In the shoes of Michele Norsa

Almost everything at Salvatore Ferragamo is up - revenue is up and net profit is up. Wholesale, retail, footwear and fragrances, all up. But when Michele Norsa contemplates such bounty, his attention must sometimes be drawn downwards, specifically towards his left trouser pocket.

There, the CEO of the luxury goods house - by his own admission a very superstitious man - keeps his good luck charm of 25 years, an amber stone that just about fits inside his palm.

Speaking to The Business Times at the brand's Paragon Shopping Centre store, he pulls the stone out of his pocket on request. "I always have an amber (stone) in my left pocket . . . for a few years, I was carrying it in the right pocket, then I found somebody who told me it should be in the left pocket," Mr Norsa explains. "The amber changes . . . I was using a different one until last year."

There are other means that Mr Norsa employs in the pursuit of a charmed life. He avoids unlucky European numbers, and thanks to prolonged exposure to the Asian markets, also steers clear of the number 14. "I never sit (on seat) 14 on the plane," he says.

And then, there are the teddy bears. The tie he is wearing is a special World Cup one that is not in stores yet at the time of the interview, dotted with football-loving teddy bears. It is not clear how the ursine creatures manage this precarious balance of good luck and bad, but whatever it is that Mr Norsa is doing, it is working.

Almost three years since Mr Norsa took the group public, the stock has gained analyst approval, with some reckoning that the group will pull in the fastest growth in earnings before tax and interest in its class for the 2012-2016 period.

If it weren't for Mr Norsa, there would very likely be no Salvatore Ferragamo counter on the Borsa Italiana today. Having joined the group in 2006, he bears the distinction of being the first outsider to head the family-controlled firm.

Tasked with whipping the firm into a shape presentable enough for a listing, a lesser man would have baulked. But by then, Mr Norsa had already brought one other fashion house - Valentino - public, and played a leading role in other family companies such as Benetton and Rizzoli.

"I've been working all my life with family companies, listed or non-listed. I believe that family companies have something special," he says. "Maybe it's more difficult because you have to run a public company, (and) at the same time you have family (members) as major shareholders, so these two realities are different and have to be developed at the same time. But I think the experience has been very positive."

With Mr Norsa's entry came a more no-nonsense approach to the freewheeling business of fashion. In 2009, he told Financial Times just what he thought of catwalk events, which tend to be large and elaborate affairs. "The luxury industry now has to rethink how to do business in a profitable way without wasting energy on sometimes useless expenses," he'd said then.

Since its listing, the group has had little reason to look back. Last year, it recorded double-digit sales growth in all geographical markets save Japan. Its largest contributor was predictably the Asia-Pacific region, which accounted for 37 per cent of revenue, or about 466.5 million euros (S$822 million).

China, even more predictably, underwrote most of it with 20 per cent growth in year-on-year retail channel sales. While businesses batten down the hatches in anticipation of a slowdown in mainland spending, the numbers have held up, for at least 2013.

"China's still doing very well and of course, the second and third-tier cities are doing better than Shanghai and Beijing. From the West Coast of the US to Europe, Australia and Canada . . . there's a big flow of Chinese (shoppers). They are becoming the driving force of business around the world," Mr Norsa notes.

This shift in demographics is leaving a noticeable imprint on the fashion house in almost every imaginable way. "We were discussing today in the car - if we look at the size of the shoes, we've seen that the average size is getting smaller worldwide because we've seen more Asians buying shoes," Mr Norsa says.

The brand's bag collections, too, which are developed for the global market, are now designed with the Asian consumer in mind. "The most important thing is colour - red, orange, yellow - bright colours have a positive influence on the Asian market."

It will never be known what the house's late founder - who reportedly refused to use machines to make any of his shoes - will make of this, but he might be hard-pressed to object to the rate at which the Chinese pull the brand's goods off shelves. Now, whole stores are designed around Chinese haste. "The Chinese need to shop fast. They have limited time when they come to Europe or the United States. So it's important for them to have a wider selection, because often, it's gifting," says Mr Norsa.

Counters for small leather goods - a popular gift item - offer a wider selection for Chinese travellers who favour the swoop-in and swoop-out approach. If Mr Norsa is perturbed by this wholesale attitude towards luxury, he does not show it. "It's a different way of shopping, probably," he says.

Even with the Chinese being big buyers, Salvatore Ferragamo is perhaps mindful that post-2008, we live in a smaller economy now, somehow. Accordingly, the best-sellers have also become smaller.

