Big Boss

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Metzingen, a small town in southern Germany with a population of around 22,000, seems an unlikely place for a circus troupe to pitch its tent in the middle of winter, yet what looks like a vast, tented city looms from an icy field. The isolation of the location is summed up by the banter of several guests as they step inside.

"Shall we go to a bar afterward?" asks one.

"We'd have to build one first" is the reply.

Inside, the cavernous space (which includes a huge bar, for one night only) has been decked out not for clowns and acrobats but for a fashion show—one far bigger than those usually staged in Paris, Milan and New York. While the 94 models walking the runway are all habitués of those venues, not one face in the front row at this show (make that shows—five of them back-to-back, with a break for supper) is familiar to anyone who frequents the fashion circuit.

Sitting front and center in a black suit and black shirt is tonight's ringmaster: Bruno Sälzer, 50, chairman and CEO of a company founded in 1923 not far from this field. Back then, it was a small sewing outfit helmed by a guy called Hugo Boss. Today Hugo Boss AG has a retail value of $6.5 billion and—for 2006, the year of the most recent declared figures—net sales of $1.97 billion with a net profit of $170 million. It also has 9,385 full-time employees, not to mention those working for subsidiaries around the world, many of whom have flown in from all points of the compass just for tonight.

"This show is for us, to excite our people about our brands," explains Sälzer, who has been at the helm since May 2002 (he had joined the company in 1995, working in sales and marketing) and has overseen a period of astonishing growth. "We've grown so big, we had to build this tent so people could sit down."

What follows is not the most earth-shattering fashion show, mostly because Hugo Boss clothes are designed for reality and not exaggerated for the runway. Yet it is certainly one of the biggest. A Paris extravaganza staged by Jean Paul Gaultier, for example, will probably feature 100 looks. But tonight an estimated 2,000 items, all impeccably made by Hugo Boss and not one of them a repeat, are shown under the labels Boss Black, Boss Orange and Hugo (both for men and women), as well as Boss Green and Boss Selection.

As to the scale of this operation: when it comes to giant single-fashion brands, Hugo Boss AG is huge (although not, it should be noted, as huge as Polo Ralph Lauren). LVMH (the market leader), Gucci Group/PPR and Richemont, which owns Chloé, are also bigger, but they are multi-brand conglomerates. Of the single brands, for menswear only, Hugo Boss is as big as its two nearest competitors, Giorgio Armani and Ermenegildo Zegna, combined. The company still makes 1.6 million suits a year, but that's old news; it now reflects a wider cultural shift and has repositioned itself from a suit-driven menswear company to a lifestyle company with womenswear, accessories and, under license, fragrance, eyewear and watches. (Jewelry made by Swarovski is about to launch, and children's wear will arrive for spring 2009.)

What's palpable at Boss is a forward motion so fast you can feel it. Year-on-year growth is at 15%, which Sälzer equates to the growth of Shanghai, where you blink and another skyscraper has gone up. "You can feel the growth, [whereas] a 5% growth in a brand or a city is more organic," he says, pointing to tonight's audience, which is full of youthful faces. "If you grow, you hire mostly young people, and if you don't grow, your company looks older."

Between each of the five shows, Sälzer is up and about, shaking hands. Not a man who sits still, he runs around 8 miles (13 km) in a nearby forest every day in sneakers that are the only items in his closet that do not bear the Boss label. Sälzer will usually spend the rest of his day on his toes because his policy is to limit his time in the CEO's office to two hours a day. His style is to manage by chatting: anyone can approach him, and whether he's in the showrooms, the canteen or the gym, they do. "Nothing is planned. If you walk, you can talk to 50 people a day," he says.

Sälzer, who calls himself "perhaps a little old-fashioned," is not a fan of M.B.A.s. "I favor a system where you learn how to think, how to combine things, how to set priorities," he says. "The subject you studied in school doesn't mean anything. What is significant is the training of your brain. My doctorate is in logistics, and I never worked in logistics, while our head of production logistics did his doctorate in nuclear physics." What he instead values most is instinct. "But you have to train that instinct," he notes.

Then there's travel. "If you don't travel in fashion, you are dead," says Sälzer, who has just returned from Madrid, where he had no specific agenda other than that he hadn't been there in a year. Traveling means checking out restaurants, new hotels, the stores, "then three months on, if someone says, 'We should open on this street,' I know exactly where it is and what the area is like. While I travel, I don't decide anything; I'm just being open. But when a decision is needed, I'm ready. I'm a very fast decision maker."

Which is not to say that the decisions he has to make are always easy. In 2000 Hugo Boss had made a disastrous debut in the womenswear market that cost the company $75.8 million, or 38% of sales, over four years. The division was based in Milan, where, as Sälzer puts it, "the team had, collectively, thousands of years of experience. Yet the crazy thing was, there were big mistakes in all areas. The organization didn't work, and not because we don't know Milan. The problem was, the spirit didn't come over." Once in charge, Sälzer reconnected the company's most fashion-forward sector to its Metzingen DNA. Today, womenswear generates an estimated $263 million for the company. While Sälzer is pleased with that, "I don't want to have this experience again," he says.

Show and Tell

CLEARLY THAT PROBLEM is in the past. The womenswear under the Boss Black label being shown tonight, designed by Ingo Wilts, a German who has been promoted through the ranks, is sleek and sexy. Boss Orange, designed by Andrea Cannelloni, an Italian who has been with the company in Germany since 1998, is more casual. Tonight's finale showcases the Hugo label, the brand's most avant-garde offering, and marks the debut of Belgian designer Bruno Pieters, the first major creative appointment Boss has made outside the company since the Milan fiasco. Pieters' collection of compass-cut coats, jackets and tunics wows this audience, which rises to give a standing ovation.