Hi, welcome back to Line Sheet. Thanks to everyone who came to yesterday’s Selling Sexy event at McNally Jackson (especially my old Lucky crew, Nattlesnakey and Jannooz). And thanks to Marisa Meltzer for running the show. I can’t believe the book is out. If you read it (or even a part of it, or even just the cover!), please send me your 60-second review.

It’s shaping up to be Succession week over here. (Look, we don’t make the rules.) Rachel “Rachel@puck.news” Strugatz is back with the real plan for Fabrizio Freda’s exit at Estée Lauder… and who’s next in line. I’ve also got updates regarding Stefano Cantino’s Gucci promotion, the future of Tomorrow (you know, the owner of A-Cold-Wall, Loverboy, and others), and some color on what’s really happening over at BDG, whose chief content officer, Emma Rosenblum, just split.

🚨🚨 Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, we’re releasing a super-duper bonus episode—an audio excerpt of Selling Sexy. I hope you enjoy it. Subscribe here and here.

Mentioned in this issue: Estée Lauder, Fabrizio Freda, Gucci, Stefano Cantino, BDG, Emma Rosenblum, François-Henri Pinault, Kering, Sabato De Sarno, Bryan Goldberg, Nylon, W magazine, Tomorrow, A-Cold-Wall, Jane Lauder, Stéphane de La Faverie, and many more…

• On Stefano Cantino’s promotion: We’re not surprised, right? Yesterday, Kering announced that Gucci deputy C.E.O. Stefano Cantino was going to become the real C.E.O., replacing Jean-François Palus, a bean counter and longtime confidant of C.E.O. and chairman François-Henri Pinault. The changeover will take place in January.

  This was always the plan. Kering’s succession strategy is simple, but Gucci’s reporting structure was tricky. So consider this the final step in an overall streamlining process that began with Palus’s appointment. (He’ll now likely be absorbed back into the greater organization—previously, his title was group managing director—although I haven’t confirmed that.)

  With Cantino in charge, Kering deputy C.E.O. Francesca Bellettini gets a partner she knows well (they worked together at Prada) with an innate understanding of Italian culture and appreciation for what it takes to run a $20 billion-plus machine. (Previously, Cantino led marketing and comms at Louis Vuitton). But is this enough to turn around a business that is shrinking—Gucci’s revenue will drop this year—and reorient it toward a $15 billion annual goal? And what does this mean for the fate of embattled designer Sabato De Sarno?

  By the time Cantino is officially running things, he will have had enough time to evaluate whether he and De Sarno are the right match. If there is going to be a change, I suspect it will happen relatively quickly. The standard new C.E.O. protocol would usually allow for a brief review period followed by an unequivocal ruling, a way to look fair and decisive. (But, you know, I really don’t know anything at the moment. If I find out, I’ll tell you.)

• Where have all the BDG editors gone?: Earlier this week, I got word that Emma Rosenblum was stepping down from her post as chief content officer of Bustle Digital Group, better known these days as BDG. The party line was that Rosenblum was leaving to focus on her career as a novelist—a nice cover—and that she would effectively be replaced by her deputy, Charlotte Owen.

  Maybe, but it’s also true that BDG has been subject to a reversal of fortune in recent years. Founder and C.E.O. Bryan Goldberg, who earned a nice payout in his past life as a co-founder at Bleacher Report and built BDG on the illusion that he could create a new Condé Nast, abandoned his post-pandemic attempt to take BDG public a little while ago and settled for a new round of financing in September. (Goldberg has already raised $145 million.) Meanwhile, Jason Wagenheim, his chief business officer, decamped for a programmatic-heavy soccer media startup. And BDG’s bread and butter—pouring life into faded brands like Nylon—seems increasingly challenged.

  Also, Rosenblum wrote a book that pissed some people off—“where every character was based on a BDG exec,” noted one competitor. The book, Very Bad Company, “was the nail in the coffin,” this person suggested. In the book, Rosenblum kills off a character ostensibly based, at least in part, on one of her colleagues. Actually, pretty much every character is based on a BDG employee, and one such employee suggested that the head of people was given a particularly terrible storyline. Someone on Rosenblum’s side argues that’s not true and that the H.R. character is the only one who gets a happy ending.

  Anyway, there’s no way anyone is actually mad about this. It got BDG attention, and Goldberg is the kind of guy who enjoys that sort of punishment. (My takeaway: I need to read this book after I read all the other books I need to read.) In the end, it sounds like this was truly a mutual decision. Rosenblum was getting a nice paycheck that BDG probably no longer wanted to cut, and her books are getting optioned.

