In an industry obsessed with cutting corners, there are few fashion apparel brands that can offer exceptional quality, fashion-forward designs, product innovation and master-level tailoring. Kiton is one that does.
In fact, the Italian company is so focused on quality and craftsmanship that it controls its own supply chain and has its own tailoring school.
“Kiton is synonymous of quality, a quality that is recognized all over the world and is explained not only by the quality of raw materials and finished products. Kiton is also recognized for its relational quality, both at the commercial level with wholesale and final customers and with local institutions,” Antonio De Matteis – Kiton Ceo said. “Moreover, Kiton is synonymous with well-being: all employees benefit from social welfare in a way that is hard to find elsewhere.”
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Indeed, Kiton prides itself for having a high-level of social sustainability where the family owners and their employees are totally complementary. “In the company, the doors of the offices are always open for both employees and managers, who are always available to share ideas and receive suggestions from workers,” Antonio De Matteis noted.
“Kiton is a family, which believes in its employees and creates well-being for them,” said Antonio De Matteis. “Compared to the artisan sector, the level of employees’ salaries is very high while the high tailoring school has a strong social impact, reaching out to local young people, aiming to offer them an opportunity for training but at the same time to restore dignity and to preserve the tailor’s job.”
That commitment to employees is likely why Kiton succeeds so well and leads the market in innovation and quality. It also differentiates itself by the extraordinary quality of materials sourced, which is guaranteed due to the full control of the production process. Indeed, the entire supply chain is owned by the Kiton group and the Paone family. “With five owned production sites, Kiton has acquired the ability to experiment and the capacity to create unique fabrics through continuous research,” Antonio De Matteis said.
All these efforts are meant to meet the discerning fashion demands of the Kiton customer, who is constantly looking for a quality and innovative product and has an obsessive attention to detail. The Kiton customer seeks a high level of service “that is equal (if not superior) to the intrinsic quality of the product,” Antonio De Matteis said, adding that Kiton relates to the customer “with a policy of quality as well as continuous textile and stylistic research.”
Kiton is also nimble at reading the market and meeting the needs of fashion apparel shoppers — men and women alike. Antonio De Matteis said the market has changed in this post-pandemic period — especially regarding consumer attitudes and preferences. “Today, the guideline for customer buying is precision: purchases are much more precise and targeted with a high increase in the demand for formal wear,” Antonio De Matteis said. “People have returned to wearing suits and ties, plus, today, men like to change several times throughout the day, and this has led to an increasing demand for casual wear.”
Meanwhile, women’s wear is increasingly becoming a larger part of Kiton’s business. Just over the past five years, Kiton’s women’s collection has gone from garnering 5 percent of sales to now reaching 20 percent. The company said was due to an increasingly accurate and precise stylistic message as well as the development of the distribution network. As a result, Kiton boutiques in Rome and Milan now see half of the merchandise sold in women’s wear. And at the Madison Avenue store in New York, 70 percent of sales are women’s apparel.
From here, Kiton’s future will be under the name of elegance, precision, and continuity, which are “three key words for Kiton and part of its DNA.”
In closing, Kiton is a company that never stops, and that adds something every day. “Our company motto ‘day by day, step by step, door to door, we never stop’ is simply an update of the one created by the founder, my uncle Ciro, ‘the best of the best, plus one,” Antonio De Matteis said.
“We want to continue the process of innovation both in the raw material and in the final product, develop the retail and wholesale channels, invest in marketing which today is a central asset and expand our accessories market.”