Give feedback about this article

Bulgari is a high end jewelry and fashion company based in the heart of Italy, that also has a heart of gold. The company has been ahead of the curve in adopting social responsibility values and takes pride in supporting both emergency and long term initiatives ranging from art, culture, sustainability, the environment, and education. Bulgaris partnership with Save the Children...has raised nearly $100 million since it began in 2009 (Shirley, 2021, p.2). When the COVID19 pandemic hit, every business across the globe was financially hit, luxury retailers being hit the hardest. Even in a time when revenue for the high fashion industry is at an all-time low, Bulgari, led by Jean-Chistophe Babin, completely switched gears in production and converted their fragrance factory into a sanitization gel manufacturing facility. Further on into the pandemic, the company donated to key research foundations, most notably to the fund that supported the AstraZeneca vaccine research. Another area that Bulgari is ahead of the rest of the corporate world is in their female management, where 62% of company management is female (Shirley, 2021). Babin touts that Bulgari is an equal opportunity employer that has a mission to spread joy to their customers as much as their employees.

Stakeholders in Bulgari take pride in their companys social responsibility initiatives, which Babin even notes in the article that even in tough times during the COVID19 pandemic, [they] had the trust of the shareholders to spend millions to contribute to a cause (Shirley, 2021, p.8). The company gives to their sponsored initiatives, even outside of a global pandemic, because their social responsibility is held within the core values of the company. The shareholders support the use of dividends for these social causes, and their customer based is even swayed from competing brands because of their social initiatives.

Reading the article on Forbes, the statistics about Bulgaris management being 62% women was impressive to me, but mostly because there is not an initiative within the company to hire a certain amount of women In leadership roles. The company does not hire based off of statistics, but rather off of value and Babin notes that their method has been successful in creating diverse teams that produce higher quality merchandise than those of less diverse ones. I also think it is commendable for a company, especially one in luxury items that would clearly be suffering significantly in a global pandemic, to repurpose its own facilities without the intention of making profit and to donate its products to a united cause.