Jenna
Woodhull
goes west

There is a particular kind of person in the apparel business who can look at a rack of forty samples and tell you, without much ceremony, which six will sell and which thirty-four are somebody's feelings. Jenna Woodhull is that person. She has been that person, in various job titles and various zip codes, since Bill Clinton was in office.

In February 2025, Sendero Provisions Co. announced that Woodhull would join as Chief Merchandising Officer. Sendero is a Waco, Texas apparel brand that mixes outdoor lifestyle with Western influence, and which began its life in 2014 as a single hat inspired by the Big Bend country of West Texas. The trade publication Shop Eat Surf Outdoor described the hire as a big coup for the brand, which is the industry equivalent of a raised eyebrow and a low whistle. Sendero, after all, is not a conglomerate. It is a company that named itself the Spanish word for trail and means it.

What made the announcement worth a whistle was not simply Woodhull's resume, though the resume does most of the talking. It was the reporting that came with it. According to Shop Eat Surf Outdoor, Woodhull had an opportunity to lead the men's and women's businesses of a major surf brand and chose Sendero instead. In an industry that has spent two decades consolidating itself into fewer, larger, more anxious entities, choosing the smaller thing on purpose is close to a moral position.

01 / The long way aroundNobody starts at the top, and she took that personally

Woodhull's career begins in a place most product executives never visit: the sales floor. Her first jobs were in retail, as a buyer. Then she became a sales rep for Volcom, from 1999 to 2005, carrying a line sheet and learning the least romantic and most useful lesson in the trade, which is that a beautiful garment nobody orders is a hobby.

Then came Hurley, roughly five years of it, where she served as National Sales Manager and Director of Retail Marketing before moving into the product department. She has described the education plainly: she learned an enormous amount working for a public company and also under the guidance of Nike and Kering. Those are two very different schools of thought about what clothing is for, and she attended both.

In 2010 she returned to Volcom as global Vice President of Design and Merchandising, a post she held until 2013. By then she had assembled what she called a dream team of product people. And then, in the way that these stories always go, she left.

02 / The MartiansAn agency built to remove other people's stress

What she left for was Band of Martians, a brand agency and showroom she co-founded in Newport Beach in 2013 with her long-time friend and business partner Ally Lopez, co-owner of Bikini Bird. The premise was elegantly unglamorous. Woodhull had spent years travelling for Volcom, much of it with the Australian team, and had noticed that the retail landscape there was full of labels with a genuinely fresh perspective and absolutely no route into the United States. Lopez had noticed the same thing in Hawaii. So they built the route.

The roster they curated was cheerfully unbothered by category discipline: swim, apparel, candles and hardgoods, split into premium and lifestyle, deliberately chosen so that no brand competed with the one next to it. Acacia Swimwear. NOE Undergarments. First Base. Don't Care. Vampirate Surfboards. The Waxx Company. Vintage Mix by Hoffman Fabrics. Seven labels, no two of them fighting for the same shelf.

The showroom itself had a photo studio in it, plus plans for a flower stand and a food concept, which tells you roughly everything about the ambition level of a Newport Beach agency in 2013. But the underlying idea was serious and, in hindsight, unusually well aimed.

It is a good line because it is a job description in disguise. Strip away the showroom and the flower stand and you have the merchandiser's actual function: remove friction, protect the vision, let the thing grow. She has been doing that job ever since, occasionally under other titles.

03 / Ten years of hatsThe Brixton decade

Around the same period she began what would become roughly a ten-year run at Brixton, the San Diego brand best known for headwear and increasingly known for full apparel. She rose to Senior Vice President of Design & Merchandising and, later, Chief Merchandising Officer. Asked in 2023 to describe what that meant, she gave the least corporate answer available.

All things product, she said: planning and ideation, design and development, all the way through production and out to the different points of distribution around the world. Then she added, with two exclamation marks, that it is never, ever boring. Which is either enthusiasm or a warning, and in her case appears to be both.

Ten years is a long time in an industry where the average executive tenure is measured in the lifespan of a product cycle. Woodhull's history reads less like a series of jumps than a series of stays: thirteen years associated with Volcom across two stints, five with Hurley, a decade with her own agency, a decade at Brixton. She appears to regard loyalty as a competitive advantage rather than a sentimental weakness, which in a consolidating market is arguably the contrarian trade.

