Cesare Castellotti: in Ho chi Minh

Italy. (www.hugoboss.com) Joined during a time of scrutiny, reversing Board opinion on the closure of production in Italy & Poland by transforming operations. • Reported to the Senior Vice President at HQ in Switzerland, Hugo Boss Ticino, contributing to achieve €300m P&L for the shoe/accessory business. • Led team of 400 in production (Italy & Offshore), stitching (Poland), product development, HR, quality, finance & warehousing. • Working alongside the SVP, shaped and executed a plan which saved the Company by identifying €multi-million cost efficiencies, transforming the production facility (140 staff), rightsizing the team to 105 and introducing a short work week during 2010 (under contract of solidarity law) which saved €300K labour costs.. • Analysed lines, scrutinising cost across all collections: Exited loss making lines, led price negotiations with offshore factories to meet target price/margin and introduced automatic cutting equipment which saved $250k in cutting dye with Y1 ROI. • Spearheaded product development in-house and with partners in China & India. developing all plans for product execution, resources, factory allocation, pricing and technical support for factories. • Leveraged contact network to produce an additional 50-60,000 pairs of shoes in-house for Bata, Baldinini & Bruno Magli. • Gained expert knowledge of cross-category footwear construction (men's/women's), materials, moulds, last, etc. • Managed with QA/QC team to keep rejections at an outstandingly low level of between 0.5-0.9% for 5 consecutive years. • Overall, increased annual revenues from €220m / -€6m EBIT loss to €300m by Y5 with a zero loss in 2012. During tenure enhanced margins from 8% to 34%.

Joined initially as Director of Footwear Development promoted in 02/2009 to assume additional responsibility for sourcing and QA. • Reported to the President based HQ in Belgium, and led a team of 400+ product development, sourcing and quality staff, based in business-critical sample rooms in Wenzhou, Xiamen & Dongguan. • Worked closely with the HQ design team ensuring seasonal product development cycles and samples met customer requirements across the larges production area of Cortina Shoe, delivering 25,000,000 shoes per year. • Oversaw sourcing teams, leading price negotiations (achieved +7% margins Y1 & +6.5% Y2), setting KPIs, SLAs and objectives to ensure the effective on-time delivery of high quality samples across all categories. • Undertook cost analysis for all Footwear Development, working closely with procurement to meet buying target prices. • Managed a Quality Assurance team of 76 across 4 production areas to ensure customer quality SLAs were met. • Developed an expert knowledge of technical elements of footwear, accessories construction, materials, costing, pattern making, mould engineering, last and various footwear Construction.