Since former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts joined Apple as senior vice president of retail, many have wondered what she’s been doing.
A piece by a New York Times fashion writer in October was headlined: “The Mysterious Case of Apple and the Elusive Angela Ahrendts,” adding that she’d “largely disappeared from public view” after joining the company in 2013 for a reported $82.6 million pay package.
A retail consultant told Fortune last fall, “My struggle with understanding what she does is I don’t know where her imprint is, other than the obvious.”
Well, it seems the exec has been tinkering with the retail staff’s T-shirts! One New York fashion insider noticed a new look on employees behind the Genius Bar this week, and told us, “Darling! I was at the Apple Store and a ‘genius’ told me that the new boss from Burberry has changed the color of the T-shirts and made the Apple logo much smaller, and demanded staff no longer wear name tags.”
The source added of the techie, dorky name tags that once dangled ’round employee necks, Ahrendts “thought they were ugly and not stylish.” “The customers know who we are,” the Genius Bar staffer said.
Others have noticed that employees were recently wearing bright green shirts with the smaller logos, but as of last Sunday all changed to a more staid navy blue with the small Apple logo in an upper corner.
“The green ones were for Earth Day,” an insider said, but added that the staff at Apple’s flagship Fifth Avenue store wore them for about eight weeks past April 22. The new shirts will change color, with red for the holidays and other hues for new product launches in the future. But does that merit an $82.6 million salary?
Ahrendts has said her goal is to make the stores “sleeker and smarter,” and created the Genius Bar’s concierge service. But she’s reportedly been less of a presence promoting the Apple Watch. Either way, a rep for Apple said that the logo on the T-shirt change happened “some time ago.”
In May, Ahrendts also announced plans for an ambitious new Apple store in San Francisco’s Union Square that will feature services the company said it plans to rollout to stores worldwide. She said in the announcement, “We are not just evolving our store design, but its purpose and greater role in the community as we educate and entertain visitors and serve our network of local entrepreneurs.”