Burberry & Mulberry: A tale of two "Berrys Mulberry's cutesy kookiness has made it feel much more irreverently British in spirit than Burberry has in recent years. British fashion's plumpest berries, Mulberry and Burberry, both found themselves spread across the papers this week. The revelation that Burberry's CEO Angela Ahrendts's £16.9 million pay package last year made her the nation's best remunerated business person - the first time a woman topped that table - prompted delight at the sound of a glass ceiling splintered, tempered only by queasiness at the sheer amount. Personally, I don't always delight in Burberry: underneath the compelling Cara Delevigngne campaigns, the kookily-curated in-store soundtracks and Christopher Bailey's ingenious reinventions of its trenchcoat template, this is one of luxury's most hard-nosed brands (and, believe me, they've got a lot of competition). In this regard, it's like Apple. But Burberry, the only fashion company in the FTSE-100, indisputably merits respect. Ahrendts and Bailey are both inspired workaholics, who have between them stewarded a near three-fold rise in Burberry's share price since she arrived five years ago. And unlike the bankers that usually top this table, Ahrendts runs a company that makes not only money but things - and some of them even in England. These it then sells by the billions-worth to the world, Asia in particular. You probably do need to be hard-nosed to do that. Mulberry, meanwhile, has seen its share price shrivel at the news that its creative director Emma Hill is leaving, and profits are down. Bruno Guillon, Mulberry's recently appointed Ahrendts-equivalent, has been cast by gossips as the catalyst, and it will be no struggle to lament Hill's departure. Her raucous, girly sense of fun has always shone sexily through in her collections, she designed some very successful handbags, and best of all she threw really great parties. But perhaps Guillon - who is French and hails from Hermès, which whilst terribly po-faced is the sine non qua of international luxury - has realised that his berry needs to be a bit more like the other berry. Because yes, Mulberry's cutesy kookiness has made it feel much more irreverently British in spirit than Burberry has in recent years. Yet according to the evidence of their respective sales figures that Mulberry version of Britishness is more of a hit in Britain itself than anywhere else. Across the rest of the world, it's Burberry's tightly controlled, assiduously airbrushed rendering that gets the cash tills ringing.