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The Founder's Notes

Founder index · Prada Group · b. 1949

Miuccia Prada

The lesson that travels

“The most valuable thing a creative leader can build is a second place to put the ideas that do not fit the first one. Miu Miu cost almost nothing to start and is now a third of the company.”

Miuccia Prada has a doctorate in political science from the University of Milan, spent five years training in mime at the Piccolo Teatro, and was a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party when she took over her grandfather's failing luggage firm in 1978. She has said, repeatedly and without much comfort, that she found fashion an embarrassing thing for a woman with her politics to do. That discomfort is the whole aesthetic: forty years of clothes that argue with the idea of clothes.

The business partnership matters as much as the design. She met Patrizio Bertelli, a leather manufacturer from Arezzo, in 1977; he told her the family's bags were badly made. They married in 1987 and ran the company together for three decades — she made the product, he built the factories and the balance sheet. Prada Group's defining structural feature, the ownership of 25 industrial facilities, is his contribution, not hers.

What makes her the strongest case in this file is that she is the only designer in the modern industry to have built two globally significant brands. Prada is the intellectual one: nylon in 1984, ugly-pretty in the 1990s, austerity now. Miu Miu, launched in 1993 under her own childhood nickname, is the one where the ideas that were too young, too fast or too silly for Prada were allowed to go. For thirty years it was the smaller brand. In 2025 it produced €1.79 billion of net revenues, grew 29.7%, out-sold Prada on a per-store basis and delivered all of the group's growth while the Prada brand shrank 4.8%.

She is 77 and shares creative direction of Prada with Raf Simons — a succession structure most houses in this library would envy. She shares Miu Miu with nobody, which is the single largest unpriced risk at Prada Group.

§01 — The hard calls

  1. 1978

    Take over a failing family firm she considered politically indefensible, rather than let it be sold.

    The company she did not want became, within fifteen years, a global house and the platform for everything else. The founder, her grandfather Mario, had believed women had no place in business.

  2. 1984

    Make the signature product out of Pocono, an industrial parachute nylon used on military tents, instead of leather.

    It cost less than leather and read as more expensive. Prada spends the next forty years selling the refusal of obvious luxury to luxury customers — the cleanest counter-position in the industry.

  3. 1993

    Launch Miu Miu as a separate brand with its own name, its own show and eventually its own fashion week, rather than as a Prada diffusion line.

    Thirty-two years later it is €1.79 billion of net revenues and 31.3% of Prada Group. Almost every rival's second line was a cheaper version of the first, and almost every one of them was quietly killed.

  4. 1999

    Buy Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Church's and 45% of Fendi, spending real money to become a conglomerate.

    The worst decision of her career. Fendi was sold back within two years, Jil Sander and Helmut Lang by 2006, all at a loss of money and a decade of attention. Prada Group did not attempt another large acquisition until Versace in 2025.

  5. 2020

    Appoint Raf Simons as co-creative director of Prada — an equal, not an assistant or a named successor.

    Succession at the Prada brand is now visibly de-risked, five years before it becomes urgent. The identical structure has not been applied at Miu Miu, the brand carrying the group's growth.

§02 — Around this founder