There is a particular kind of executive who arrives at a company, changes the logo, gives a speech about authenticity, and leaves before anyone can check the numbers. Jill Beraud is not that. Her career reads instead like a long, slightly stubborn argument with the advertising industry about what marketing is actually for - conducted, inconveniently for her critics, from inside jobs where the results were measurable.
Consider the categories. Lingerie. Carbonated soft drinks. Hair care built on laboratory chemistry. Fine jewellery. Denim. Iced tea steeped with botanicals. A person who has held senior office in all six is either a dilettante or has found something the rest of us have missed. The evidence points firmly to the second.
The Detour That Wasn't
She has admitted, disarmingly, that the plan was never fixed. "I have always had a lot of interests," she told Boston University, her alma mater, "and I considered many different fields - architecture, journalism, and more." One notes the "and more" with sympathy. Most people who say this end up in neither architecture nor journalism nor anything else in particular. Beraud ended up in brand management at Procter & Gamble, which is where American marketing sends its promising young people to learn discipline the way medieval apprentices learned stonework: slowly, on food brands, with someone senior watching.
Five years of that, and then she did something unusual for a P&G graduate. She left the corporate ladder entirely. She went into management consulting, working on global brand equity, and then founded her own advertising agency in New York. Running a small agency is an education no MBA supplies - and she had the MBA too, from Wharton, in marketing and strategic planning, to go with the business degree from Boston University. The agency taught her the thing consultancies cannot: what it costs to actually make the work, and how quickly a beautiful idea dies when nobody can afford to produce it.
A risk worth taking is when an idea is really strategically transformational to the business and will also have a significant positive impact on the business. If you have those two things, then the idea is worth taking the risk.
Jill Beraud
Note the construction. Two conditions, both compulsory. Not "does it feel bold." Not "has anyone in the category tried it." Transformational and materially positive. It sounds like a platitude until you apply it, at which point roughly ninety percent of the ideas in any given marketing meeting quietly excuse themselves and leave the room.
Thirteen Years in the Underwear Business
In 1995 she joined Limited Brands and stayed thirteen years, which in modern marketing is roughly three geological eras. She rose to Chief Marketing Officer of Victoria's Secret, and simultaneously ran marketing across the wider empire: Bath & Body Works, Express, Henri Bendel, C.O. Bigelow, Limited Stores. It is difficult to overstate what an education that is. Six brands, six customers, six entirely different reasons a person walks through a door on a Tuesday afternoon.
The story that best captures her method is not a campaign at all. In 1997, someone worked out that only about half of women bought underwear at the same time they bought a bra. Half. In a shop whose entire architecture assumed otherwise. A conventional marketer would have commissioned a campaign about why women should buy both. Beraud's shop treated it as a merchandising and product question instead, and the panty sampling initiative that followed became part of how the business ran. Fast Company later cited it as a defining move.
By the time she left, Victoria's Secret was a multi-billion-dollar brand. This is where honest profile-writing requires a caveat: brands of that scale are built by hundreds of people, and anyone who tells you a single executive made it happen is selling something. What can be said with confidence is that she was in the room, running the function, for the whole ascent.
A Job That Did Not Exist
In December 2008 PepsiCo did something companies rarely do. It created a position specifically to hire someone. Beraud became the first worldwide Chief Marketing Officer, reporting directly to Indra Nooyi, with a portfolio of food and beverage brands measured in tens of billions of dollars. Nooyi's own framing was refreshingly blunt for a press release: the company had some of the world's strongest brands, but had never integrated its marketing in a holistic, global and disciplined fashion.
Which is corporate for: this is a mess, please fix it.
What she did next remains one of the most argued-over decisions of the era. In 2010, Pepsi did not run a Super Bowl ad. For a soft drink company, this is roughly equivalent to a monarch skipping the coronation. In its place went the Pepsi Refresh Project - $20 million committed to funding causes that ordinary people proposed and the public voted on, through social media.
