August · Christian Louboutin Confidential
Responsive Working Transformation
A case study, by invitation.
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Prepared by August · aug.co
Christian Louboutin
Prepared for Viviane Seck-Morin & Anne Raynal · July 2026 · Confidential
Responsive Working transformation.
A brief background on August and a case study
from a global luxury fashion and beauty brand.
Prepared by August · aug.co August
What's Inside

Contents

1
Hello from August
Who we are and what makes us different.
2
Introducing the case study
What a global luxury fashion and beauty brand was facing.
3
What is Responsive Working?
The mindsets and practices at the heart of the transformation.
4
The outcomes
What the program built, and how the house performed.
5
Structure and timeline
How the work unfolded across four years, with a closer look at one project.
6
How we worked together
The engagement model, and what comes next.
01 · Hello From August
August is the world's leading partner for
visionary leaders who want to
transform the way they work
01 · Hello From August

What makes August different

Ten years making new ways of working stick.
→
Embedded, not slideware. We work side by side with leaders and teams, in real meetings and real decisions, not in a workshop bubble.
→
Practical, not academic. We translate principles into concrete everyday practices. Change lasts when people prefer the new way of working to the old one.
→
Built to hand off. We train and certify internal coaches and champions, so the capability becomes yours rather than a permanent consulting dependency.
01 · Hello From August

Trusted by global companies, including some of the world's most valuable brands

A decade of ways-of-working transformation across
luxury, beauty, consumer goods, and technology.
Chanel
Estee Lauder
Bayer
L'Oreal
Talbots
Marriott
Google
Colgate-Palmolive
PepsiCo
Autodesk
02 · Introducing the Case Study
From heritage house to responsive house.
A multi-year transformation inside a global luxury fashion and beauty brand (client details anonymized).
02 · Introducing the Case Study

The ground was moving

1
The anchor channel was fading
The department store, long the backbone of US luxury distribution, was in structural decline. The customer was moving to specialty retail, e-commerce, and social channels.
2
The customer was changing faster than the house
Inside, people asked out loud whether the brand was moving fast enough to meet her where she was, and how she wanted to shop.
3
Decisions climbed and stalled
Anchored in heritage, the organization had grown careful. Decisions traveled up hierarchies and waited. People struggled to move projects forward.
4
And the brand could not be put at risk
Any new way of working had to protect a century of brand equity. Experimentation had to be made safe, not reckless.
02 · Introducing the Case Study

Why waiting wasn't an option

Two stories were unfolding at once: the house's own results were slipping, while the category around it kept growing.

The house was struggling

2 yrs
of consecutive declining results, 2015 and 2016
Company holding filings, via FashionNetwork
-35%
net income in 2016, on revenue down 9%
Company holding filings, 2017

The growth was happening without them

+150%
growth in online beauty sales since 2013, against +6% in department stores
CNBC, 2019
$1B
gained per year by specialty beauty retail, 2015 to 2019
WWD / WSL Strategic Retail
A big, beloved brand, missing growth that was there for the taking. Capturing it required no new strategy and no new talent. It required a better way of working.
In Their Words, Before
“It's so hard to make decisions here.”
“Are we moving fast enough to meet the customer
where she is and how she wants to shop?”
Head of Customer Insights
03 · What is Responsive?
Responsive Working is a fundamental shift in the way we collaborate, decide, and learn.
A set of mindsets and practices that unlock a team's potential in the face of uncertainty and complexity. It is what the house adopted, and what the rest of this story is built on.
03 · What is Responsive?

Six Responsive Working mindsets that change how work feels

01
Bias for action
Move work along by taking small steps toward a larger goal or outcome.
02
Safe to try
Progress over perfection. Find the version that is safe to try and doesn't harm the business.
03
Learn as you go
Pause and reflect on what's working, what's not, and what to do differently, so you can speed up.
04
Meet with purpose
Every meeting has an explicit purpose: action, collaborate, demo, or learn.
05
Work in progress
Share work openly and frequently to invite continual feedback and avoid grand reveals.
06
Experiment and iterate
Make things instead of talking about things. Mock it up, share it, and keep iterating.
03 · What is Responsive?

Practices that replace old habits

Simple, repeatable, and learnable in a session. These are the actual practices the house adopted. Click any card to see the shift it creates.
Rounds
Everyone speaks, one at a time.
Rounds
From unstructured discussion dominated by the loudest voice
To structured input from everyone in the room.
Meet with Purpose
Make every meeting count.
Meet with Purpose
From status meetings with no clear outcomes or next steps
To action-oriented, collaborative team output.
Work in Progress
Share the work as you go.
Work in Progress
From grand reveals and version-control fatigue
To shared, editable documents and continuous iteration.
Consent-Based Decision Making
Decide what's safe to try.
Consent-Based Decision Making
From consensus, where everyone must agree
To ideas that are safe to try, test, and learn from.
Guiding Principles
Brief statements that clarify intent.
Guiding Principles
From enforcing rules and policies
To teams deciding how to work best in moments of uncertainty.
Team Charter
Mission, roles, and decision rights, explicit.
Team Charter
From large matrixed teams without clear roles
To tightly aligned, purpose-driven teams.
Retrospective
Get better on purpose.
Retrospective
From long feedback loops that develop individuals only
To teams improving together on a regular cadence.
04 · The Outcomes
What did the program achieve?
What the Responsive Working program built inside the house,
and how the house has performed since.
04 · The Outcomes