"Generally, the trend is towards the small leather products. We see leather goods growing faster than ready-to-wear. We have a strong leadership in men's shoes. Men are our loyal customers, less influenced by seasonality; they buy the product for its quality. So it's shoes, bags and small leather goods," Mr Norsa says.

In 2013, Salvatore Ferragamo's apparel division was the only one to record a shrinkage in sales - a dip of 0.9 per cent in constant currency terms. Footwear and leather goods, far-and-away the two largest money-spinners, grew 8.2 per cent and 18.2 per cent, respectively.

Alongside its leather goods, other small items like fragrances and sunglasses are perfect gateway products for those not yet initiated to the world of Salvatore Ferragamo. "It's a fast-growing business. With 55-60 euros, you can get into these categories," Mr Norsa says of fragrances. "We (also) see developments for sunglasses - products which are affordable and give visibility to the brand."

Asked for his view of the year ahead, Mr Norsa's answer is a canny one. "I never give any outlook. I always look at the past and the present," he says.

It is not a stretch to believe that he holds a fondness for the past. Mr Norsa, who has amassed a collection of thousands of books, had been in the publishing business in an earlier life. Before his reincarnation in fashion, Mr Norsa was the area director for Rizzoli Books Group.

Even now, Mr Norsa tends to read four or five books at a time, in any of the four languages that he is fluent in - English, Italian, French and Spanish. His career in books took place a lifetime ago, but his face lights up considerably at the mention of it.

"I still love books," he says. "Only once, I read one book on a Kindle. I don't like it very much, because you don't own the book. And at the end, when you finish reading a book, you want to have it, you want to keep it."

The future, however, beckons inexorably, as the fashion industry faces an increasingly fragmented market and lower customer loyalty. The Chinese, once like fruit ripe for the picking by foreign brands, now prove a pricklier audience with higher expectations and bargaining power.

Asked how Salvatore Ferragamo will stay relevant to the market, Mr Norsa lets out a semi-sigh.

"This is not an easy part. What is important is not only developing younger products but also communicating. We expect young people to not be in touch with the brands through traditional advertising like TV, maybe not even through the PC but more and more through the smartphone," he says.

At the same time, the world of high fashion is not impervious to the pull of e-commerce. "If you look at the more developed markets like the US or UK, you have online sales . . . one out 10 customers are buying online," Mr Norsa notes.

"We recently developed a special 20-minute movie with an Italian movie director which was only for the Internet, to develop a relationship with the social networks."

Now, a larger percentage of Salvatore Ferragamo's ad budget is being placed in the digital space - websites and digital newspapers, for example.

While Mr Norsa has one eye on the long-term prospects that the digital realm offers, the daily grind itself is enough to fully occupy his mind.

"When you run a retail company, you look at your numbers five or six times a day. You feel the pressure of everyday sales all around the world - I was just checking the numbers that were coming from Japan, from Asia, from China," he says. "So, it is not a long-term pressure, but an everyday one of producing results."

In the running of a global operation, the body, too, has to keep up with the mind. "In the past, you could work from your office. You knew more or less about US, Europe - you were talking to a couple of people. Now, you have potentially 24 hours to get e-mails (because) in Asia it's night, in US it's morning," Mr Norsa says.

Asked how much time he spends travelling in any given year, he says, laughing, "You should ask my wife!" If things go according to plan, he is going to do even more jetsetting this year, for the group's global plans continue to chug along.

Now, Salvatore Ferragamo is preoccupied with sprucing up and enlarging some of its bigger American retail outlets as the US economy continues to recover. Last year, for example, its Michigan Avenue store in Chicago was re-opened, almost twice its original size, and in January, the group opened an outlet in a new location, in San Francisco.

More new stores across China and Latin America are set to follow. This growth is understandable - it is oft-said that fashion houses that run their own outlets weather tough times better than those which rely on department stores.

Even as there is retail expansion, analysts have noted the need for the group to increase like-for-like retail sales growth. Last year, the group's wholesale and travel retail channel's growth outpaced that of its retail distribution channel's. Mr Norsa is mindful of this challenge. "This year, we want to focus on the performance of retail of each store - per square-metre sales, sales per head," he says.

As he travels from market to market checking on stores and doing the circuit of fashion shows, just how he will do this is a certainty - no sitting in plane seats numbered 14, always an amber stone in his left pocket and a jaunty teddy bear on his person.

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