04 / A brief detour through three brands at onceLiberated

In November 2023, Liberated Brands named her Global Head of Women's Product. The remit was not small: women's design and merchandising for Volcom, RVCA and Billabong, simultaneously. It was, in a literal sense, a homecoming, and she said so.

The chapter proved short. Liberated Brands subsequently entered bankruptcy proceedings and wound down. It is the sort of thing that happens to good executives at bad moments, and the industry, to its credit, did not confuse the two. Within months Sendero had her.

05 / WacoA hat company with ambitions and a flagship

Sendero Provisions Co. was founded by Hunter Harlow and made its first hat in 2014. The company's stated affections are a hard day's work, free-flowing rivers, public land, quality gear, live music, art for art's sake, craft beverages and fine Texas barbecue, which is a list of values that would be insufferable if it were not so specific. It develops its own fits rather than printing on blanks. It favours, in its own phrasing, funky cool art with a Western twist over loud branding. It opened a flagship store in downtown Waco.

Into this arrives Woodhull, whose brief is merchandising strategy, product vision and category expansion, with the mandate of keeping the brand at the front of Western, outdoor and fashion trends. Those three words do not naturally sit together, which is precisely why the job needs someone who has worked in all three rooms.

She is not arriving alone into unfamiliar company. Several former Brixton colleagues already work at Sendero, including chief commercial officer and partner Mike Lawson. Her appointment was announced alongside that of Richard Ashley as Chief Operating Officer, previously of Field & Stream and Magnolia. The founder framed the year with characteristic Texan economy.

06 / The personVintage, boots, and a hat six days out of seven

Ask most executives about work-life balance and you get a framework. Ask Woodhull and you get a flinch. It is, she has said, her least favourite question, before conceding that like so many working parents she is always chasing those damn minutes. She then described herself as a severe workaholic who has always struggled with balance, which is not a phrase that typically survives the communications review.

Her method, such as it is, involves prioritising viciously, holding a strong perspective on what actually matters, and trying to be present wherever she happens to be standing. She has two children, whom she calls the junior and senior pip squeaks. She hikes once a week to keep her head on straight. Palm Springs is her calm place. She has confessed to inventing errands to Home Depot for things she does not need, to an unhealthy relationship with property listings, and to constantly planning vacations the family never takes.

The work ethic, she says, came from her mother, an elementary school teacher who balanced career and family with what Woodhull describes as some hidden source of energy. The lesson she took from it was not about scheduling. It was that people are more resilient than they give themselves credit for, and that things generally turn out all right.

Her own wardrobe is instructive, because in this business taste is not a slide deck, it is a habit. Vintage mixed with something modern, classic, usually finished with boots or a pair of red Chloés she has worn, by her own account, for far too many years. She wears a hat roughly six days out of seven and has said that picking a single favourite from a collection is impossible, which from a merchandising officer is either a dodge or a compliment to the line.

Her listening habits run to Modest Mouse, the Pixies, the Seeds and the Troggs, with a little Dr. Dre. It is a playlist assembled by someone who was paying close attention in the 1990s and never quite agreed to stop.

07 / What it adds up toThe case for the long route

The temptation with a career like this one is to read it as a straight line, which it plainly is not. It is a career made of lateral moves that turned out to be vertical ones. Retail buying taught her what a store owner risks. Sales taught her what a buyer will actually write. Retail marketing taught her how a product is explained. Design and merchandising taught her how it gets made. Running her own agency taught her what founders lose sleep over. Each of those is a discipline that people usually spend an entire career inside. She collected the set.

Which is why a company in Waco with a decade of compounding growth and a flagship store on a downtown block went out and got her, and why she said yes when a larger name was reportedly available. Sendero sells Western clothing, performance shirts, denim and cowboy hats to people who care about fit and do not care about logos. Getting that mix right requires someone who can hold a creative conviction and a sales forecast in the same hand without dropping either.

She has spent twenty-five years learning to do exactly that. The trail, appropriately enough, now runs through Texas.