<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-PHTV9K7" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden">
Loading
Skip to Main Content
Product cover image for Harry Rosen Inc.: Tackling the Next Round of Digital Disruption

Harry Rosen Inc.: Tackling the Next Round of Digital Disruption

Julian Birkinshaw, Doug Murphy, Nicole Haggerty, Vania Sakelaris

Product #:W49495
Supplier:Ivey
Discipline:General Management, Strategy
Setting:Canada, 2025
Details:Case (PDF) • 11 pages • 2026-07-16

Subjects:

Leadership and managing peopleStrategyManagement

Industries:

Goods, trade, and consumer services

Geography:

CanadaNorth America
Your Price:$10.54

Purchase this material with a free Educator Account and enjoy more benefits:

  • Free Educator Copy
  • Free Teaching Notes
  • Build your coursepack
  • Discounted academic price

The case describes Ian Rosen, president and chief operating officer (and third-generation founder), as he endeavours to transform Harry Rosen from its roots as a high-quality, high-service menswear retailer into an omnichannel purveyor of menswear. The case delineates his initial effort to launch Herringbone, the company’s new bespoke app in 2019, and the poor uptake of the app by the company’s salespeople. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the existential crisis that it presented to the retailer ushered in the president’s second launch of the omnichannel-by-design strategy, this time with significant success and adoption. Now, in 2025, Ian Rosen is considering additional investments to transform the company.

Learning Objectives

The case seeks to put students in the position of the CEO of a privately held, family-controlled, established leader in high-quality, high-service menswear retail, and to examine the efforts he is making to transform the business into an omnichannel purveyor of menswear. The learning objectives are as follows:
  • Understand the dynamics of strategic transformation and the tensions involved in adapting to new circumstances while still holding onto traditional strengths.
  • Understand the multiple facets of digital transformation, i.e., that it affects all the different parts of the business system, and it is behavioural as much as technological.
  • Develop a capacity for strategic decision-making, based on a holistic understanding of the structural forces changing an industry, as well as the specific circumstances facing one company.
  • Understand the importance of a strong corporate culture, and specifically one derived from family ownership, in shaping decision-making and performance.
Loading
Case Study: Harry Rosen Inc.: Tackling the Next Round of Digital Disruption (English version) | Ivey Publishing