When two men walked into Werner Baldessarini's fashion boutique in Munich and asked if he would sell their company's suits, the answer was no: not least because the suits were made in Germany and his stock was mostly Italian.
Undaunted, his visitors returned a few months later and asked Mr Baldessarini to join their company Hugo Boss as a designer. Eventually he agreed. That was 22 years ago. Last autumn he took charge by becoming chairman and chief executive.
When Mr Baldessarini (54) arrived, Boss was a small clothing manufacturer in Metzingen, on the outskirts of Stuttgart. It now owns one of the world's best-known clothing labels in Hugo Boss and the top-selling men's designer fragrance in Hugo.
Yet he has taken the helm at a time when Boss faces what could be its toughest challenge - launching a women's line. "We'd like to launch the women's collection next year but we'll wait till we're ready. It's too important to rush. There's no fixed timetable," Mr Baldessarini says.
Hugo Boss has reinvented itself before, notably in the early 1990s, when the sleek, sharp-shouldered style of power dressing, with which it had been so successful in the 1980s, fell out of fashion. Mr Baldessarini had helped to define that look with Jochen and Uwe Holy, the two men who "discovered" him in his Munich boutique.
Together, they turned Boss into a brand aimed at clothes-conscious yuppies who wanted to be thought to be wearing designer labels but could not afford Giorgio Armani and shied away from the outre styles of Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons.
By exerting rigorous control over a network of sub-contractors in lower-cost countries, Boss produced high-quality clothes at not-too-inaccessible prices; and a high-profile programme of golf, tennis and Formula One sponsorship raised awareness of its brand name.
The Holys lost control of the company in 1989 when, after an ill-starred US acquisition, they sold their majority stake to Leyton House, a Japanese trading company that subsequently sold it to Marzotto, the Italian textile group. The brothers left in 1992 and Marzotto appointed Peter Littmann, a German marketing whizz, as chairman.
Along with Mr Baldessarini he redefined the Boss look by introducing softer, sportier styles to the Hugo Boss collection. They also hired cutting edge photographers, such as Jurgen Teller, to shoot advertising for the younger Hugo range.
The sports sponsorship continued under Mr Littmann, but he also sought to create a more cerebral image for the brand by beginning an ambitious sponsorship scheme with the Guggenheim Museum. This has funded exhibitions and ad hoc projects, notably Jeff Koons' floral Puppy sculpture outside the Guggenheim Bilbao. The company also initiated the biannual Hugo Boss art prize.
Mr Littmann left Boss in early 1997 and Joachim Vogt, a former McKinsey consultant who had taken charge of production, became chairman. He departed last autumn and was replaced by Mr Baldessarini, who sees his role as restoring continuity.
"Joachim Vogt was a statistics man from McKinsey, whose world was very different from ours," he recalls. "We wanted to move in the same direction but had different ideas about how to get there. Fashion has a lot to do with emotion and that's very difficult for outsiders to understand."
Mr Baldessarini says his immediate priority is to "make the company less bureaucratic". He has little faith in the colour consultants, trend-spotters and style forecasters who advise many fashion groups, preferring to encourage his employees to respond to their instincts.
"Why would we want to work with consultants, who tell everybody the same things each season?" he says. "We do our own research while we're running around the world. If you consider things for too long, they never get done. The Swatch wouldn't have been launched if it had been researched."
He sees no need for another sea change in Boss's styling like the one he and Mr Littmann initiated in the early 1990s. Similarly, he claims to be happy with its advertising, although future campaigns will be less overtly masculine, as soon as a launch date is finalised for the women's collection.
An avid F1 fan, Mr Baldessarini is committed to continuing Boss's sports sponsorship. "It's been very important for us in making the brand well-known worldwide," he affirms. "How else could we have done it from a small town in Germany?"
However, he may seek changes on the arts front. "I'm happy with what we've achieved in our five-year relationship with the Guggenheim," he says. "We haven't decided exactly what we're going to do in future but I'll discuss it with Thomas Krenz (the Guggenheim's director) this month."
Despite the boardroom turbulence, Boss's trading performance has remained robust in recent years. Its exposure to Asia is so slight that, unlike other expensive European brands, it emerged unscathed from the Asian economic downturn to raise turnover from DM1.14 billion (€580 million) in 1997 to roughly DM1.4 billion last year. Mr Baldessarini expects continued growth.
