Salvatore Ferragamo named Alessandra Toscano as Chief Brand Officer, effective immediately. Toscano spent three years as Chief Marketing Officer at Valentino, where she oversaw the Pierpaolo Piccioli-era campaigns and the brand's expansion into TikTok-native content distribution. She reports directly to CEO Marco Gobbetti.
The appointment follows Ferragamo's February confirmation that Creative Director Maximilian Davis will depart after his Spring 2025 show in September. Davis joined in March 2022 with a mandate to reset the brand's contemporary codes. He delivered six collections. Revenue for the twelve months ending December 2024 fell 9.2% to €1.13 billion, with Asia-Pacific down 14% and Europe flat. The house has not yet named Davis's successor.
Toscano's mandate is to stabilize brand perception during the creative interregnum and prepare for a relaunch under the next designer. At Valentino, she managed the transition from celebrity-heavy campaigns to architecture-focused storytelling, working with photographers like Pieter Hugo and Juergen Teller. She also led the brand's first direct-to-consumer livestream commerce pilots in China, generating €4.2 million in gross merchandise volume across three events in 2023. Before Valentino, she spent six years at Prada Group, most recently as Global Communications Director for Miu Miu.
Gobbetti is applying the playbook he used at Burberry: hire brand infrastructure before the designer, not after. At Burberry, he brought in Julie Brown as CFO and Marco Marchi as Leather Goods Director nine months before Riccardo Tisci started. The pre-work allowed Tisci to focus on product while commercial teams rebuilt wholesale relationships and recalibrated pricing architecture. Ferragamo is now repeating the sequence. Toscano will audit the brand's visual identity, renegotiate agency relationships, and map customer acquisition costs across channels. She will also oversee the search for a new advertising agency of record; the house has worked with Publicis Luxe since 2019 but did not renew the contract past June 2025.
The timing matters because Ferragamo's direct-to-consumer penetration is still only 31%, low relative to Hermès (67%), Brunello Cucinelli (54%), and Bottega Veneta (48%). Toscano's work at Valentino included building a first-party data infrastructure that reduced reliance on third-party customer lists by 22 percentage points over two years. Ferragamo will need similar architecture if it intends to compete for the same high-net-worth customer cohort that currently splits spending between The Row, Loro Piana, and Khaite.
Allocators should watch for three signals. First, whether Ferragamo announces a Creative Director before Milan Fashion Week in September or delays until January 2026. Second, whether Toscano hires a standalone Chief Digital Officer or consolidates digital under her remit. Third, whether the house adjusts store footprint before or after the new designer starts; Gobbetti closed 18 underperforming locations in 2024 and flagged another 12 to 15 for review in 2025.
Ferragamo's board meets again in mid-May to approve Q1 results and discuss creative succession. The brand's largest shareholder, the Ferragamo family, controls 63.7% of voting rights and has publicly committed to Gobbetti's restructuring timeline through at least 2027.
The takeaway
Ferragamo hires brand leadership before naming a new Creative Director, copying Gobbetti's Burberry infrastructure-first playbook.
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