Thomas Burberry founded the Burberry brand in 1856 as a small drapery shop in England. He started experimented with waterproof cloth and began making sportswear and hunting clothes. His business took off (literally) during World War I when he started making military coats for the British Royal Flying Corps. After the war those coats filtered into the civilian world and became the iconic trench coat we know today. Burberry then introduced the ‘Nova’ check (plaid) pattern as a lining fabric in 1924 but it took until the fashionably adventurous 1960’s for the check to start showing up on the outside of Burberry’s merchandise. Worn by such glittery names as Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn, Burberry was definitely understood as a high quality luxury label. But a few years of loss of brand management focus caused Burberry’s sales to sputter. A slow expansion began in the 1980’s, but it wasn’t until 1997 that Rose Marie Bravoa, acquired from US retailer Saks, led a new management team in orchestrating a huge turn in Burberry’s tide.

Bravoa put a checked bikini on Kate Moss and pumped up splashy advertising. The Burberry check found it’s way onto shirts, bags, hats,.. doggie collars. The Beckham’s were called. Sales went through the roof. 2001 was the best year Burberry had had yet. 2001 was also the year Bravoa hired English designer Christopher Bailey away from Tom Ford’s Gucci to head up Burberry’s fashion rebirth. Now the fashionista cognoscenti was meant to consider Burberry seriously within the top tiered fashion houses. The Burberry execs were probably holding their breath when….Bailey showed in Milan. The press approved. Burberry was humming now!

But wait! Even before the champagne spills from the fashion show after part had dried, Burberry made it’s first misstep. Others may disagree but the 2002 opening of Burberry’s US flagship on 57th Street in New York City showed a misunderstanding by the company of how to guide the fashion label into the future. Designed by international mega-design firm Gensler, the asymmetrically gridded facade of the new Burberry store is meant to be an abstraction of the signature Burberry plaid. Uh… sorry, but how literal can you get? This is a one-liner architectural rendering right up there with the 1776 foot tall ‘Freedom’ Tower design for the World Trade Center site. A huge opportunity is missed here of being able to architecturally describe ideas at the base of the Burberry esthetic. The foundation of the brand, what has made Burberry famous, are the ideas of the layering of rich materials, outside and inside, the seen and the hidden. The discovery of beautifully modern pattern beneath a sober exterior. And even beyond that, the Burberry of this age should be speaking about it’s thoughtful modern re-imagining of the Burberry of the past. Why couldn’t the facade of the flagship store reinforce these ideas? It could play a sexy peek-a-boo game of hide and seek with shoppers on the street. Great expanses of a single material and then -!- a cut or fold to reveal color and pattern within, drawing the viewer inside for more discovery. More could be said about this but we will have to leave it for the moment.

This brings us back to the other problem that is inherent in Burberry’s resurgence into the fashion world. It seems that Bravoa made a deal with the devil by initially pushing the Burberry check pattern so forcefully into the market. It succeeded in raising the brand’s exposure but it also succeeded in flooding stores with lower price-point merchandise. Which meant that everyone started wearing something with a plaid pattern on it. And we all know that when the masses are covered in an overextended label, the big-ticket buyers find some other purchase to set themselves apart with. Burberry has had problems being associated with the ‘chav’ culture in the past and it looks like that problem resurfaced again. Has nothing been learned from Calvin Klein’s overextended licensing fiasco or the logo-tired Gucci that Tom Ford had to resurrect? Burberry had laid this trap for themselves. But at least they have Christopher Bailey, fighting against this trend, trying to grow Burberry’s runway exposure. Of course that leads us to their next questionable step. Maybe a small one but a question nonetheless. Bailey launched the Burberry Prorsum collection in fall 2002. The direction of the clothing design will be left for the time being but the name must be brought up. ‘Prorsum’? Not only does it not sound catchy but it is hard to say. Not to mention that the word sounds a little like ‘possum’. Which brings to mind images of scrubby little animals… dead… on the side of the road.

A final critical point. Burberry’s fragrance lines. All of Burberry’s bottle designs are duds. Especially the Burberry ‘Touch’ bottles. And the check pattern applied to the outsides of the ‘Brit’ bottles! Further proof that the lessons of brand mark overextension are hard ones to learn. There is no visual evidence of a conceptual thread running through all of the fragrance lines. A unifying design vocabulary could tie all the lines together (think the beautiful bottles and packaging of Comme des Garcons) and help consumers make the jump from one scent to the next. Also, a new iconic form could expand Burberry’s vocabulary from just one tartan pattern and reinforce the brand by telling it’s story from another angle (Think Moschino).

One idea for Burberry that seems to have not been tried yet. Give us a new plaid. And not just another color combination. If you have (or ‘had’) everyone’s attention and your name has become synonymous with ‘plaid’, why not give us something completely new? Reinvent plaid. Redefine it. Make it a modern re-imagining of the history and tradition that is Burberry. In a pattern that people can see to be a reinforcing of the brand’s core ideas and image. Not an overextension of it. And make it only accessible to the top clothing lines, thereby also becoming ‘aspirational’. Then you will have us. Again.

One good thing about Burberry that must be said is their logo. Clean and simple. Bold but refined. Modern and traditional at the same time. And the name itself is nice too. Easy to say and catchy enough to say again. Burberry is a brand with great roots and great talent working for it today. It just needs to refocus it’s image and not loose sight of it’s core philosophy. If Burberry finds it’s voice again to speak about it’s tradition of unwavering craftsmanship, in a re-imagined modern way, it will have growth potential way into the future.