Updated 12:51 p.m. EST on March 10
Hugo Boss said the company’s back-to-basics, profit-optimization strategy is working and this seemed to be borne out by the German brand’s results in the fourth quarter of last year.
Sales in the last three months of 2025 rose 7 percent, in currency adjusted terms, to 1.28 billion euros. This meant that over the whole year, revenues gained 2 percent to 4.27 billion euros.
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Hugo Boss also reported that operating profit improved by 22 percent in the fourth quarter.
Over all of 2025, operating profit rose by 8 percent to 391 million euros due to “a focus on productivity improvement and cost efficiency,” the company noted. Those numbers were above expectations of around 379 million euros, analysts from the likes of RBC, JPMorgan and Jefferies pointed out.
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The results were significant because the German menswear specialist’s sales growth consistently hovered around zero for all of 2025, falling and rising only one or two percentage points every quarter. The situation was similar in 2024. The stagnation came after two boom years of double-digit growth in 2022 and 2023 when the brand splurged on marketing and a redesign.
But last year Hugo Boss was forced to concede it was not going to hit the target of its “Claim 5” strategy, that of making 5 billion euros in sales by 2025.
“We are going to reach that one day,” Hugo Boss chief executive officer Daniel Grieder told journalists during an online press conference on Tuesday morning in Germany. “We are convinced the power of the brand is intact…but we are not ready to give any indication of the timing.”
In December, the company outlined a new strategy to deal with lackluster growth, saying it would prioritize quality growth over quantity, with more focus on profitability and cash generation. This would involve changes in distribution, the simplification of product lines and the closure of around 50 stores by 2028, executives said. However, Grieder added, no layoffs were planned.
“For me, 2025 marked a turning point,” he said, “not because of the financial outcome but because of the strategic direction we have set.”
The new strategy — which is being called “Claim 5 Touchdown” and which is to run through to 2028 — won’t necessarily bear fruit in 2026, Hugo Boss executives warned. “But I am confident that by the end of this year we will be operating from a strengthened position,” Grieder added.
Around three-quarters of the German brand’s business is made up by menswear and during 2025, sales of the more formal Boss menswear line grew by 3 percent.
However Boss womenswear sales slid 5 percent during the year while sales of Hugo, the company’s more casual line, decreased 4 percent.
That is why changes are planned for Hugo and the brand’s womenswear over the coming year.
Hugo has been the line that’s been more experimental in a fashion and lifestyle sense over the past few years, Grieder told WWD, particularly in North America. But what the company has realized is that customers resonate more with what Hugo Boss stands for — that is, its heritage as a purveyor of men’s formalwear and suiting.
“So we have adapted our collection to go back to that, to increase the proportion of contemporary suiting,” he explained. “So far [in terms of orders] it’s been very well received.”
As for womenswear for both the Boss and Hugo lines, the company recently appointed Kerstin Dorst to head its newly created womenswear division. Previously womenswear was an adjunct to the two lines but now has its own stand-alone division.
Dorst, who was with Tory Burch in New York for around 12 years in various senior roles, started in mid-January. She has already presented her analysis of what needs to happen with Hugo Boss’ womenswear, Grieder noted.
“She’s shown us her new ideas and it resonates well, so we are very positive that we will get traction there,” he said. “Going forward, womenswear has a big potential for Hugo Boss.”
In terms of sales territories, Hugo Boss’ home market of Europe, the Middle East and Africa achieved growth of 9 percent, currency adjusted, in the last quarter of 2025. This was mostly driven by positive sales in France and Germany and a successful holiday season, the company said.
In the Americas, Hugo Boss sales rose 6 percent in the fourth quarter, with Latin America seeing double-digit increases. Company executives stressed “sequential improvement and solid momentum in the U.S.”
In Asia-Pacific, sales slipped 1 percent in the fourth quarter. Hugo Boss has had problems in China, both with its image and its retail pricing, and saw sales fall in that region for most of last year.
It was growth in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, including strong results in Japan, that compensated for the moderate revenue decline in China, Hugo Boss explained.
Despite the relatively positive final quarter, Hugo Boss reiterated the guidance for 2026 it had already published late last year, when revealing the change in strategy.
The company predicts that sales revenues will fall in the mid- to high-single digits throughout the year and that Hugo Boss won’t return to growth until 2027. The brand also expects operating profit to decrease to between 300 million and 350 million euros, significantly less than market analysts had forecast.
After the 2025 results were announced, Hugo Boss’ stock rose 7 percent in early trading before settling around 3 percent up.
So far, the German company has yet to see any impact of the current conflict in the Middle East and its ramifications on oil prices, which briefly blew past the $100 a barrel barrier this week.
“We are looking daily at what’s happening in the Middle East but for us at the moment, we don’t see any consequences,” Grieder stated. So it is too early to make a statement on that issue. But if that changed, the company would adapt as necessary, he added.
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