For eighteen months, one of the most important seats at Gap Inc. sat empty. The last chief marketing officer had left in November 2022, and the company - stumbling through store closures, leadership churn and a fashion identity that had gone quiet - simply did not fill it. Then, in May 2024, Gap introduced Fabiola Torres. The message was clear: the brand was done waiting.
Torres arrived with a resume that reads like a tour of American consumer culture. Nike. Apple. Pepsi. And now Gap, the 55-year-old denim label that once defined casual American style and then spent two decades struggling to matter again. Her job was not modest. It was to make people care about the blue box logo one more time.
She goes by Faby. Internally, on industry honor rolls, in the hallways of a marketing organization she now leads across creative, visual merchandising, store experience and operations. The nickname is disarming for someone with a quarter-century of brand-building behind her, but it fits the philosophy she keeps returning to.
The long climb, starting in Mexico
Torres did not start in Silicon Valley or a New York agency. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Communications from Universidad de Monterrey, in Mexico, and got her first serious marketing footing at Nike Mexico as an advertising manager. What followed was an eighteen-year run at Nike that carried her across Latin America and up through global retail marketing, ending as Head of Global Sneaker Culture - which is roughly as close as a corporate title gets to being a professional authority on hype.
Along the way she launched Nike's first sneakers destination mobile app and worked with teams across North America, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Sneaker culture taught her something that would matter later: a product becomes desire when it plugs into music, identity and the feeling of belonging to a moment.
From Nike she moved to Apple, serving as Vice President of Global Marketing at Beats by Dre - a role steeped in the intersection of sound, design and desire. Then, in 2020, she joined PepsiCo as SVP and CMO of its energy drinks portfolio, where she led relaunches of Mountain Dew Energy and Rockstar Focus. She also ran PepsiCo's Hispanic business unit, sharpening a multicultural marketing instinct that has been a throughline of her career.
A career, mapped
Turning the volume back up
Gap's problem was never its heritage. Torres says so herself. The problem was silence - a brand with genuine history that had stopped showing up in the conversation. Her fix was to lead with culture and let the product ride the wave: music partnerships, self-expression, and a denim category that Gap had every right to own but had let drift.
The campaigns came in quick succession. Get Loose. Give Your Gift. Feels Like Gap. Better in Denim. Digital-first, culturally wired, built to be shared rather than merely seen. She has worked to connect the label with artists and cultural drivers, championing individuality under a brand purpose Gap frames as "Championing Originality."
Her broad remit reflects how central brand is to Gap's turnaround under CEO Richard Dickson's revival playbook. Marketing, creative, merchandising, store experience, operations - all of it rolls up to her. It is an unusually wide span, and a signal that Gap sees storytelling not as a department but as the engine of the comeback.
The playbook she carries
The four brands on Torres's resume look different on the surface - sneakers, headphones, energy drinks, denim - but she treats them as variations on one theme: meaning first, product second. Below is the through-line, weighted by how much each chapter feeds what she does at Gap today.
She talks about the job in plain terms. In a retail landscape crowded with promotions and price wars, the task, she says, is to "cut through the noise and create moments that connect to culture." That means being nimble, pivoting fast, and refusing to let a brand coast on what it used to be.
There is a personal thread running underneath all of it. Torres is a proud Latina executive and a recognized diversity advocate, someone who climbed from an advertising desk in Monterrey to a global corner office without leaving that identity behind. She led PepsiCo's Hispanic business unit not as a footnote but as a discipline, and she brings the same instinct to Gap: audiences want to see themselves in the brands they wear.
What she is really building
Ask what success looks like and the answer is not a quarterly number. It is relevance - the sense that a Gap campaign can land in the middle of culture and make a nineteen-year-old care about a label their parents wore. That is the harder, slower project, and it is the one Torres seems built for. Sneaker culture taught her how hype works. Beats taught her design as desire. Pepsi taught her scale. Gap is where all three finally meet.
Whether the turnaround holds is a story still being written, quarter by quarter, campaign by campaign. But the empty chair is filled, the volume is back up, and for the first time in years people are arguing about Gap again. For a marketer who believes moments matter more than megaphones, that is exactly the point.