Technical


This will be good


After two decades spent leading Nautor’s Swan to ever great innovation and success, Star world champion and America’s Cup veteran Enrico Chieffi has now taken over the helm at SLAM Clothing...


To succeed in the clothing world means accepting that the environment will be fiercely competitive. The pace of change at the high-performance end of the sport has triggered a new wave of technical clothing which has seen the competition increase even further. Which is one reason why SLAM’s new CEO Enrico Chieffi is not only well-suited to the job, but is fired up about the task ahead. Many will know Chieffi as the


highly accomplished Italian Olympic sailor, a multiple world champion, America’s Cup tactician and lifelong devotee to sailing. Others know him for his pivotal role at Nautor’s Swan as vice president where he spent well over two decades shaping a new future for the shipyard, most notably in the performance world. Chieffi likes nothing more than a big challenge and fierce competition, which makes him perfect for SLAM. Appointed as CEO in the late


summer last year, the last 12months have been full-on for Chieffi and his teamas they took a fundamental look at every aspect of the company’s business fromits product lines to the way in which clothing was designed, built and supplied.


58 SEAHORSE ‘Being a competitive sailor, you


learn to judge the immediate issues but also to look well ahead for opportunities. Being successful also means being prepared to make big changes. This kind of thinking comes naturally to racing sailors and are aspects that are important in any business,’ he says. Applying that foresight and


making the bold changes resulted in SLAM launching a new a significantly different catalogue in Milan in May this year at an event that surprised even Chieffi. ‘We were expecting 120 people to attend but we actually had 260 from all over Europe,’ he says. ‘This was an impressive indication of the interest that we had created in a short space of time.’ Knowing how much had changed


perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. ‘When I joined, the company had over 600 different items and garments or SKUs [Stock Keeping Units] as they are known in manufacturing. And that was before colours and sizes were taken into account. So, we started by taking a blank sheet of paper and going right back to basics to establish what our objectives were and how we would develop a strategy to match.


Above and right: just as competitive on the water as he is in business, Enrico Chieffi is the current European champion in the Star class as well as a past world champion in both the Star and the 470. He also created the ClubSwan division of Nautor and played a major role in two AC campaigns


‘We knew we wanted to be a


technical company and to produce high-quality clothing for sailors. This led us to take a close look at the collection and assess each item on the basis of why it was required and how it would fit with other items in the collection. The result was a reduction from 600 to 125 items.’ ‘From this smaller collection we


were then able to create a structure of more than a thousand clothing systems and combinations to cover the wide range of activities within the sport and the variety of conditions in which they would be used. In basic terms, combinations such as cold/dry, cold/wet, hot/wet, hot/dry etc. ‘The next stage was to validate our


designs and establish credibility with the best sailors in our sport so we decided to sponsor the Italian Sailing


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