I’m betting £995 is the right price for a handbag

“The new trend is what I call a constructed bag,” Andretta says. “When you have an Alexa, which is a soft bag, when you put it on the chair or table, it’s going thwooock.” His hands indicate a formless shape collapsing.

“It’s not even something the company did wrong, simply that the product was going out of cycle. If one day everyone will ask only for electric car, I think it will be difficult to sell Rolls-Royce.”

Stooped and intense, wearing a blazer and black trainers, Andretta lays on a tour of the display area. He picks out a few items he hopes will turn the tide.

First there is a remake of the classic Bayswater bag in a smaller size. “Inside is lined with real leather,” the boss says. The price is £795. Then there are “rock” versions of other styles, accessorised with studs and chains, which are due to hit the shelves in July.

Andretta also shows off a bag with a two-tone zip, the Camden. It is the fruit of a wrestle with Mulberry’s latest creative director, Johnny Coca, who was poached from the luxury label Céline.

“If you really want to be respected by Johnny you need to push so hard that he has to decide this is better than Céline,” Andretta says.

“On this bag I said we can match the zip colour with the leather and he told me that Céline was not able to do this. I said Céline is Céline, we can do it at Mulberry — and in the end we did.”

Andretta, 59 , has impeccable fashion credentials — his CV includes Moschino, Gucci, LVMH and Céline — but he looks pleasingly crumpled as he settles into a chair in a meeting room. He hunches over a glass of water, tapping it rhythmically on the table as he answers questions.

Mulberry’s boss manages to be even more European than his French predecessor. He speaks with a shifting accent, the result of an upbringing spent flitting between Toulouse, his mother’s city, and Venice, his father’s home. Andretta senior was an antiques dealer (“I personally don’t like so much — I’m more interested in modern design”) and his mother looked after the family.

The first move from France to Italy came when Andretta was seven. “I knew only French. I was totally shocked because I went to school and came home and said, ‘Mama, there is a teacher in front of me and I understand not a word.’ ”

He read business studies at university in Venice, then became a sales manager for a leather tannery whose customers included Dior and Hermès. Before long, a client asked him to help with its accessories business. “This was at the end of the Seventies,” Andretta says. “It was a moment when buying the raw material, the leather, at the right price was critical.”

He joined Mulberry’s board as a non-executive director in June 2014, three months after the majority shareholder, Singaporean “Queen of Bond Street” Christina Ong, ran out of patience with Guillon.

In February that year, in a last roll of the dice, Guillon had unveiled a collaboration with the supermodel Cara Delevingne, harking back to the tie-up with model-turned-presenter Alexa Chung. Whereas the Alexa was priced at £695 when it debuted in 2009, the Cara range was pitched at £795 to £2,500. Today the cheapest Alexa is £1,100, and the Cara range goes up to £7,500 on the website.

Andretta maintains that linking with Delevingne was a “good thing”, and insists that “it’s impossible to say” the era of celebrity endorsement is over, but says: “This moment we need to support the new creative director, so we must be more behind Mulberry and Johnny.”

His main point is that, while “you can really go up [in price], your core product must stay in the range, and Johnny is truly committed to this”. For Mulberry, the range is £500 to £995, he says.

Andretta, who joined from the jeweller Buccelatti, is reluctant to describe Guillon’s attempt to push the brand upmarket and increase its exclusivity as a mistake. “It was perhaps that they considered an opportunity that was not an opportunity, because it’s difficult to try to change the DNA of the brand,” he says.

“Mulberry is an accessible brand for a lot of people. For a lot of people, spending £500 to £995 is a lot of money. For some others it’s not, but you have to respect this kind of thing.”

Half-year results last December hinted at stabilisation after several years of woe. Sales grew 5% and the business swung from a £1.1m pre-tax loss to a £100,000 profit. Online sales increased by 20%, but wholesale deliveries dropped 11%, reflecting both a slowdown in Asian demand and efforts by Mulberry to control distribution.

