had a long career at McKinsey & Company and you set out on another path in 2024-what were some of your greatest takeaways from that experience and why was it the right time for a change?

I deeply enjoyed my journey at McKinsey & Company because I started as a generalist but found an unexpected passion for fashion and helped to build McKinsey’s apparel, fashion and luxury practice. But after 24 years with the firm, I also felt I wanted to focus on certain elements, like following my passion for research and thought leadership. I started with the State of Fashion report with Business of Fashion and I’ve written more than 40 white papers, but I wanted to do more in-depth research. More and more, I also enjoyed advising senior decision makers more than running and overseeing projects and large transformations.

When I turned 50, I thought, I could stay on for another 10 years with McKinsey, but I could also make the attempt of being more consequential on what I really wanted to do. And after a long process, I concluded I could do that. And that process resulted in me founding FashionSIGHTS.

Tell us about FashionSIGHTS and your vision for it.

FashionSIGHTS is a corporate think tank—not a consulting firm—that is deeply rooted in research and deep experience and industry expertise that allows us to provide insights on fashion and luxury and, hopefully, helps contribute to a better understanding of what the future of fashion is.

So, from this vantage point, what is the future of fashion?

To answer that question, it's important to understand where we are and where we’re coming from. In the 20+ years I spent working in the industry and advising senior executives, I've seen a prosperous, highly profitable and adaptive industry that was obviously facing one or the other challenge, like consumption fatigue, but was still growing quite massively. I've seen “small” businesses that had $1 billion in sales that are now seeing $20-, $30-, $50 billion in sales.

So, we've seen a massive growth, amazing success stories, incredible fortunes that have been created. But interestingly enough, if you read the news or talk to people in the industry, you very often get the story how difficult everything is and how much the industry is struggling. And yes, that has happened, but from a 10,000-meter view, the industry is doing much better than one would think, and it's much more profitable and successful than other industries, like grocery, for example.

Volatility has no doubt increased, and we see a significant saturation in the big Western markets, which will not provide the levels of growth the industry is looking for. As a consequence, I think the next five to 10 years will be challenging, will require a high level of resilience, and will require different levels of innovation to cope.

Still, I’m generally quite positive about the fashion and luxury industries because I believe people will continue to have the desire to express themselves through fashion, and there is a massive market for want-based purchases, not just need-based purchases.

What makes FashionSIGHTS distinct from what's already in the market?

We do for a living what classical consulting firms are not focusing on and are not paid for: We do research, we do thought leadership based on that research and we provide independent advisory over a longer term, not just project based.

What we do not do is classical trend forecasting. The insights engine we're currently building starts, of course, with the mega trends and the discontinuities that have shaped or impacted the fashion industry in the last decades. But we go deeper and try to understand the underlying economic industry and consumer drivers that really shaped it.

Fast fashion, for example, was enabled by sourcing deflation and the appearance and success of MTV and later social media. So, fast fashion is not a trend, fast fashion is an outcome of the different drivers and the business innovation that have happened. Luxury moving out of its niche and growing to today's size—with an incredible value creation for the industry, but also for business—is the result of a growing middle class, a growing hedonism in the Western world, but also the willingness of larger groups of people to, as one of my industry friends calls it, reward themselves for achievements.

We don't try to look at the phenomenon as such. We try to understand what enabled it and what was driving it. Because we believe that’s the only way to predict where things are heading.

How will you use all of this knowledge and information to better understand where things are heading?

We're focusing on four different areas: thought leadership, advisory, investments and community. We want to contribute to the discourse of the industry with our thought leadership, we want to provide the facts and figures. We want to help and shape the discussion and, in that way, support the industry to prepare for the future and to make the best and most informed choices.

We also do targeted advisory for senior decision makers, heads of strategy and chiefs of staff, as well as future decision makers in fashion, to support not only the short term but also the mid- to long-term difficult choices they need to make. That is not classic consulting. It's not the classic strategy project with a team of three for three months. But it is the factual underpinning to discuss strategy and think through the choices at hand. We are sparring partners for top management.

We've also started to engage with promising startups and scale ups at the crossroads of fashion and tech and, on that end, we are excited to build a relationship where we can help over longer periods with our deep understanding of the industry and where it is potentially heading, as well as an industry network we've developed to support those innovations and the positive changes they could bring. We want to be partners that support a part of the journey: from seed to VC, from VC to PE or from PE to exit. In order to do that, we are happy to take equity and invest ourselves with partners.

