Herno talks current business trajectory amid uptown New York opening

In a world of marketing and data-driven creativity leading brands today, finding authentic products born from heritage, ingenuity, and provenance is rare. It’s also what makes something truly luxury. The Italian company Herno, widely regarded for its lightweight, capped sleeve and inventive puffers, is defined by the latter.

The brand, founded in 1948 in Lake Maggiore by Giuseppe Marenzi, is digging its heels into retail in the wake of a brand category expansion. FashionNetwork.com spoke to Claudio Marenzi, Giuseppe’s son, president, and chairman, about the brand’s current trajectory.

In the back ‘lounge’ section of the new Madison Avenue store, located next to Balenciaga and near a new McQueen store, Marenzi explained the strategy of positioning the store on the highly coveted strip of Madison just north of 57th Street.

“New York is a city where we could have 2, 3 or 4 stores as there are cities within cities here. We know that the Soho customers are different; they tend to be more tourists. Uptown, we have a local customer,” Marenzi said of the brand’s first store downtown, which opened in 2017.

He noted that customers there tend to be from other U.S. states, South America, or Asia, especially Japan, where the brand has been strong for years.

With a wholesale-to-retail breakdown of 75 percent wholesale and 25 percent retail, the stores are a spot for the brand to demonstrate its complete vision with its expanded knits and tailored ready-to-wear offerings in addition to outerwear.

“We would like to open more stores in the future, but we are still a wholesale company. Fifty percent of our distribution is in Europe, with Japan and the U.S. tied for second place. Ten years ago, Japan was four or five times bigger,” Marenzi noted.

Japan has been crucial to the company in more ways than one. While on a business trip there during a frigid, rainy season in 2008, the second-generation Herno brand leader purchased a thin, down-filled jacket that he layered underneath his Herno raincoat.

“I liked the look, so I thought we had to develop this idea of combining the ideas. The jacket, which was Issey Miyake, was made of stiff nylon. I wanted to make something soft and thin,” he recalled, describing the resulting 20 denier nylon that was durable yet lightweight and down injection process used in the new outerwear styles.

“It’s not how much down you have but the air between that the warmth depends on,” he added.

On a subsequent trip in 2011, Marenzi was thrilled to find a Billboard of Orlando Bloom wearing a down jacket he thought to be Herno until he saw the Uniqlo signage. He quickly realized their lightweight concept was being mass-produced. At first, he thought this spelled doom for Herno.

“I was worried this would finish us, but it was the opposite. Some people wanted the original, and then we further developed down,” he said.

He directed his traditional outerwear tailors to start applying these design principles to down fabric, creating leaner silhouettes than traditional down styles had previously offered.

In 2019, the brand—which also made a name for itself as a manufacturer especially known for its double-face wool by serving brands such as Jil Sander, Prada, Tom Ford, and Louis Vuitton during the Marc Jacobs era—began to focus on expanding its oeuvre.

“We to develop and learn to make products ourselves. We started a lab inside the company, first for knits, bringing in knit experts to develop, design prototypes, samples, and manufacture all in-house,” Marenzi said, pointing out their hybrid knits and down pieces.

For example, a fall offering is a lightweight hooded puffer that lines a chunky knit button sweater, allowing the sweater to serve as outerwear for the look while giving it a practical warmth layer.

It’s the sort of ingenuity that helped found the company. According to Marenzi, during WWII, his father worked in an airplane company, where he was in charge of creation and materials.

“At that time, there was oil mixed with gasoline. When the war ended, the oil was used to transform cotton raincoats into a waterproof coat,” he explained.

This upcycling and letting the available resources dictate the product also set the stage for the brand’s environmentally friendly stance. The company voluntarily measured how much natural resources were used to make their garments before B Corp. status existed.

Even the name, derived from the river Erno, relates to the vibe of communing with nature. While the Madison Avenue store exudes a sleek Italian-meet-New York vibe with its blonde wood walls and parquet floor, steel beams for hanging clothes that rest on wood and leather hangers, modern display tables made from wood accented with metal and smooth seating, many stores mimic the Lake Maggiore headquarters that is covered partially in flora and vegetation.

Since the youngest Marenzi fully took control of the brand’s reins when he bought the complete shares from the rest of his family in 2005, he maintains it’s all about the product.

“Everything is about the product, though now I understand we have to do marketing,” Marenzi admits.

In Herno’s case, those products speak to a lover of ‘quiet luxury’, the kind of folk who have a cap-sleeve barely-there puffer practically the same density as a thick sweatshirt in every color for spring days and summer nights when the mercury dips below 72 degrees fahrenheit.

“We have acquired new customers seeking this because it’s always been in that direction. I don’t like these words; it sounds sleepy, But yes, it’s luxury and tradition, so it’s a good time; now is our moment,” he said, adding, “Our offering is the perfect balance between quality and value—I am also a manufacturer, so I know the value of things. Right now, even the rich consumer is paying attention to the price, and at Herno, it’s a nice one.”

Before saying goodbye, Marenzi replied to a question regarding the massive construction site directly across the street. According to Marenzi and his team, it’s a commercial building being razed to construct another luxury residential property du jour. The executive didn’t seem concerned about any negative impacts during the demo and build. He knows that it will bring more locals closer to discovering the world of Herno.