Creative Director — A Season at Maison Lievre

A four-round, advanced fashion/luxury simulation. You are the newly promoted Creative Director of Maison Lievre, a mid-tier Parisian ready-to-wear house (EUR 88M revenue, 11% EBIT) where a private-equity fund just took 60% and installed a commercially aggressive CEO.

The founder's grandson — you — has a fixed runway slot on 2 March at Paris Fashion Week, a hard EUR 2.4M collection budget, and a split mandate the role has never had to hold at once: runway acclaim AND a measurable lift in sell-through. Last season earned a Vogue rave but only 38% full-price sell-through (segment healthy is 65–70%), pushing 42% of the line into margin-destroying markdown.

The board now wants ≥62% sell-through, ≥3 tier-1 editorial placements, and the 4 anchor department-store doors (22% of wholesale) kept on side.

Across four rounds you (1) set the creative thesis and a deliberate novelty mix targeting 'optimal newness' rather than maximal novelty or maximal safety; (2) allocate the EUR 2.4M as a portfolio across novelty tiers, decide show-vs-product spend, and protect a contingency for the atelier's warned 18% overrun; (3) choose an explicit, defensible design-evaluation method (curatorial single-vision vs cross-functional panel vs data-anchored scoring) and resolve the Head of Design conflict over the radical show-anchor look — valuing it on portfolio editorial pull, not standalone margin; and (4) read the season result against the dual mandate and propose a repeatable creativity-evaluation and creative-governance model.

The math rewards optimal newness, portfolio budgeting with a real contingency, defensible cross-functional/data-anchored evaluation, keeping the statement look as the line's signal, and an honest governance answer — and punishes the five classic errors: maximising novelty to win the show, over-correcting to safe carry-overs, committing the full budget with no contingency, selecting by feel, and cutting the show anchor on its sell-through number alone.

Final KPIs track Full-Price Sell-Through %, Brand Heat (editorial pull and novelty), and Creative Governance (a repeatable, defensible process), against the EUR 2.4M cap.

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.