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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2018

  Coco Chanel: From Fashion Icon to Nazi Agent

  Geoffrey Jones and Emily Grandjean

  Case describes the career of the iconic French fashion designer Coco Chanel who created a transformational business during the first half of the twentieth century. The case describes how she leveraged relationships to build her fashion business and legendary luxury brand based on understated elegance. Chanel famous little black dress was accompanied by many other innovations including the use of jersey as material and her development of the Chanel No. 5 perfume. The case pays close attention to the importance of Chanel’s networks among artists and European high society. It explores how she embraced the Anti-Semitism widely found in that society at that time period. During World War 2 Chanel lived in the Ritz hotel in Paris in occupied France in a relationship with a high-ranking German intelligence officer. She herself became an intelligence operative for Nazi Germany. The case ends with Chanel in Switzerland in 1945 after she had left France after the Liberation by Allied forces. This case can be used to explore multiple issues including creating and building an iconic fashion brand; female entrepreneurship; and ethical responsibility of business.

  Keywords: Business History; Biography; Entrepreneurship; Relationships; Brands and Branding; Ethics; Fashion Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry;

  Citation:

  Jones, Geoffrey, and Emily Grandjean. "Coco Chanel: From Fashion Icon to Nazi Agent." Harvard Business School Case 318-139, April 2018.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2017 (Revised March 2018)

  Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Putin and the Russian Oligarchs

  Geoffrey Jones, Rachael Comunale and Kate Lazaroff-Puck

  This case examines the career of the Russian business oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was one of a small group of business tycoons that became fabulously rich after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the new Russian government, advised by prominent Harvard economists, privatized state assets. The case provides an opportunity to explore how this happened, and what its impact was both at the time and for the subsequent development of capitalism in Russia. Berevosky's business empire suffered a major reversal after the appointment of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000. Berevosky's opposition to Putin's plans to restore the authority of the Russian state led to his exile in Britain, where he reinvented himself as an opponent of authoritarianism.

  Keywords: Russia; Business ＆ government relations; business history; privatization; Government and Politics; Business History; Business and Government Relations; Privatization; Soviet Union; Russia;

  Citation:

  Jones, Geoffrey, Rachael Comunale, and Kate Lazaroff-Puck. "Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Putin and the Russian Oligarchs." Harvard Business School Case 317-005, March 2017. (Revised March 2018.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2004 (Revised March 2018)

  Opium and Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century

  Geoffrey Jones, Elisabeth Koll and Alexis Gendron

  Concerns the growth of multinational trading companies in the first global economy. Examines two Scottish-owned merchant houses, Jardine Matheson and James Finlay, and shows their changing trade and investment strategies as well as their use of an organizational form later known as business groups. Also demonstrates the role of ethnic networks in globalization during this historical period. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

  Keywords: History; Globalized Economies and Regions; Ethnicity; Multinational Firms and Management; Groups and Teams; Trade; Social and Collaborative Networks; China;

  Citation:

  Jones, Geoffrey, Elisabeth Koll, and Alexis Gendron. "Opium and Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century." Harvard Business School Case 805-010, July 2004. (Revised March 2018.)  View Details

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