Can Stone Island Scale Without Losing Its Spirit?

Times have been tough for high-end fashion brands, and Stone Island is no exception. The Italian label, known for its garment-dyed knits, technical outerwear, and longstanding links to hardcore football fans, reported nine-month sales down 5 percent in 2024 (full-year figures are due in February).

But chief executive Robert Triefus is feeling buoyant. Retail and direct e-commerce sales, the brand’s strategic focus since being acquired by the Moncler group in late 2020, were up 27 percent in the first nine months of last year. Falling revenues can be attributed to turbulence in the wholesale market, which exacerbated the planned-for hit from phasing out many accounts, Triefus said.

“Wholesale is now a smaller, more controlled reality. We are rightsizing our footprint; identifying the partners we want to carry forward and creating a framework to make sure we’re very unified in the way the brand shows up,” Triefus added. “What the industry is looking for now is to see if, as we reduce our reliance on wholesale, we are able to compensate for that through our DTC network… We are effectively doing that.”

Triefus, who joined Stone Island in June 2023 after leading Gucci’s marketing function, has been charged with leading the outerwear firm through a period of transformation. The 40-year-old brand, which has long been prized by subcultural tribes from football fanatics to denizens of the Paris grime scene, was acquired by Moncler Group in 2020.

In its first steps to scale the brand, the group has embarked on a global advertising blitz and a push to tighten distribution. Stone Island also diversified its offer, introducing a “Ghost” line with more discreet tonal logos and a “Stellina” performance outerwear range.

Expanded Flagships

Triefus spoke to BoF ahead of the January 22 opening of Stone Island’s new Paris flagship: a two-story, 200-square-meter hub on Rue Saint Honoré. The store is just a couple of blocks from its previous location but more immediately adjacent to luxury names including Goyard, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci (which is currently building a super-store on the street), and big enough to house a new store concept from Rem Koolhaas’ OMA studio, which the brand has already deployed in locations including Chicago and Munich since 2022.

Now Stone Island and OMA are switching their focus to redesigning and expanding stores in key fashion capitals — what Triefus calls “lighthouse cities” — using the new format, which echoes the brand’s authority in fabric and garment dyeing innovation by outfitting stores with stainless steel and cutting-edge materials like burnt cork, sand-sprayed finishes, and compressed soil. There are also screens for showcasing the brand’s storytelling videos, display cases for its most innovative and eye-catching garments, and gathering spaces for hosting customers.

The Paris opening follows the roll-out of an expanded (now directly-operated) corner in London’s Harrods department store, with Milan, New York, and Tokyo next on the list.

“Our objective at the moment is not to open lots of new stores,” Triefus said. “It’s to take our existing network of 92 stores and progressively introduce this new concept, progressively improve the performance of those existing stores.”

Since the Moncler acquisition, Stone Island has also phased out third-party distribution deals in markets including Korea, Japan, and China, as well as taking over its e-commerce operations (they were previously operated as a white-label service from Yoox Net-a-Porter). “We’re able now to benefit from local warehouses, which is allowing us to offer omnichannel services we couldn’t before,” Triefus said.

Of Stone Island’s roughly €400 million business, the share of retail and direct e-commerce reached nearly 50 percent in 2024, up from less than a third at the time of the Moncler acquisition.

Marketing Push

Since Triefus joined the brand in 2023, its retail expansion has been accompanied by a global advertising blitz, with outdoor campaigns plastering billboards and buildings as well as the pages of influential men’s magazines. The brand now spends roughly 7 percent of sales on marketing.

Triefus, who was previously Gucci’s marketing and communications boss for over 15 years, has had to strike the right tone in order to fuel greater, more consistent visibility without disrupting the community-driven momentum the brand has long enjoyed: the customer tribes who wear Stone Island’s compass motif as a badge of honor — from Milan’s MTV-era spendthrift “paninari” in the 1980s, to football hooligans in the UK to American hip-hop fans during peak Drake — have all cultivated a counter-cultural allure for the brand.

“This brand has an uncanny way of being adopted by culture, and subcultures really,” Triefus said. The Rivetti family, Stone Island’s former owners who retain a significant stake in the company, “were extremely cautious about marketing to the community. They wanted their storytelling to always be authentic, always based on the founding vision of [designer] Massimo Osti, which was absolutely product-centric.”

The brand’s first celebrity campaigns — lensed by David Sims and fronted by actor Jason Statham, musician Liam Gallagher, basketball pro Jalen Green, and DJ Peggy Gou (the brand’s first woman ambassador) — are the result of a lengthy effort “to understand who were the members of the community that could be most effective and authentic in allowing the credentials of the brand to be more visible,” Triefus says.

Triefus says he sought out profiles who already wore and knew the brand well — and could be credible for its core community while reaching a larger audience, which will be key to making sure the program of expanded stores and collections pays off. Stone Island has historically depended on a cluster of hardcore fans who buy heavily into the brand’s technical offer on the one hand, with young, aspirational shoppers who buy sweatshirts, tees, and other merch driving the rest of sales.

Triefus sees a big opportunity for the brand in filling in some other niches: more mature (usually higher-earning) individuals looking for distinctive pieces to fill out their wardrobes; shoppers who discover the brand later in life; women. Women account for 20 percent of sales, with roughly half of those purchases made for themselves, according to the brand’s market research, despite not having any dedicated womenswear offer. “These are women who are confident, a little rebellious, going somewhere in their life,” Triefus said, who has dubbed them “pioneers” among the brand’s client base.

‘Playing’ With Luxury

Luxury brands are expected to face another sluggish year in 2025, with sales growing by a low-single-digit percentage according to BoF and McKinsey’s recent State of Luxury report.

HSBC analysts expect Stone Island to return to topline growth this year, with sales rising 5.5 percent, and accelerate to 9.5 percent growth in 2026.

Triefus feels Stone Island is positioned at a promising niche. “Consumers have become very focused on the value and price proposition, and are drawn to long-lasting functionality,” Triefus said.

Stone Island is also a brand that “plays with luxury,” Triefus said, while continuing to offer plenty of more accessible options. The brand’s compass-patch sweatshirts are priced €225; while its garment-dyed puffers cost €1,200.

Going forward, the brand plans to be cautious about raising prices overall while stretching the top end of its offer — targeting luxury shoppers with more exclusive innovations like a €4,000 ripstop leather bomber, or a €2,300 silver parka coated in aluminum nano-particles.

It’s a strategy Harrods’ buying director Simon Longland says is working. “The brand remains super consistent amid this steady elevation,” Longland said. “Outerwear is our biggest category for men; skiwear and technical outerwear in particular is dynamic… When you add these pieces that are more special, more limited, our customer really responds to that.”

Yet the risk that growing sales in the luxury space could alienate longtime customers still looms.

The solution, for Triefus, lies in backing up the brand’s marketing with real research and product innovation. “Everything that we do will always be rooted in a judgment about its authenticity and the respect we have for the values of the brand, those values that are expressed in the product,” he said. “It’s about doubling down on commitment to material research innovation, but also to the community, to be true to our founding principles.”