He trained as a neuroscientist and ended up running marketing for belts, wallets and hats worn under some of the biggest names in fashion. The method underneath is stranger, and simpler, than it looks.
David J. Katz likes to say he is an alchemist disguised as a chief marketing officer. It sounds like a line built for a conference stage, and he has used it on plenty of them. But spend a few minutes with how he actually works, and the label starts to feel less like branding and more like a job description. His raw materials are data, neuroscience and, lately, artificial intelligence. What he is trying to produce is something older and harder to measure: a reason for a person to want something.
Katz is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Randa Apparel & Accessories, a company most shoppers have never heard of and most shoppers have almost certainly bought from. Randa makes clothing and accessories for more than thirty owned and licensed brands, a roster that reads like a department-store directory: Levi's, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Haggar, Dickies, Cole Haan, Columbia. The belt looped through your jeans, the wallet in your back pocket, the gloves in your coat - there is a real chance one of them passed through Randa's system on the way to you.
Scale Katz is marketing across, according to Randa and his speaking bios.
The unlikely trainingThe origin story Katz tells is almost too neat, which is probably why he tells it. He is, by his own description, the child of a psychologist and a stockbroker. One parent spent a career studying how people feel. The other spent a career studying how people bet. Put those two instincts in the same house and you get a particular kind of mind - one that treats persuasion as something you can observe, test and, eventually, understand.
He carried that instinct into a neuroscience degree at Tufts University, later adding executive business training at Harvard Business School. It is not the resume you expect from a man who now talks about margins on headwear. But it explains the through-line. Katz does not treat a store as a place to display product. He treats it as a place where thousands of small decisions happen, and where each of those decisions has a cause you can, in principle, find.
That line is a good tell for how he thinks. Plenty of executives talk about disruption as a market force, a weather system that arrives and rearranges the furniture. Katz keeps dragging it back to the human level. Behind every trend line is somebody whose job, habit or expectation just changed. It is a neuroscientist's reflex applied to an industry that often prefers abstraction.
The core ideaIf Katz has a single thesis, it is about maps. “You can't navigate tomorrow's landscape with yesterday's maps,” he has said. “We need new maps.” The complaint underneath is that too much of retail runs on outdated charts - assumptions about who the customer is, where they shop and why, drawn from a version of the market that has already shifted.
His fix is not more technology for its own sake. It is better questions. He returns, again and again, to a simple three-part prompt that he uses like a lens: What does everyone see? What might they be missing? What might this mean to our business? The first question gets you to consensus. The second and third are where the value hides.
“What does everyone see? What might they be missing? What might this mean to our business?”
His working method, in three questionsHe has a name for the risks that hide in plain sight: gray swans. Not the unpredictable black swans of popular business writing, but the slow, visible threats everyone can see coming and somehow still fails to plan for. In his telling, these include climate change, the effect of GLP-1 medications on how bodies and sizing shift, and the fragility of supply chains built around a single geography or channel. “A business built around a single geography, single distribution channel, or single supply chain scenario is exposed,” he warns.
Illustrative weighting of themes Katz raises in interviews - not company data.
For all the data talk, Katz's diagnosis of what went wrong in retail is almost romantic. He argues the sector drifted into sameness - stores that look alike, stock alike and feel alike, stripped of the discovery that once made shopping worth the trip. His prescription is four words long: “We have to bring back the treasure hunt.”
This is where the neuroscience and the nostalgia meet. Discovery, surprise, the small thrill of finding something unexpected - these are not soft extras. They are the exact levers that make a brain want to come back. Katz's version of data-driven retail is not about making the store more efficient until there is nothing left to find. It is about using analytics on price, style and margin to build experiences that feel more human, not less.
He is equally sharp on the difference between strategy and wishful thinking. “If a strategy isn't subject to change when the environment or customer changes, it's not strategy, it's just a bet,” he says. It is the kind of sentence that sounds obvious until you count how many corporate plans it quietly disqualifies.
The careerKatz joined Randa in 2014 as a senior vice president and was promoted to EVP and Chief Marketing Officer in 2019. Along the way he picked up a second, unofficial title he clearly enjoys: Alchemist in Residence. Underneath the whimsy is a real remit. He leads both marketing strategy and the company's AI initiatives, which means he is one of the people deciding how generative tools show up inside a business that sells physical accessories at enormous scale.
His public profile grew alongside the job. He co-authored the best-selling Design for Response: Creative Direct Marketing That Works, a title that has aged into something of a reference point. He has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice, a “Change Agent and Influencer” by Women's Wear Daily, a “Menswear Mover” by MR Magazine and, in a phrase he seems fond of, a “Retail Radical” by The Robin Report. His commentary has surfaced in The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC and The New York Times.
The personAsk Katz to describe himself and the list gets long and a little playful: story-teller, author, speaker, neuroscientist, alchemist, and cook. It is a telling mix. The common thread is not fashion at all - it is the act of combining ingredients, whether they are compounds, data sets or plot points, into something a person actually wants. Marketing, for him, is just cooking with attention instead of flour.
That framing is why he can make a category as unglamorous as men's accessories feel like a laboratory for consumer behavior. Belts and wallets do not carry the mystique of a sneaker drop or a handbag launch. But they sell in enormous volume, across every price point, to nearly everyone. For someone who wants to understand how ordinary people make ordinary choices, there may be no better vantage point than the accessory wall at Nordstrom or Walmart, where Randa has long been a top belt vendor.
What comes next, in his telling, is a version of retail that uses AI not to replace the human moment but to sharpen it - to read the signals faster, redraw the maps sooner, and put the surprise back on the shelf. Whether the industry follows is an open question. Katz, for his part, seems less interested in predicting the answer than in making sure the right questions keep getting asked.