2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Oscar de la Renta brand. It’s also its first year without its beloved namesake, who passed away last October. And while the transition to a new Creative Director – Peter Copping, formerly of Nina Ricci – is big change for the brand, it can rely the steady hand of CEO Alex Bolen to manage the shift. Bolen, who assumed the role of CEO 13 years ago, is also married to Oscar’s stepdaughter, Eliza – even without Oscar, the label remains a family business. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Oscar de la Renta’s business has been primarily American, but that’s changing. Could you give us a snapshot of where the business is at in 2015?

Call it 60 percent U.S., 40 percent rest of the world. That’s up from 10 years ago, when it was probably 98/2. A dramatic expansion of our business outside the United States, and that’s in the context of a business that has grown nicely within the United States, as well. Emerging markets, international markets have been and are a huge part of our growth strategy. But it’s impossible to generalize. There is not, if you’ll forgive the expression, one size that fits all. What’s going to work for us in Korea is going to be different than what works in India. It’s going to be different than what works in Brazil.

Our approach with regards to international markets, whether they’re emerging or established, is if they’re new markets for us, we have to plant a lot of seeds and realize that not all of those seeds are going to germinate. The ones that do, we have to try to make sure they get sun and water and continue to plow both human and communications assets behind those markets that are working. Korea is a market that for us is a ‘right now’ opportunity, between some strength that we have in the bridal business and more mature women who are already consumers of fashion. There are opportunities in Korea that don’t exist for us today in mainland China, which is principally an accessories market. To the extent it’s a fashion market, it’s a men’s fashion market more than women’s fashion market. Having said that, I was in Paris last week, and I went to a party for an account of ours that was hosted for Chinese couture customers. There were a bunch of Chinese women there who were incredibly well dressed. It’s going to be a huge market for us. Huge. It is clearly the future. I just don’t know when it’s the future. We don’t want to go badly into a market like China. There are too many of our peers who are now trying to unwind arrangements that had been difficult or aren’t working.

I would rather be late than go badly. We have many people that contact us that are highly qualified in terms of their knowledge of the market from a real estate matter, how to deal with various government authorities, and have the financial wherewithal to execute a solid business plan in China. I have not to this day met one manager who has convinced me that they understand the Chinese consumer, they understand the Oscar de la Renta brand, and that they are the person or the people to take us forward in this market. Until we find that, I think we would be foolish to do it. These businesses are so much about people and people who understand the needs of the local customer.

What people want in Russia and what people want in China and what people want in India are all very different. Hopefully we have, on offer, things for all of them within our line but even that’s something that’s evolving for us. For the first time this year, we designed a Ramadan collection that we took to our markets in the Middle East and it was very successful for us. We did, I don’t know, a million dollars in business where we just sent a line to our various accounts. Two sales people took it. We took a rack of clothes. Designed tunics, caftans, other items that seemed appropriate for those markets. By virtue of that, we picked up incremental business. Is a million dollars going to change our life? No, but it’s a start, and it gets the customer there to understand that we are serious about being a participant in that marketplace. We’re trying to understand what she needs. We’re trying to solve problems.

There’s value there that goes beyond dollars and cents.

Exactly. We don’t just expect you to come to us. We want to try to understand what you need. Oscar always said, “it is my job to solve problems.” I think he’s right. The problems that a woman has or the problems that a woman is trying to solve in the Middle East are different than what she’s trying to solve in Boston or Miami or Mumbai.

In North America, Oscar the man, and by extension the brand, is a cultural force. Even if you aren’t particularly into fashion, you know something about him. How do you approach messaging in emerging markets?

I think that so much of our company’s success was the result of the messaging from the man. Before I was born, Oscar stood for something. He meant something in people’s minds. To this day, everybody – everybody – knows who Oscar is, but not everybody is familiar with our line. We’re thrilled to have a reputation as a great designer of evening clothes – cocktail dresses, gowns – our line, much more of our business, is represented in day clothes than in evening clothes.

We do have some communications challenges to try to continue to stand for all of the things that Oscar has stood for but mean more things to more people. We don’t want to be all things to all people, but we want to be known as an innovative design house, somebody that is solving problems within the general DNA and aesthetic of what Oscar has established for women around the world.

You were really early on adapting new tech and new strategies in PR and communications. You were early on live-streaming shows. How does this attitude towards innovation carry through the rest of the business?

Well, look, I think you said it. For us, innovation, whether it’s technological innovation, innovation in terms of fabric content and everything in between, customers around the world expect us to be innovative. That is fundamental to what we do. Every season, we show a new line and we want to be thought of as innovative. Now, innovative for us doesn’t necessarily mean bleeding edge. It doesn’t mean avant-garde. It has to be within the context of the brand, but we always want to be looking ahead.

