'We really are data mad': Inside Jaume Miquel's decade remaking Tendam

On a January morning in 2026, the chairman and chief executive of the Spanish fashion group Tendam stood in front of a business audience at Esade in Barcelona and reduced a decade of work to a single, wry phrase. "We really are data mad," Jaume Miquel said, explaining how obsessively the owner of Cortefiel, Springfield and Women'secret now reads its customers before it makes a move.

It was a telling line from a man who, this August, completes ten years in charge. Miquel became CEO in August 2016, when the company was still called Grupo Cortefiel — heavily indebted, traditional and, in his own description, dangerously volatile. The decade since is an unusual turnaround, precisely because it is not a growth story in the obvious sense: the topline grew only slowly, but everything underneath it changed. The clearest proof came in July 2025, when an Abu Dhabi investor bought a majority of the company he had rebuilt.

The outsider who came up through the brands

Miquel is, by training, an economist rather than a fashion man. He holds a degree in economic sciences from the University of Barcelona and completed a business management development programme at IESE, according to Tendam. His early career was spent inside American apparel: he ran communications for Europe at Dockers, worked at its parent Levi Strauss, then headed Southern Europe for the boot brand Timberland and sat on its European management committee.

He joined Grupo Cortefiel in 2006, not at the top but inside the portfolio — as managing director of the lingerie brand Women'secret, which he would lead for ten years, adding the flagship Cortefiel and Pedro del Hierro labels in 2015. By the time the top job came, he knew the brands as an operator, not a strategist parachuted in.

The corner office, 2016

Miquel took over as chief executive in August 2016 and added the role of executive chairman in June 2019, consolidating control under the private-equity owners CVC and PAI Partners, who had bought the business outright after Permira's exit in 2017.

His diagnosis was blunt, and he has repeated it almost verbatim for years. "In 2016, our company had a traditional model, considerable debt and high volatility," he told the Esade forum. "Today, our company is healthy, profitable and able to grow." The fix, as he tells it, was less about cost-cutting than about removing the structural risk that haunts the industry. "It's an attractive, creative sector, but without a clear strategy, delivering fashion is extremely difficult," he warned at the same event.

The 2018 rename from Grupo Cortefiel to Tendam was the public marker of that shift: away from a single flagship and toward a multi-brand house. The pandemic, he says, forced the pace. "Covid forced us to react and radically rethink our strategy," he told the Matins Esade forum.

Data mad

The model Miquel built rests on three legs: loyalty, omnichannel and a platform. Tendam closed its 2025 financial year with 27.6 million unique members in its loyalty clubs — the raw material for the 'data mad' decision-making he describes. Its e-commerce sites have become a multi-brand platform carrying some 186 third-party brands, by its 2026 count, alongside its own, curated, in his telling, with almost clinical precision: "We've structured it, with 60% similar brands, 20% superior brands, and another 20% inferior brands, ensuring perfect complementarity," he explained to the Spanish news agency Europa Press.

He is unsentimental about why the group keeps launching labels — seven new own brands in roughly the last four years, from Slowlove to OOTO. "We've crafted niche brands to protect margins and not cater to everyone. We've also revamped physical stores, turning them into digital hubs for sales and logistics," he said. Yet he defends the shops in near-civic terms: "As retailers, we must contribute to the community because physical stores generate value, stability, and progress." The age of "savage capitalism" is over, he added; what is needed is "a social capitalism where companies play an active role and set examples."

A turnaround, not a growth story

For most of Miquel's tenure, the honest summary is that profitability and the balance sheet improved far faster than sales. Revenue moved from roughly 1.13 billion euros in 2016 to a record 1.47 billion euros in the financial year ended February 28, 2026 — about 30% over a decade, a steady climb rather than a sprint. The quality of the business is the real story: in that latest year net profit rose 26% to 111.7 million euros, EBITDA grew 9.4% to 368 million euros, and net financial debt had been cut to 304.3 million euros. Online sales reached 231.2 million euros.

By its own account, Tendam is Spain's second-largest fashion group by domestic market share, behind the global giant Inditex; measured purely on revenue, it ranks behind larger groups such as Inditex, Puig and Mango. Its goal, Miquel told Europa Press, is "sustained and profitable growth between 6% and 8% in the coming years, increasing our market share from 6% in 2019 to the current 7%" — modest numbers that nonetheless represent share taken in a brutal market.

In the news: The Abu Dhabi deal

For a CEO of his profile, Miquel is not a flamboyant public figure; the coverage that defines him is corporate, not personal. The biggest story of his tenure broke in July 2025, when Multiply Group — the Abu Dhabi royal family's investment vehicle, now part of the 2PointZero holding company — acquired a majority 67.91% stake in Tendam, with the previous owners CVC and PAI staying on as minority shareholders. It is the validation his decade was building toward: the platform he assembled was stable and profitable enough for a sovereign-backed investor to buy a majority of it. The deal also resets the ambition — store openings are being tripled toward around 140 in 2026, and Miquel has set a target of 2.5 billion euros in sales by 2030 through international expansion, new own-store formats, selective acquisitions and AI.

The private executive

Miquel is guarded about his personal life — "a normal guy who gets on with his life without bothering anyone," as he put it to Spanish newspaper El País — but the outline is clear enough. He was born in 1963 in Tremp, in the Catalan Pyrenees, which he credits for a lifelong love of skiing; he runs three or four times a week, plays padel and reads historical novels in the summer, when he can finally switch off. He lives in Madrid, and told the Spanish fashion title Telva he has a blended family of five children — three his own and two his third wife's — which he called, with a smile, "the triumph of hope over experience."

His one indulgence is footwear. "I have more than 400 pairs, I'm a collector," he admitted to both El País and Telva — mostly sneakers, a habit dating to his Timberland years. The small rebellions of a man who spends his day at a screen, as he describes them, are the 15 beaded bracelets on his right wrist and a set of discreet tattoos, the first a compass rose, done at a moment when he "needed not to lose his north." To protect family time, he has swapped work dinners for breakfasts and rarely leaves the office later than seven in the evening.

The next decade

Ask Miquel for the lesson of the decade and he does not reach for the numbers. He reaches for readiness. "Opportunities don't happen by chance," he told the Esade audience. "You have to seek them out every day and be ready when they come along." Ten years in, with new owners and a far more aggressive plan, his next decade will test whether the growth he deliberately deferred can finally arrive. As he put it on the latest results: "2026 marks the beginning of the rollout of Tendam's full potential."

This article was written with the assistance of AI.