Philipp Plein has been making waves since he entered the fashion world. His creations have always been loud, polarizing – and selling exceptionally well. Now Plein wants to expand his company and establish his brand in the watch and sports markets. And still without investors or bank loans.
It stands there almost provocatively, right in front of the entrance to the Philipp Plein headquarters in Lugano, Switzerland: a flashy Mercedes. If there are any doubts about who the car might belong to, these will be resolved at the latest in the owner’s office. There, the eye quickly notices the many unusual decorative pieces, such as the two-meter-tall Transformer statue behind the desk. Philipp Plein himself no longer notices his own furnishings; When we enter, he is busy with an employee — and even during our conversation, employees keep coming into the CEO’s office and need his attention. The German answers their questions sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian, but always briefly and succinctly. Only when his partner comes to visit him with his eleven-month-old baby is Plein less abrupt — the entrepreneur makes time for his family and continues the interview without further ado with the baby in his arms. Running a global company also requires a certain amount of multitasking ability.
Over the last 25 years, the Philipp Plein Group has developed into a global fashion empire. Founded in 1998, Plein’s business started with luxury dog beds and furniture, which he drove from trade fair to trade fair. However, he then happened to notice that you can make more money with fashion: “Most people buy a new table or armchair maybe every ten years – but a new handbag every year. People are prepared to spend thousands of euros on both,” says Plein. Today he sells furniture again under the brand named after him, but he has made a name for himself with his eye-catching fashion creations and fashion shows. And Plein is also quite successful financially: Forbes estimates Plein’s total assets at around €800 million.It’s hard to really classify Plein. Although there are many brands that operate in a similar price segment, these are mostly large companies that are generally no longer owner-managed.
The company behind the group, Cream della Cream Switzerland GmbH, achieved sales of €215 million in 2022, a full 50% of which came from online sales. With a margin of 25%, this corresponds to EBITDA of around €54 million. Forbes therefore values the company at around €600 million. And there is something else that sets Plein apart from many of his competitors: he built his company without investors and without a single bank loan — he only received €10,000 in start-up capital from his father. “I am one of the youngest in my industry. Giorgio Armani is 88 years old, Roberto Cavalli is 82, many of the most famous designers have already died. So at 45 years old, I have no time pressure,” says Plein.
The entrepreneur wants to use the time to expand into further luxury areas: This year he launched his first series of luxury watches and with Plein Sport he wants to storm the high-end sports segment. In the last three years, a new sports brand store opened on average every three and a half days; Plein wants to show a similar growth rate in the next few years.Plein expects growth of 25% for its fashion segment this year and at the same time wants to increase the margin to 30%, which would mean a profit of €80 million in 2023. If the growth actually continues in the next few years, Plein could equal competitors like Giorgio Armani, Miuccia Prada or Ralph Lauren with another feat: get a place on the Forbes Billionaires List. Can that work?
In 1998, when Plein was 20, the then law student began designing luxury dog beds. “The pet industry is very safe. Even in tough economic times, people want the best for their animals,” explains Plein. “I thought making luxury dog beds could be a good business idea. So the dog doesn’t sit on the €10,000 sofa, but has his own place.» He tried to sell his creations to pet companies for two years — in vain. But when Plein began presenting the dog beds at furniture fairs, success suddenly came. Soon he also produced other pieces of furniture and sold them at one trade fair after another. Since it is common practice in the furniture industry to require down payments, Plein was able to quickly build a profitable business with little start-up capital.Plein sold his first pieces of clothing almost by accident. To decorate clothes racks he designed, he hung leather vests decorated with Swarovski crystals on them. But the vests outsold the pieces of furniture they carried.
The bling of the Swarovski stones is still a trademark of Plein today — as is the skull, which was also found on the vests and still runs through the collections today. “Fashion was never my passion. “The whole thing somehow happened by itself,” says Plein today. He decided to follow the demand and enter the fashion industry, but initially only acted as a wholesaler at trade fairs. It was only in 2009 that he opened the first commercial Philipp Plein showroom in Milan, less than an hour and a half away from his current headquarters.Plein: “My strategy has always been to find a niche with each product. I knew that I couldn’t compete with the established players on the market, I had to be different. Even today, we are still the underdog in the industry.”
Nevertheless – or precisely because of this – the Philipp Plein brand now has a strong recognition value. In recent years, the company began licensing the brand as well; The cooperation with the watch manufacturer Timex led, among other things, to the start of the watch collection launched this year. This not only allows the company to reach new customers (more than 10,000 stores worldwide sell Plein’s products), it also brings in cheap money: over the next five years, Plein would like to generate €100 million in pre-tax profit from the licensing business alone.But Plein is not only conservative when it comes to building the company, he also doesn’t believe in loans in his private life. Plein pays everything out of his own pocket; According to his own statements, he even paid for his villa in Bel Air, which is estimated to be worth US$200 million, entirely from his own funds.
The business rationale behind it, says Plein, is that he would rather build solid, profitable relationships with his business partners over the years rather than make a quick buck. Although this conservative approach takes longer, Plein wants to take as little risk as possible with his business – after all, it is his “baby,” as he says. And he is quite proud of the organic growth: “It makes me safer than insurance,” says Plein as he puts his feet on the table.
Philipp Plein was born in Munich, but grew up in Nuremberg and later attended the Schloss Salem boarding school in southern Germany. He always knew that as an entrepreneur he wanted to be his own boss. When he found out that most of the CEOs of large companies in Germany were lawyers, he knew that he wanted to study law. Great success was his goal; However, it was not clear to him that he would achieve this through the fashion industry. But Plein consistently took advantage of every opportunity that came his way and ultimately ended up where he is today.