I think that perhaps relative to some of our peers, we have been less afraid of failure. We certainly had some things that haven’t worked.

But in general, we want to try to embrace what is new in order to be part of the conversation. We think that it’s one of the ways that a company like ours, that is maybe smaller than some of the other global brands, can create some advantages. Maybe they’re not permanent advantages, but we can at least try to gain some competitive advantage by being not afraid to embrace what’s new.

Can you give me an example of one of the ways you’ve managed to create an advantage?

I think that Erika [Bearman, PR at Oscar de la Renta] and what she’s done with @OscarPRGirl has enabled us to mean more things to more people. She’s embraced technology as a way to tell the world what our brand is about. I think that it was always very authentic for Erika. Erika is somebody that is representative of our customer.

The fact that she was interested and excited about communicating in a new way, the fact that I was confident that she would not do it in a way that was in any way going to diminish our brand allowed us to experiment. Innovation, experimentation – these are things that we always have to be doing as somebody who wants to be thought of as a design leader, whether it’s design of clothes or design of the way that our brand is communicated.

I think there are other things that are less obvious, more back of house. The way that we now develop prints – until recently, we were doing it in a very 19th century fashion. We’ve embraced a lot of technology here. I think that things like 3D printing, are those relevant to our jewelry business and what we’re doing? Absolutely. Now, have we figured out exactly the right way? No. But are we working on it? Yes.

You’ve been in e-commerce for, by my count, about five years now. Is that right?

At least.

Erika Bearman: 2006 was our first e-commerce site.

How have you seen it grow since its inception?

Last year we did about $5.5 million on our website. That’s almost 100% growth year-over-year. Great growth rates, still relatively small numbers. It is, again, the future. I remain convinced that before too long, oscardelarenta.com will be our biggest store. We’re not there yet. Some of that has to do with our product to offer. We don’t have a lot of low price point products. On the other hand, I have been amazed, pleasantly surprised by how quickly our customers have shown a willingness to purchase very expensive items online. It’s not always a case where they’re buying two or three and sending one or two back and keeping one. People are figuring out how to shop online, how to make their lives easier by utilizing oscardelarenta.com.

This month, we are going to enable our site with something called Borderfree that will allow us to ship to various far off lands, dealing with all of the taxes and duties in the local currency. Before, that’s all been done manually for us. We have a whole program of things that we want to introduce because we think that oscardelarenta.com is going to be our biggest store. We’re getting the growth rates. Do I wish $5.5 million was $55 million? Yes. Are we going to get there tomorrow? No. Are we going to get there soon? I believe so.

How do you see the importance of your bricks-and-mortar locations changing?

I think that our bricks-and-mortar locations will continue to be hugely important. Given our product mix now and for the foreseeable future, if our shoe business continues to grow well, if our hand bag business continues to grow well, I still feel that for us, bricks-and-mortar-wise, the strategy is bigger stores in highly urban environments. We are not going to be a brand that can ever support a store in every important shopping center across America. I think that we will make an important statement in bricks-and-mortar with stores in important urban environments and the rest we will service through a combination of wholesale and our own digital.

We’re figuring out what that right balance is of all of those ways that she wants to shop. Wholesale is a great solution in many contexts but not in all contexts. Digital is an excellent solution for her sometimes. There are other times that she wants to really be sold. She knows, “I’m going out to a party on Tuesday and I need a little black dress. I know that Oscar makes those so I’m going to go shop.” There are the other times that she wants to think about it, wants to see what the latest trends are. We see people who definitely shop cross channel. We think that will increase and we’re going to need to do both.

Oscar de la Renta is coming up on 50 years in business now. In the past 15 years, there’s been a ton of growth in the company in terms of adding new categories and opening new stand-alone stores. Do you expect that type of expansion to continue, or do you feel as though you’re reaching a bit of a plateau?

I think that there are some obvious categories that we’re not participating in, like menswear, that could very quickly become a more integral part of our business. I think for us, the challenges are not so much new product categories, it’s doing what we do now better. Shoes – after a long time trying to get it right, we are finally getting shoes right. Hand bags are still a work in process for us, very much. I think that we need to be executing design-wise, manufacturing-wise, distribution-wise really well, and being distributed in all of the geographies where it makes sense.

We are just getting started in places like the Middle East. We’re going to open a second store in Dubai this year. While our business here is very strong, I still think we can do a lot more. For us, really, it’s doing more of the same, doing it better, in more geographies.

