Autry has hired a chief executive to make its international growth “structured and agile”. The adjectives are the admission. Its expansion abroad was demand the brand received rather than distribution it built. Danilo Piarulli has been hired to convert one into the other.

The same statement lists four priorities: direct retail, selective distribution, geographical expansion, brand consolidation. Three of those are one priority in three registers of politeness. The fourth is what a brand gets once it stops letting other people decide where it appears.

Revived in 2019 around a dormant Texan trademark, Autry was carried abroad by its stockists: sneaker boutiques in Hamburg and Frankfurt, then KaDeWe in Berlin and Galeries Lafayette in Paris. The brand supplied; the shops did the choosing. Growth of that kind is not a strategy; it is a queue.

The queue has a length. Autry closed 2022 at a hundred million euros. Mauro Grange, chief executive of the holding company above it, wanted two years to double that number — as La Conceria reported. Nearly four have gone by.

Piarulli names the problem more politely. Autry is moving from “a product-driven success” to “a truly global brand”, he says, and the remedy is direct-to-consumer. Product-driven is the courteous term for demand nobody organised.

66 per cent of the business sat outside Italy by 2023, and the owners wanted the home share lower still. Then Korea: Autry cut its local distribution contract outright and incorporated a subsidiary to sell direct.

Roberta Benaglia, who chairs the brand for owner Style Capital, told WWD the market was too exposed to grey-market goods. Korea’s distribution route had belonged to someone else; taking it back meant building a subsidiary from nothing.

Wholesale is a brand’s revenue and another company’s customer.

Piarulli spent thirteen years at Golden Goose, arriving as chief financial officer and leaving as chief consumer officer. That business closed 2025 with 232 directly operated stores and 81 per cent of revenue sold direct, against 77 per cent the year before. Golden Goose has separately installed Gemini in selected shops.

Autry has twelve stores and turnover of €150 million earned through wholesale. Nobody installs anything in a shop whose lease belongs to somebody else. Piarulli has been hired to take Autry abroad; most of abroad is already selling it, on another firm’s account.