The idea for the dog beds also came to him by chance: “When we moved into a new house, my mother wanted to do all the interior design herself. She bought Burberry dog cushions for our dogs – the dogs destroyed them on the first day,” remembers Plein. “But she also didn’t want to buy regular dog baskets because they wouldn’t fit in with the rest of the furniture. That gave me the idea for the luxury dog beds.”When Plein entered the then quite classic luxury fashion industry in the early 2000s, his loud style clearly hit a nerve. The industry has since caught up, but Plein is already looking at the next step: he wants to break into the watch and sports markets. His designs stand out visually from other brands, as the new watch collections “Crypto King” and “Crypto Queen” clearly show.
The “Timemachines”, as they are called on the website, are produced in Switzerland, but the flashy design makes them stand out from the ranks of classic Swiss watches: They are large, eye-catching, heavy and decorated with Plein’s trademark – the skull . The price also stands out: the cheapest “Crypto King” model starts at €3,000, well below the starting price of other brands. “We have noticeably reduced margins in order to be able to offer an attractive price,” says Plein.Plein’s Brand Ambassador for Watches initially didn’t want to share the price of the new models, but Plein was very open about it. In general, the entrepreneur speaks relatively freely about numbers: “My industry is very closed, everyone keeps the numbers that are written a big secret,” says Plein. “I want to talk openly about our numbers. I have no secrets – and everyone hates me for it.”
The name of the collections shows another specialty of Plein: he firmly believes in the vision of decentralized technologies such as NFTs, the Metaverse and cryptocurrencies. “This is the future of the Internet,” he says. Each of the “Crypto King” and “Crypto Queen” watches comes with its own NFT, which buyers can add to their wallet (the name of the digital wallets in which NFTs or cryptocurrencies are stored) by scanning a QR code. It has been possible to pay with cryptocurrencies in Plein’s online shop since 2021; At the time, the company was one of the first major fashion houses to accept currencies such as Bitcoin.
Last year, Plein also opened a “Crypto Concept Store” at number 9 Old Bond Street in the heart of London – a Philipp Plein collection that “combines fashion, cryptocurrencies and the digital art of NFTs” is presented on three floors can be read on Plein’s website. With MoNA (Museum of NFT & Art), Plein has also founded an interactive online gallery and museum.But Plein also knows that the Metaverse (like online shopping in its early days) needs to be embraced by the masses before it can reach its full potential. The aim of these projects is therefore to make Plein’s fans aware of the Metaverse and its promises: «The Metaverse is without borders, open to everyone, it unites us and it drives human creativity,» said a robot at the Autumn/ Plein Sport winter fashion show.
In 2022, the first Metaverse Fashion Week took place on the Decentraland platform — Plein was one of the designers who presented their digital creations there. In its digital flagship store Plein Plaza, fans can already buy digital clothing items as NFTs and decorate their avatars with them. The Metaverse department store cost Plein a whopping $1.4 million; another sign that he is convinced of this trend. His most popular Metaverse product is a gold down jacket that sells with an ultraviolet backpack and a monster standing on a snowboard — for a whopping $17,610.
However, the next big project — and the one that the fashion designer talks about with the greatest passion — is not the crypto industry, but Plein Sport. “Plein Sport makes me feel like I’m 20 years old again,” says the fashion designer. “It feels like I’m at the very beginning, creating something completely new – only this time I have a lot more experience and capital.” The reason for the expansion is obvious: there’s a lot of money to be made in the sports industry. According to the market research company Research and Markets, the global luxury fashion industry generated around US$ 97 billion in sales in 2022 — while sportswear earned US$ 190 billion, almost twice as much.Plein wants a piece of that pie. He emphasizes several times that the luxury sports brand is separate from his other brands (in addition to Philipp Plein and Plein Sport, the designer also runs the haute couture brand Billionaire and Plein Golf). “Plein Sport carries none of my trademarks; no Swarovski skulls, no leather, no bling,” says the designer.
The stores of his main brand can only be found on the «high streets», for example on Wiener Graben or Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm — with Plein Sport, however, the entrepreneur relies on visibility; he uses the stores as marketing instruments as well as sales locations, which is why they are primarily in busy shopping centers and streets where rents are more affordable. This strategy also explains why Plein is able to open so many new stores even as retail is increasingly succumbing to the success of online shopping. Currently the sporting goods are still in the mid to high price segment (his latest shoe costs around €270), later Plein would like to use economies of scale and reduce prices.
But can the German fashion designer really break into the business of giants like Nike, Adidas and Co? “Of course not,” Plein replies pragmatically. “The most I can do is steal crumbs from these giants. But even if I steal just 0.05% of Nike’s sales, that’s $200 million. As in the fashion world, I’m the outsider here – and for an outsider, $200 million is a lot of money.”Two weeks after the interview with Forbes, Philipp Plein visits a furniture fair in Milan again. He shared with his fans on Instagram: “I’m really excited to be here. Anyone who knows me knows that designer furniture is one of my greatest passions.” The Milan furniture fair is the largest in the world, so Plein can be happy with his CV.
But a few days later he posted a video of himself and his team designing a new Plein Sport backpack and wrote: “We never sleep, we are always working.” Despite his great success, Plein still feels like an outsider always as an underdog — that’s part of his DNA. Whether at furniture fairs, in the fashion world or in sportswear, Plein always had to and wanted to be different: “I am a small fish who fights against billion-dollar monsters.”