Coca, who filled the creative director’s seat last July — 18 months after Emma Hill’s departure — unveiled his maiden collection at London Fashion Week in February. The 40-year-old has talked about improving the functionality of Mulberry’s bags, for example, making the clasp plate smaller on the Bayswater.

Julian Easthope, an analyst at Barclays, Mulberry’s house broker, reckons Coca’s debut was “the key thing”. “He’s got some interesting designs and advertising that’s slightly away from the home counties set,” Easthope said.

Andretta likes to keep an eye on the design process “because the normal tendency of a designer is trying to give you always more and more quality, more and more ways to dream, and normally that means more cost and a price is not perfectly respecting your goal”.

Some analysts have suggested that mid-market rivals such as Coach and Michael Kors muscled ahead of Mulberry during its management and design hiatus. Andretta rejects this. The business, founded in 1971 by Roger Saul in his garage in Somerset, still makes half its products at two factories in the county. It employs 600 craftsmen and women and 250 other staff there.

Andretta points out that Mulberry has a dozen people dedicated to repairing customers’ old bags, replacing torn lining and so on. “It’s quite impressive that people, after 20 or 30 years of use, give us their bag to repair because they have a lot of affection for the thing — it’s not about money,” he says. “In the industry, you have only Vuitton and Chanel that are doing this.”

Coach and Michael Kors, in contrast, are “multibillion brands” that “play the made-in-China [game]”. “Mulberry is where you start with the real product, made in Europe,” Andretta says.

Do customers appreciate that? “Si. Consumers perceive perfectly.”

Mulberry’s backers “would like it a lot” if it eventually became a multibillion-pound beast, Andretta concedes, but “I think I would not like it personally”. He believes it is more realistic to aim for £500m of sales in the next few years. Despite its fame in Britain, Mulberry is less well-known abroad and turned over a total of less than £150m last year.

“When you go over £500m, from my personal point of view . . . in the end you are less driven by creativity and giving a great product to the customer,” he says. “You are really driven by numbers of units, variation, colour, pallet, price, size. It’s becoming a more complex machine.”

Andretta is targeting international expansion, particularly in China and Hong Kong. Although he says Mulberry can grow its number of stores in the People’s Republic from three to twenty, he wants to use the internet as the main portal for overseas growth.

For London Fashion Week, Mulberry drafted in a 20-strong “digital task force” to help its online team with filming clips and uploading them. “We started bombarding social media. We put a lot of things online immediately after the show to maximise the investment,” he says.

Andretta mentions a friend who runs Dior in China. “He called me three days after the show and said, ‘What is happening?’ People in his office found it on social media in China. We had 25m contacts. Never happened before — we never reached 1m in our previous life.”

Exactly an hour into our interview, a landline rings and Andretta scurries off. Those handbags won’t sell themselves — at any price.

The life of Thierry Andretta

Vital statistics

Big-screen action hero: Kurt Russell

Born: April 25, 1957
Family status: married, two children
School: various. “My family moved to Italy, then back to France, then back to Italy”
University: Ca’Foscari, Venice
First job: tannery sales manager
Pay: undisclosed. Previous chief took £708,000 in final year.
Homes: London and Paris
Cars: Jaguar XK120 and electric BMW i3
Favourite book: Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
Film: Escape from New York
Music: Pink Floyd
Gadget: Lanvin trainers
Charity: Mitsubishi Corp Fund for Europe & Africa
Last holiday: skiing in Italy

Working day
The chief executive of Mulberry gets up before 7am at his home in Mayfair, central London, and has breakfast with his wife and two children, aged 3 and 5. If he has a busy day ahead, Thierry Andretta rides his Vespa to the company’s headquarters in Kensington for 8am. If he has more time, he takes his eldest child to school and arrives at 9am. Andretta tries to keep three hours free in the morning, “so I can do a point about the day, a point about the previous day”. From 11am until 7pm he is fully booked: “Meeting, meeting, meeting.” He likes to eat out after work. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, in Knightsbridge, is his current favourite.

Downtime
Andretta used to scuba dive, play tennis and run. “It was a shock when I had kids, so they’re enough now,” he says. He has a collection of 25 vintage motorbikes, including a Triumph T100R .