Prada begins to become all grown up and get out into the real world . . . .

Prada has long been a brand that has shall we say 'done things its own way', its idiosyncratic methods have left it behind with respect to many and varied modern technologies and phenomena.  The main reason for this is its chief executive, Patrizio Bertelli, although the company is 95% owned by miuccia Prada is is accepted that Bertelli runs the company.  Famously stubborn and difficult to deal with, he is claimed to be responsible for Jil Sander leaving the company which bears her name, as after the Prada group purchased a significant part of her company, arguments between her and Bertelli caused her to have to leave the firm.

This type of management style can famously work one of two ways, dramatically well or dramatically badly, some of the decisions that Prada has chosen by his hand have been quite odd.  Not producing any significant or noteworthy jewellery lines based on the principle they would dilute the purity of the brand (pretty much all his decisions seem based on this principle), not building any coherent website and keeping the company website appearing as if it were the simple print ad style website that fashion brands maintained some 10 plus years ago (an extremely difficult decision to understand as even goyard one of the worlds most exclusive brand has always had a reasonably comprehensive website) and for many years refusing to repair any clothes and shoes that were purchased from the brand.

Now however these ideas seem to be working against them, by the end of 2008 start of 2009 the firm was forced to ask banks to restructure their finances owing to a debt of 1 billion euros, and for a while it appeared the swiss giant Richemont may acquire a sizeable portion of the firm.  After strugggling with finances for a while the brands current debt of 450 million euros has been extended to 2012.  This difficult period of troubles has presumably forced the brand to rethink many of its former 'ideas'

Firstly the aversion to webtrade has ended, they have started a fully integrated website allowing for online buying in the US, presumably to later be extended worldwide, second their policy on repairs has been repealed with an in house repair department (to be fair this happened some years ago, but still), and most massively they will be considering, and when I say considering I pretty much mean doing, an IPO, primarily to pay their debts but also to bring them bang up to date in line with most other luxury firms.

The IPO is looking to net some 4 to 5 billion euros, pundits however value the firm at around 3.8 billion euros, this element of the deal is essentially monopoly money and will no doubt be decided in their favour.

One thing that will change dramatically is, they will of course no longer be an independant company, this will affect the way in which they conduct their business, at present decisions are made and the only person who answers for them is their board of directors or staff members, when floated they will have to answer to shareholders, and if consistent growth cannot be demonstrated year on year then changes will have to be made, including removing the old CEO and replacing him with someone more inclined towards expansion.  I think we will see some massive changes at the house of Prada in the next couple of years after this deal goes through, it is sure to be almost unreconizable to what we know today.