Lastly, we want to build a community that we can engage with, from followers on LinkedIn to participants in events we’ll host or support, and with our two newsletters that will focus on CEOs and boards on the one side, and heads of strategy and chiefs of staff on the other.

We can provide a unique perspective because, in addition to my team’s exceptional research competence, I have provided more than 20 years worth of advice to some of fashion and luxury’s leading institutions, to entrepreneurs, to boards, and I had the amazing privilege of looking behind the curtain and support clients on strategy questions as well as on big transformations. That will be complemented by the terrific network of friends in the industry and access we have to the board rooms. These views will also appear in a book we have in the works … (more on that below).

Now it would be great to learn a bit more about you—can you describe your greatest inspirations in three words?

People who find their passion and have the energy to shape things are my real inspiration. I’ve seen incredibly inspiring entrepreneurs in this industry who have built amazing businesses. I’ve seen families developing businesses over several generations. I’ve seen courageous CEOs turning businesses around. I’ve also seen that in consulting; some of my great mentors at McKinsey had that great combination of passion and what we call in German, Gestaltungswille, the will to shape and design.

Resilience would be the other word. Typically, it’s not easy to shape things, even if you are passionate, you need to dedicate time and effort and energy, you need to pull out all stops, you don’t accept no as an answer. And if you take all of these three things, that is what I’m really enjoying now in my new role,

At FashionSIGHTS, we are now acting in a very entrepreneurial way, we’re building it up from scratch, we’ve built the infrastructure, we’ve worked on a brand, we started to set up an insights engine and, in that sense, I think the new venture allows me to do all three things: to follow my passion, to shape business and, hopefully, to have a positive impact on the industry. And I’m sure I will need some resilience.

What's something you'd love to do more of?

Even after traveling the world—not quite all the seven seas—I still feel I’ve only seen small parts of the world out there and I’m still incredibly curious to see more. I hope FashionSIGHTS will enable me to get to many interesting places I haven’t been, but I also hope I can privately do more travel with my wife and kids in the years to come. Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia are on the list, we haven’t been to those places as a family.

What's something you learned recently that you really should have already known?

How much effort it takes to build the infrastucture for even a small company like FashionSIGHTS! But on a more personal note, I didn’t realize how much I learned from my father about carpentry. I recently did some carpentry work with my daughter, and it took me down memory lane. It reminded me of my younger days, helping my father with countless tasks around the house. Back then, I had no idea I was learning—but it turns out just having watched it back in the day was enough to get the job done now. Funny how those lessons stick with you.

What do you wish you had more time for?

I would love to read even more than what I do. While traveling the world as a consultant for 20+ years, I always thought it was the travel and the working hours keeping me back, and it probably was, but I still want to work on prioritizing that more.

The Last Chairlift by John Irving has been sitting on my night desk for a while now and I need to reread The Bling Dynasty: Why the Reign of Chinese Luxury Shoppers Has Only Just Begun by Erwan Rambourg, as I want to recapture the China luxury boom and how it all started.

Let's say it's five years from now: Where is FashionSIGHTS and what have you accomplished?

Five years from now we hope to have built a boutique insights and advisory business that is recognized for a deep understanding of the industry and where it is heading, and that has and is still supporting leading businesses in this industry, from discount to luxury, from Europe to the States to Asia, from manufacturers to retailers to investors.

By then we would also have published the book we are currently working on which has two core elements: One is the hindsight on how fashion and luxury have developed in the 15 years since the financial crisis, including a deep understanding of the drivers and patterns that have evolved from that development, and the second element is an outlook on the themes that will shape the next decade from 2025 to 2035.

In order to do that, we've run a lot of research, but I’ve also started interviewing many of the movers and shakers of the industry, like The New York Times fashion director and critic Vanessa Friedman, Vestiaire Collective CEO Maximilian Bittner, 3d Design CEO Eric Liu and some famously private owners of very successful family businesses. It’s an amazing privilege to spend time with these individuals and to reflect on how we got here, where everything is heading and to translate that into a book.

I think there is enormous interest in the short term but less focus on the mid-term and long-term outlook for the industry and what will impact it. That's why I think looking back 15 years and forward 10 is a very interesting proposition that doesn't exist at the moment. And it’s at the core of what FashionSIGHTS is doing, providing hindsight and foresight.