Looking back it is astounding to realize how much value Fossil management destroyed by going after smartwatches.
Smartwatches were unquestionably a "disruptive" innovation that came to challenge Fossil Group bread and butter core business. At the time (2014-15) it was probably the correct calm to buy into the new segment by acquiring Misfit, although the price paid looks ludicrous now.
What really went wrong though, and where I lay most of the responsibility to top management and Kosta specifically, was to not keep and sustain Misfit separately. Instead management decided to roll out all the non sensical not-mature smartwatches to all the brands, creating a money pit for capital allocation, disrupting the processes that had been in place for years and creating conflict of interests and priorities all over the place. This simply diluted the value and credibility of the brands to which the smartwatch "cancer" was introduced like a virus to a healthy ecosystem. Moreover, in the process, the Misfit brand and goodwill which at the time had potential was entirely destroyed and written off.
If instead the Smartwatch offering had been cultivated in a separate, independent unit and only brought over to the rest of the portfolio selectively when the quality and scale was acceptable (say for instance, now) we would now be in a much healthier situation and hundreds of millions and thousands of jobs would have not been lost.
This is the "innovator's dilemma" 101 which dominated corporate strategy in technology for the last twenty years. It is shocking that our highly paid, MBA rich management team never got the memo and led us to this situation. Sometimes corporate demise comes down to few decisions: in Fossil case embracing the smartwatch pipe dream to me was the biggest mistake.
We now hear that the brands and organization need to go back to "their roots", focus on the core and on premium/desirability which is all well and good, except we are a few years too late on what should have been done the moment the Apple watch came to the market.