What the program built

By the program's later years, new ways of working had a name, a toolkit, and an internal engine of its own.
60+
internal coaches trained and certified across the organization
Program records
1,000
change agents connected in a global community, online and off
4
markets where the work took root, spanning three continents
10
global priority projects accelerated with new ways of working
04 · The Outcomes

How the house has performed since

The transformation ran from 2016 to 2020. In 2017, its first full year, the house returned to double-digit growth and sustained it through the end of the engagement. Many forces drive any brand's performance; new ways of working are one way the house went after them.

Before · 2015-2016

2 yrs
of consecutive declining sales and profits
-35%
net income in 2016

During · 2017-2019

+11%
return to growth in 2017, the transformation's first full year
+28%
revenue growth over the engagement, from $9.6B in 2017 to $12.3B in 2019
The house has continued to grow in the years since. We hold the claim to what we can verify: the turnaround began while the transformation was underway.
Company annual results; CNN Business; FashionNetwork
05 · Structure and Timeline
How the work unfolded.
The activities, the four-year arc, and a closer look at one project along the way.
05 · Structure and Timeline

Four years, one arc

Each phase earned the next: proof before conditions, conditions before acceleration, acceleration before scale.
2016
Prove it small
A leadership development pilot. 100% of participants preferred the new practices to their old ones.
2017
Set the conditions
CHRO-sponsored launch. Top leaders primed, priority teams piloted, first internal coaches grown.
2018
Move the business
New ways of working applied to priority projects across beauty, fashion, and technology.
2019-20
Scale and hand off
A branded internal movement: certified coach network, online hub, and a global champion community.
Why that order: leaders had to experience the shift before they could sponsor it, and the business had to see results before the organization would scale them.
05 · Structure and Timeline

The program elements behind the change

Four kinds of work, run in parallel and reinforcing each other across the arc of the program.
COACH
Coached real teams
Embedded with priority business teams, running weekly rhythms of planning, shipping, and reflection against live business goals.
TRAIN
Trained leaders
Prepared top leadership to model new mindsets, from strategy and governance practices to everyday decision-making.
CODIFY
Built the playbook
Codified what worked into a branded internal toolkit: practice guides, videos, trainings, and an online hub.
SCALE
Grew internal capability
Trained and certified internal coaches and champions, so the capability lived inside the house rather than with us.
2016 · Prove it small
2017 · Set the conditions
2018 · Move the business
2019-20 · Scale and hand off
A Closer Look · The Beauty Division

From the boardroom to the shop floor

A double-click into one of the priority projects made possible by the conditions set in 2017. By 2018, with the partnership still active, the new ways of working were producing results the market could see: the beauty division's first move into specialty retail, a decision that touched a century of brand equity.
THE CHALLENGE
Enter specialty retail, safely
The house had never sold beauty outside its own counters and boutiques. The move was existential for the channel strategy, and the brand could not be diluted.
THE APPROACH
Location by location
The team planned the entry store by store, sprint by sprint: demographics, placement, and experience, learning from each door before opening the next.
THE RESULT
A new anchor channel
What began as an edited assortment in a handful of doors is now in hundreds of locations and online, a cornerstone of the division's growth strategy.
The same sprint-and-crit approach was later used to reimagine the house's flagship retail experience, with interns and senior leaders designing side by side.
06 · How We Worked Together
How we worked together.
The engagement model, the unlock, and what their people say now.
06 · How We Worked Together

The engagement model

1
Ten scopes, eight sponsors
Not one monolithic program: a sequence of focused engagements across four years, each with a clear sponsor and mission.
2
We followed the energy
Each scope went where leaders invited us, building on demonstrated results rather than mandated rollouts.
3
Small, embedded teams
Two to three August partners at a time, working inside the house's real meetings and decisions, not outside them.
4
Four-week cycles
Align on Monday, ship on Friday, adapt between. Work scoped and delivered in cycles, so it stayed nimble and visible.
5
Designed to hand off
Every scope grew internal capacity, so the movement kept compounding after August stepped back.
The Unlock
The risk was in not experimenting.
A heritage brand is not fragile. New ways of working made it safe to test the future, without devaluing what a century had built.
In Their Words, After
“There's no going back.”
“When we get together now, it's so clear that this is the way we need to move in the future.”
SVP People Management
“It clicked and we've taken off.”
“We are focusing on the right problem. We're focusing on the right questions, and we are efficient in addressing it.”
VP Finance
What Comes Next

Imagine this at Christian Louboutin

Independent, beloved, and free to move: few houses are better positioned to make new ways of working a competitive advantage. To make our July 27 conversation concrete, we will come with three questions. You are warmly invited to bring your own first answers.
01
Where does slow decision-making cost Christian Louboutin the most today?
02
Which live priority would you want a responsive team to accelerate first?
03
Who are the natural champions a movement could start with?
Karina Mangu-Ward & Jessie Punia, Partners, August
Christian Louboutin + August August
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