The verdict has never fully settled. Sales figures during the period gave critics ammunition. Marketing academics have written it up as both a landmark and a cautionary tale, occasionally in the same paper. But it satisfied both halves of her own risk test - transformational, and intended to move the business - and it forced a very large, very conservative industry to have an argument it had been avoiding about whether attention and affection are the same currency. Sixteen years on, most consumer brands run some version of what she was attempting.
She then took over as President of PepsiCo's Starbucks and Lipton joint ventures, overseeing the largest global tea portfolio, the reinvention of Pure Leaf, and the creation of the Refreshers category. The development process there was characteristic: the team refined the drinks by asking baristas. The people who would actually pour it. A radical notion, apparently.
Scientists, Stylists and a Humidity Machine
In December 2011 the Boston Globe reported that the former Victoria's Secret marketing chief was taking over a small Cambridge beauty company called Living Proof, founded on MIT science and the unglamorous problem of frizz. It is a peculiar career move on paper - from a $40 billion portfolio to a specialist hair care firm - and an entirely logical one if you believe, as she evidently does, that the interesting work happens where the product is made.
Her description of how they built things there is the single most revealing sentence in her public record: "Our stylists experiment with products and then meet with scientists." Salon professionals tested formulations. Researchers argued back. Disputes about frizz were settled with a humidity machine, which is the closest the beauty industry gets to a laboratory duel. Fast Company put her at number 39 on its 100 Most Creative People in Business list in 2013 and labelled her, accurately, The Marketing Experimentalist.
I have had plenty of speed bumps in my 30-year career, but I genuinely never think of them as mistakes as long as I learn something.
Jill Beraud, to BU Today
Diamonds, Then Tea
Two more acts followed in quick succession. From October 2014 she was Executive Vice President at Tiffany & Co., running global retail operations with oversight of store development and real estate - a job about square footage and adjacency and lease terms, which is to say a job about the least romantic possible aspects of romance. Then, from October 2015 until September 2018, she was Chief Executive Officer of IPPOLITA, the privately held luxury jewellery house.
And then, in 2019, having run marketing for one of the largest beverage portfolios on earth, she co-founded a startup selling iced tea. Sh'nnong Beverage Company, launched with Charlie Herbstreith, blends green, oolong and Bai Mudan teas with botanicals. The Má line went national through more than five hundred Vitamin Shoppe stores.
The name is the tell. Shennong is the emperor of Chinese legend who is said to have personally tasted hundreds of plants to catalogue what each one did to him. A patron saint of empirical method, in other words, and an unusually on-the-nose choice for a woman whose entire professional identity is testing things rather than asserting them.
Upstream
The current chapter is quieter and, arguably, the most interesting. She has sat on the board of Levi Strauss & Co. since 2013 - through an initial public offering, a pandemic, and the wholesale reinvention of how denim reaches people - and shareholders re-elected her in April 2026 to a term running until 2029. That is a long time to stay useful to a 170-year-old company. She served on the board of Revance Therapeutics from 2019 to 2025, chairing its brand strategy and compensation committees. She has been on the World of Children Board of Governors since 2009.
And since September 2022 she has chaired the board of Fashion for Good, the Amsterdam-based initiative working on how clothes are actually made - the supply chain, the materials, the parts nobody photographs. "In this vital decade for climate action," she said on taking the role, "Fashion for Good's work is more important than ever. We need to transform the sector into one that prioritises a regenerative approach, champions innovation."
There is an obvious joke here about someone who spent thirty years teaching people to want things now working on how those things get produced. It is also the wrong joke. Demand and supply are the same system observed from opposite ends, and someone who has spent a career learning precisely why a person picks up one item and not another is unusually well equipped to work out what would have to change further back down the line.
Her advice to anyone starting a new job is characteristically unsentimental: be clear on the company's strategy and priorities with far more specificity than you picked up in the interview, and - the line worth stealing - "always take feedback as a gift." Coming from someone who has restarted in six industries, that is not a motivational poster. It is a working method, tested repeatedly, in humidity machines and boardrooms alike.