  There have been some other recent notable BDG exits (Liz Angell at Romper; Kathy Lee at The Zoe Report, etcetera). At Nylon, most of the full-time staff is gone, leaving editor Lauren McCarthy and a skeleton crew. (See this funny, but also sad, tweet.) The word is that Goldberg is still focused on the events business, as I reported last fall when Alyssa Vingan was fired from the E.I.C. role and McCarthy was promoted.

  While multiple people with knowledge of Goldberg’s plans said that content is very much alive at BDG, it does seem that events are a primary focus. Brand moments—like a print issue—that are sponsor-heavy will live on, too. There will be a few editors who are essentially brand ambassadors-slash-influencers and oversee the remaining content plays and make guest appearances. (W, by the way, is operated separately from BDG and unaffected by all this, as far as I can tell.)

  I’m told that 1Q2024 sales were rough during the sans-Wagenheim adjustment, but the third and fourth quarters are “looking good.” The question is whether Goldberg might end up selling off some of these lesser properties, like Romper and Zoe Report, or simply shuttering them. Anyway, the next Condé Nast, BDG is not.

• Tomorrow has come?: I heard from a well-placed source that Tomorrow, the showroom-cum-“brand incubator,” is preparing to sell its owned brands. One version of this story posited that most of the labels—including Coperni, Martine Rose, and Loverboy—were to be shipped off to an Italian group with manufacturing expertise. That rumor is definitely not true, according to a source close to Stefano Martinetto, the guy behind Tomorrow. The brands are all in different states, and it probably wouldn’t make sense for someone to buy the bunch. But Tomorrow is in the process of figuring out a way to operate them individually, perhaps to more easily sell them individually in the future. To wit: The biggest of them all, A-Cold-Wall—founded by since-departed Samuel Ross—is slated to be sold, either to a licensing group or an independently wealthy person, and it sounds like there are interested parties across the U.S., China, U.K., and Italy. (A-Cold-Wall has always felt like it could be bigger than it is—last time I checked, it was between $10 million and $20 million—but whether it can grow without Ross leading is a question. My bet is on a licensing firm.)

  One of my last projects at Business of Fashion was building a case study about Tomorrow and their strategy. My question, from the beginning, was who might buy the company after it raised so much money from private equity. (Tomorrow’s majority owner is Three Hills, the Italian firm behind Sant Ambroeus’s recent expansion.) None of these brand incubators—essentially, operators who do everything but the creative—have been able to meaningfully scale. (New Guards Group was on its way with Off-White, and then Palm Angels, but the Farfetch of it all stuck a wrench in their plan.) Anyway, perhaps with some more time, Tomorrow will figure it out.

Alas, the hasty choreography of Freda’s departure represents a more nuanced backstory. As is often the case, the board supported Freda… until it didn’t. I recently viewed an internal document, dated nearly a year and half ago, proposing a timeline to potentially name Freda’s successor in November 2024. “There was a bit of back and forth––there was fiscal 2025 or 2026,” said a person intimately familiar with the situation. “They finally settled on the end of fiscal 2025.” This person noted said that the board “always knew he was going to retire at the end of the [2025 fiscal] year.”

Originally, there were five internal contenders in the mix. There were “the Janes”—Jane Lauder, Ronald’s daughter and the company’s chief data officer, and Jane Hudis, executive group president. Then there was Tracey Travis, a former C.F.O. who recently exited the business, and wild card Peter Jueptner, the group president of the international division who is said to be retiring later this year. But, according to multiple sources, the winner of the C.E.O. bake-off is almost certain to be Stéphane de La Faverie, the executive group president of The Estée Lauder Companies. A source with close ties to the family and executive leadership team said that de La Faverie is “absolutely the person.”

De La Faverie, who spent close to a decade at L’Oréal in his previous life, has been at Lauder now for almost 14 years and ran the Estée brand portfolio before being promoted to group president in 2020. De La Faverie has long been a subject of industry gossip regarding his colorful personal life, but he is mostly well-liked and seen as a charismatic executive. “Naming Stéphane will be a show of stability,” said a person familiar with the matter. The board thinks he is “better suited” than the other candidates.

As for the rest of the internal candidates, the extremely well-respected Travis announced her retirement in July and isn’t turning back, and Jueptner apparently has “zero charisma,” although I’m sure he’s a lovely person. Hudis, the executive group president, is a talented leader, someone who rose steadily through the ranks over her three decades at the company, but I’m told she was never a serious contender, which is too bad. Meanwhile, I heard that an “outside search” was just for show.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren

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