Nicolai Marciano has proven Guess Inc.’s relevance to a younger, streetwear-skewing consumer. He’ll get the chance to further prove himself as he leads the launch and scale of the Guess Jeans brand in 2024.
CEO Carlos Alberini revealed the new brand Tuesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call and said Guess Jeans will launch with its own identity and retail concept.
“With Guess Jeans we will be addressing the casual business head on, and while the brand is targeting the younger Gen Z and Millennial audience, the assortment is truly for everyone [and] multi-generational,” Alberini said.
Marciano, the son of Guess co-founder Paul Marciano, is set to lead Guess Jeans expansion. The younger Marciano has headed up brand partnerships and specialty marketing at Guess for nearly a decade.
“…During the last few years, we executed a significant elevation of our Guess brand,” Alberini said. “As a result of this transformation, we created great separation between our current, very sophisticated, more dressy assortment and the more casual product assortment that was part of our brand’s DNA since the inception of Guess in the world of denim. We now see tremendous opportunity in this casual lifestyle space, and we plan to reclaim our denim legacy with the launch of the new brand in 2024.”
Guess Jeans’ focus includes sustainability, “robust celebrity marketing” and an “American West Coast denim” aesthetic, Alberini said.
“We expect to capture a wide audience with the Guess Jeans offering, primarily the men’s customer,” the CEO said. “The new brand is poised to establish a new benchmark in denim practices and innovation, reaffirming our dominance and our roots in the denim category.”
Distribution will be global and across Guess stores and the online channel. Pricing, Alberini said, will be “very competitive.”
Proving Grounds
The past several years has seen Marciano forge a path for himself at the L.A. denim dynasty.
He’s more recently been designing for the Guess U.S.A. sub-label.
Initiatives and collaborations he’s helped strike have given the brand relevance among new consumers.
Although Alberini described Guess Jeans as a new brand launch, the name has been in existence as an incubator for the business to test new endeavors.
Among those tests are the raft of collaborations the brand brought to its 2018 booth at ComplexCon.
In another example Guess Jeans’ collaboration with Round Two founder Sean Wotherspoon became the impetus for a Farmers Market pop-up concept in 2018.
Lot 5 of Guess headquarters in Los Angeles served as the Farmers Market venue for a weekend of live performances, food and product launches. Vendors included Carrots by Anwar Carrots, Darren Romanelli, Pleasures, Utmost, Chinatown Market and Pintrill.
While Marciano has shown his talent on the design and marketing front, he’s also been keen on shaking up distribution through a more updated approach to selling.
“It’s the community. It’s an experience,” Marciano told WWD of the Farmers Market at the time of the launch. “You sell something to a store, like a wholesale account and there’s nothing special about that. It’s very transactional. Here, you’re creating a story around the clothing that’s dropping and an experience that’s happening and that’s ultimately where our demographic and the youth wants to connect these days.”
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