Nearly a year into the global CMO role at H&M, the world’s second-biggest publicly traded fashion retailer, John Ehrnst runs a closely watched rebuild in fashion retail. He sat down with Campaign Asia-Pacific during his recent trip to Seoul, a city he once lived in, and to which he now returns with business on his mind and something close to affection—to talk product, physical retail and the AI question the industry hasn't finished arguing about.
"Our vision is to liberate fashion for the many," says H&M’s global CMO John Ehrnst. "We come back to the fact that the product is number one, two and three."
His emphasis on product carries the weight of an old truth. And nowhere does that truth land harder than in Asia. The region's fast-fashion market is already worth more than $100 billion and continues to grow at a CAGR of 8% through 2032, driven by a digitally native youth population, rising disposable incomes and deep social media penetration. In markets like Korea, Japan and China, shoppers are highly brand-literate and pretty unforgiving. They know when a brand has genuinely designed with them in mind and when it has simply re-hemmed something conceived elsewhere.
“A
few years back,” Ehrnst concedes, “we weren’t great at that. But we saw a
business need and a customer need to adjust, and now locally relevant
collections and collaborations are common for us.”
H&M is rebuilding in public, and the numbers tell a complicated story. Its global store count has come down
from 5,076 at its 2019 peak to the lowest since 2016, at 4,101. Operating profit improved 40% YoY in Q3 2025, against
a 3.4% sales decline. Leaner, more disciplined, but still under pressure where it counts most.
The competitive context is brutal and H&M is effectively positioning itself as a Goldilocks label: better quality than ultra-fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu, cheaper than Zara and anchored on its ambitions to reduce its burden on nature. It sounds like a reasonable place to stand but the middle is crowded and getting more so, with Primark, Mango, Uniqlo, Abercrombie and Gap all competing for the same consumer—one who wants social-media-worthy trend pieces without paying full-price-fashion money for them.
Meanwhile, the pace of the market is intense. Shein reportedly adds up to 10,000 new SKUs per day and Zara's blink-and-you-miss-it drops have made the concept of seasonal collections feel almost Victorian. The TikTok-to-purchase pipeline can birth a micro-trend on a Tuesday and bury it by Saturday. Against that backdrop, being the sensible, well-priced option in the middle requires more than good value—it requires speed, cultural fluency and a reason for consumers to choose you over six other brands they can reach from the same screen.
When asked what H&M would most like to learn from its competitors, Ehrnst is transparent.
“The speed element… being able to produce fast. That’s the piece that we are seeing as one key factor to be able to give our customers the best possible product at all times. We need to be fast.”
He is quick to add that speed has never been the whole story.
"To zoom out on that one, we've been doing successful business for 70-plus years, and it has been with the business idea of getting the best possible fashion and quality at the best price in a sustainable way. We're going to continue with that."
“In our history, we have never been alone in the market. There has always been competition, and competition is healthy. It forces us to innovate in many different fields all the time. And I think that is also just continuous. That’s the world we’re living in,” he adds.
The Seoul story and doubling down on retail
Part of the H&M rebuild strategy is the physical stores—fewer but unmissable. That is where Seongsu comes in.
On Seoul's east side, the former industrial district has become one of the city's most culturally alive neighbourhoods: independent Korean labels beside design-led cafés, repurposed factory floors beside concept stores, the texture of a manufacturing past worn as an aesthetic credential. It is where Seoul's creative class congregates, and where global brands show up when they want to be taken seriously.
H&M's answer is a three-floor, 842-square-metre flagship developed with architecture practice SKYnoa under the concept 'A Stage for One and for All.' The store has a dedicated creative space for local artists and collaborators, runway-style fitting rooms that double as mirrored stages for content creation, and smart mirrors that recognise garments, field size and colour requests.
"Seongsu is the place to be—not only in Korea. We've broadcast quite a lot from that store on our own channels and we get great engagement outside of Korea. So it's very clear that both an experience is what people are looking for, and also Seoul is what people are looking for."
The Seongsu outlet did not arrive in isolation. The same autumn, H&M opened its largest location in the world in Paris's Forum des Halles, following ten months of renovation, and a 1,000-square-metre flagship on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Le Marais. In Shanghai, the Huaihai Road store, H&M's original China outpost, opened in 2007 and has been shuttered since 2022, was relaunched as a 3,000-square-metre House of H&M, with a café and flower shop.
The thinking behind all of them was shaped during Covid, when the industry's rush toward digital was swift and, in Ehrnst's view, got ahead of itself. "Many in the industry were extremely bullish on online. There were all these doomsday reports saying stores would never survive. But I think we were proved wrong, and the industry was proved wrong, because especially young people said: we want to come back to stores. We want to be in stores."
The return, though, comes on new terms. "Of course, they need more of an experience than just buying whatever they can buy online. Young people like coming to stores, but we must elevate who we are and make it more of an experience." Seongsu is H&M's most visible answer to that and it is not being treated as a one-off.
Seoul's role in H&M's Asia strategy runs deep. Ehrnst has built a design studio hub in the city, tasked with creating locally informed but regionally scalable collections. "I think that signals how big our belief is in the region," he says. The studio is a bet on Seoul as the place where global fashion behaviour takes shape before it travels.
