Geoffroy de la bourdonnaye biography of martin

LONDON — Geoffroy de La Bourdonnaye, the new chief executive at Liberty, doesn’t see much difference between marketing fashion items or fast-moving consumer goods.

A former Walt Disney Co. and PepsiCo Inc. executive, de La Bourdonnaye said the hardest part about breaking into the fashion business was persuading his colleagues he could speak the luxury lingo.

Before joining Liberty last summer, the 50-year-old French executive had served as president of Christian Lacroix for four years.

“The only challenge in making the transition from Disney to Lacroix was convincing people that I was legitimate in that world, that I was part of them,” said the steely-haired de La Bourdonnaye during an interview inside store founder Arthur Liberty’s wood-paneled boardroom.

“At Disney, I was taking stories and turning them into products,” he said.

“At Lacroix, I was taking ideas from the catwalk and turning them i