You just covered my question about menswear, thank you.

Again, to aspire to be all things to all people is a fool’s errand. I think that we have to stick with what we are best known for. Oscar was a designer of womenswear. Having said that, Oscar had a lot of thoughts as expressed in the way he dressed himself everyday with regards to menswear, and I think there’s a certain relevancy to that. I also don’t think things are static. Peter [Copping], our new designer, has a lot of ideas about menswear, is very much a tailor. Brand DNA is not a static thing. It can’t be looked at as such. We can’t go from this side of the world to that side of the world, but we can build bridge that over time gets us there.

The big mistake that we have unfortunately made from time to time is to do things that are not authentic, things that don’t seem like a good fit with our company and our brand.

You worked in finance for 13 years before pivoting pretty hard into fashion. How did you find that transition, especially given your unique relationship to the de la Renta family?

I went to Brown University. I was asked to go to a career presentation on careers in the fashion business. There was somebody there from Ralph Lauren, there was somebody there from Donna Karan, and other brands. I was asked the question how do you suggest getting into the fashion business? My advice would be marry someone who’s stepfather is a world famous designer. [laughs]

I was very much not expecting to do this job. A lot of very specific circumstances led to me coming here.

Having said that, very fundamentally, I believe whether it’s finance or apparel, business is a series of apprenticeships. You try to find people who’ve been there, done that, and learn from them. I think the most valuable experience is bad experience that doesn’t kill you. My view was that Oscar had been through a lot and had survived and thrived in a tough business for a long time. I wanted to learn from him.

The pivot, as you say, was very unexpected. It was very much based on the opportunity to work with Oscar. What I was doing in the finance world, in some ways could not be more different than what I’m doing now. My job, which I thought I liked quite a lot, was a series of projects. This project never ends, in a wonderful way. There is nothing that teaches one to be humble and teaches humility better than running a business. Because you think you’ve got the best laid plans and stuff happens.

It’s been wonderful learning how to learn, because I didn’t know anything coming in. I told Oscar, “Oscar, you’re probably making a huge, big mistake, because I know nothing about your business.” He said, “Well, come and learn.” It has been very much a learning experience for me, in many cases learning the hard way. I continue to learn. That’s a lot of fun.

There’s been tremendous change in the fashion industry over the past 15, 20 years. How has the luxury tier that the Oscar brand lives in changed since you entered the industry?

When I arrived here, Oscar had organized his business very much in a sort of a classic ’80s, ’90s designer licensing model where the collection was shown without a tremendous amount of commercial push behind it in order to drive brand and drive image to make licenses work. Fundamentally, a small exclusive product to drive more mass sales. That’s still the game that so many people are trying to pursue. Now, they’re not doing it in exactly the same way. I think that the licensing model is by-and-large out the window. Although, I’m not sure that it hasn’t been thrown too far out the window in some cases, but maybe that’s a topic for another discussion.

We don’t think that the idea of diffusing our label to do Oscar de la Renta and Oscar Purple and Oscar Collection and all of that makes sense. We really want to focus on the Oscar de la Renta label. How do we expand that? Set another way, if we’re offering $1,500 printed cotton dresses for women with the Oscar de la Renta label, it’s difficult to dumb yourself down offer another sort of printed cotton dress for $500 and not have the customers get confused.

I think that licenses ended up getting confusing for customers. I think that the same thing is going on right now with a lot of the affordable luxury.

I’m not sure if that answers your question of how things have changed. In our line, for example, we have introduced jersey dresses in the last three or four years. We sell them for $700. For us, that’s a big innovation when our opening price point used to be $1,700. In the realm of global fashion, for $700 we’re talking about the one percent. But for us to go from $1,700 to $700, we have massively increased our addressable markets. We’re from two tenths of one percent to five tenths of one percent or some such thing. That’s what we have to constantly be trying to figure out. How do we do a little bit more? How do mean a little bit more to a little bit more people, not have people be confused, continue to be true and authentic to what Oscar stood for 45 years ago?

He really did stand for all of the same things then as he did the day he died. We don’t want to lose any of that. Oscar was always about looking ahead, not too far ahead. Always about making women beautiful, always about solving problems. In many way, he’s made it easy for me. It’s not hard for us to understand what we stand for. What tools we bring to bear to make sure that we’re presenting what we stand for in the best way, that’s maybe a little bit more of a challenge, but I think we’ll figure it out.

Q&A by Adam Wray, Curator of FashionREDEF. You can follow Adam on REDEF and Twitter (@FashionREDEF, @terminal_avenue), or reach him at adam.wray@redefgroup.com