The city earns that status, in Ehrnst's telling, because it simply refuses to stand still. "I was on the phone with a colleague and he said, 'Oh, you're in Korea? When did you move?' I said eight months ago. He said, 'Okay, so it's the same, nothing would've changed.' I said: 'No, no. It's not the same. Everything has changed.' You feel it here— the city is constantly renewing."
What's renewing? "K-pop shapes many trends and behaviours, especially among young people. Beauty is also part of that. The beauty industry is very well known outside Korea. Retail experiences—that struck me and many others. It's very advanced here and the newest trends often pop up in Korea."
The in-house agency question
H&M has run an in-house marketing and creative department for over 30 years. Its media buying in six key Asian markets (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, Japan and South Korea) sits centrally with IPG, now part of Omnicom, following the 2025 acquisition. But where in-house ends and external begins is, by Ehrnst's own admission, still being tailored.
"Fundamentally, we have always been a design-driven brand. We have hundreds of designers in-house within the creative fields. The same principle applies creatively—we have a big creative muscle in-house in order to get speed, but also to make sure that we are cohesive as a brand. We're also very curious and we want to look around the corner at what's happening next, so we do bring in external expertise when needed—both for a new perspective and local relevance," he says.
Seongsu, he says, started as a globally originated idea that an external creative agency made locally alive. Brazil offered a similar lesson. "We had an idea we wanted to show up with in the beat of Brazil. But what is the beat of Brazil? We had external agencies and local talent tell us: this is the beat of Brazil. Then we adjusted to that."
The honest answer on where it all settles: "The main thing for us is to continue to be at the forefront of innovation. And how we do it, whether that is with a network of creators or local partners in different markets, I don't have the recipe for that yet."
In 2026, the in-housing conversation is increasingly being cut by AI. As automation makes certain creative work faster and cheaper, more of it is drifting inward at brands across the industry. At H&M, that drift leads directly to its most contested area of experimentation: digital twins.
On AI, H&M wants to draw a line but will everyone accept where it’s drawn?
In March 2025, H&M announced the creation of digital twins of 30 human models in partnership with AI company Uncut. The images were released in July 2025, watermarked as AI-generated, and landed in the middle of an industry conversation about what generative AI does to the people whose livelihoods depend on being photographed.
The reaction divided along predictable lines. But Ehrnst's framing of why H&M is doing it, and how, is more nuanced than the controversy coverage captured. The first distinction he draws is load bearing: digital twins versus avatars. An avatar is a fabricated AI persona, fictional, invented, not rooted in any real person. A digital twin is a replica of a consenting human, built from extensive photographic data.
"We have said no—we're not going to use avatars. We are using digital twins, and that is the responsible way of doing it," Ehrnst said.
The models retain full ownership rights to their likenesses, can license their twins independently to other brands, and are compensated on a licensing model. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok will require users to disclose the use of AI to create realistic content, and it is labelled as such to inform audiences.
"We need to agree. These are on the terms of the models," Ehrnst says.
"What I have learned throughout the process is that to make an avatar look great with fake clothes, that's easy. But to make it fantastic with a digital twin wearing real clothes that should look exactly like they do in reality — that's more challenging."
The technical challenge, he notes, is clothing and not face fidelity as AI has largely sewn that up. Getting garments to drape, wrinkle and catch light in a way that honestly represents what a customer will receive is where the challenge lies. "What I have learned throughout the process is that to make an avatar look great with fake clothes, that's easy. But to make it fantastic with a digital twin wearing real clothes that should look exactly like they do in reality—that's more challenging."
That quality bar is both an ethical position and a product integrity requirement. If the digital image misrepresents the clothes, it misleads the customer. H&M's high standard is not pure altruism.
Critics, including Equity (the main trade union in the UK for professional performers and creative practitioners), have pointed not to the consenting models but to everyone downstream, including the photographers, stylists, make-up artists and set designers who fall entirely outside the consent framework. Ehrnst doesn't brush the concern aside. "That's why we want to be loud and clear that we are working in the field, but in a responsible way. What other parts of the market are hard for us to influence? In that sense, we try to set the precedent in influencing good change and responsibility in the use of AI."
“To me, it’s about finding what’s next—what you can do that wasn’t possible before. If it’s just recreating images we could have shot in real life, there’s no real benefit. That’s still part of the learning process. The obvious upside is speed — you don’t have to travel or shoot on location; you can do it digitally. And speed is a key factor.”
H&M's position, as he frames it, is that it cannot control the industry, but it can model a better version of how this technology gets used. What H&M will not do is use AI to replicate what could have been shot on location anyway.
“To me, it is about finding the next thing—what can you do in the future? It’s about exploring. Obviously, if it were just doing an image that we could have shot in reality, then it’s the same thing. There’s no benefit.”
His most telling concern mirrors a wider industry anxiety: where does this all lead if we don't pause to think deeply about it?
"What happens in the world in the future if everyone else is just using avatars? That's a scary world. Then what is human creativity? Where is the magic from humans?"
It’s a question that hangs over the entire industry, not just H&M.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific