Freddy, the leading Italian brand of fitness and dancewear, will open its biggest store in London’s Covent Garden next March. Measuring about 300 square meters, it will take two of the three floors of a building in the district. The third floor will house an office and a showroom for the important UK market. A country manager is being recruited.
The company opened a few weeks ago a 200-m² store on Rome’s prestigious Via Frattina. It already has two stores in Milan, one of which is seated in the city’s famous La Scala opera house, and another one in the Italian city of Verona. Fresh from a licensing deal with Itochu, Freddy already has two stores in Tokyo.
Freddy’s revenues grew by 4-5 percent in 2007 to an estimated €57 million, but the company’s founder and chief executive, Carlo Freddi, is projecting a sales increase of more than 10 percent in 2008. One of the drivers will be the contract recently signed by the brand with the Italian Olympic Committee, giving it the right to outfit the big Italian delegations to the Olympics in Beijing and Vancouver.
The Olympic deal will cost Freddy more than €10 million over the duration of the contract. The company is very profitable, but it continues to invest about 15 percent of sales on advertising and promotion, excluding the new retail initiatives, and 5 percent on R&D and design.
Among other actions, it sponsors Fama, a daily dance show on Spanish television. Freddy, which had a big stand at the recent Bread & Butter fair in Barcelona, recently hired Alex Belles as its agent in Spain. He continues to act as general manager of Sergio Tacchini in Spain, where this other Italian company has down-sized its operations sharply, like in France. Freddy previously hired Sergio Tacchini’s former French country manager, Jean-Michel Guerin, as its sales agent for France.
