Bart Claes

Bart Claes's public reflections circle around one central idea: that professional identity and personal worth must be kept separate, especially when a company is fighting for survival. He and his sister Ann arrived at this explicitly during two different crisis periods — first around 2018, then again reflected on in the 2022 retrospective — telling each other directly that "we zijn meer als alleen het professioneel stuk van ons leven" ¹. This was not resignation but a deliberate psychological move: by agreeing that failure would not make them lesser people, they freed themselves to fight harder rather than freezing in fear of loss ¹². The bravado of "Not under our watch. Potverdorie, we gaan toch alles aan doen, maar echt alles, het onderste kan halen om het recht te trekken" ² sits right next to this calm acceptance of possible failure — for Claes these are two sides of the same coping mechanism, not a contradiction.

A second recurring theme is legitimacy as a second-generation leader. Claes is insistent that inheriting rather than founding a company does not make him less of an entrepreneur: "Ik voel me ook niet minder ondernemer. Ik heb het voortgezet. Kinderen van stichters moeten ook niet denken: ik ben dan minder ondernemer als een stichter" ². This belief is backed by concrete practice rather than just rhetoric — he describes the mandatory 6-9 month traject through every department that he, his sister, and any future family member entering the business must complete, mirroring how he and Ann themselves started on the shop floor ². He also points to governance as the real mechanism of succession, not sentiment: it was the external board members, not the family itself, who confronted his father in 2003 about a generational clash in vision, which led to the father stepping back from operations in 2004 ². For Claes, formal structures and outside voices matter more than family harmony narratives when it comes to actually transferring control.

The sibling partnership itself is something he describes almost as a designed system rather than an organic relationship. He is explicit that neither wants to dominate the other: "Geen van de twee wil de andere beheersen. Wij beheren onze relatie, wij beheersen ze niet. Wij zijn echt volledig gelijkwaardig" ². This equality is operationalized through what amounts to a credit-and-blame rule: each grants the other 51% of the credit when things go well, and each takes 51% of the responsibility when things go badly ². Combined with a complementary "yin-yang" balancing dynamic in meetings, this is less a philosophy of niceness and more a working protocol for keeping a two-person leadership structure functional under pressure — summarized in his own phrase, "Wij gunnen elkaar het succes" ².

On the business itself, Claes repeatedly resists simple narratives about digital disruption. He argues that selling online is not the hard part — selling online profitably against a competitor the scale of Zalando, with a revenue gap of roughly 10 billion versus JBC's 250 million, is what actually takes years to master ². He also traces part of the mid-segment retail squeeze not to e-commerce alone but to the 2015-2016 terror attacks, which he says triggered a structural, lasting fear-driven reduction in clothing spend and pushed shoppers toward discounters ². And he is blunt about the limits of digital growth as a hedge: even doubling online sales 2.5x during 2020 could not offset closing 150 physical stores for three months, since stores represented 90% of revenue ². These are not abstract observations but lessons drawn from watching JBC nearly buckle under sequential shocks — online disruption, terror-driven consumer caution, COVID closures, and inflation.

Claes also talks candidly about his own temperament as a factor in how he leads. As a self-described introverted, highly sensitive CEO, he says he protects his energy deliberately by structuring his work around one-on-one meetings rather than large group settings ². This ties to a broader statement he makes about how he sees his own life: "Je hebt twee soorten mensen: die vertellen over wat ze doen in het leven, en mensen die leven. En ik ben de tweede" ². The line reads as a rejection of performative entrepreneurship — for Claes, running JBC through crisis after crisis is not content or narrative but simply the thing he does, quietly, and he frames his calm as functional rather than decorative: "Uit rust, uit stilte komt kracht" ².

Finally, Claes shows a willingness to experiment with format even while holding to conservative instincts about family governance — the clearest example being JBC's clothing line with Camille for kids aged 4-14, extended into a Roblox/metaverse version where avatar clothing is earned through in-game points rather than bought with parents' credit cards ². This is presented as a values-driven design choice, not just a marketing gimmick: he wants the mechanism of acquisition, even in a virtual space, to teach earning rather than spending. It fits his broader claim about family businesses generating a disproportionate share of economic value, which he puts at around 75 percent, and his conviction that it is leaders' daily behavior, not formal charters, that employees actually absorb and mirror ².