Katherine
Brodieand the audience nobody wanted

There is a rule in fashion marketing so widely obeyed that almost nobody bothers to write it down: chase the young. Chase her relentlessly, budget for her exclusively, and photograph her in a way that suggests she has never once worried about a utility bill. The rule has the pleasing quality of being both obvious and, on closer inspection, largely unexamined. Katherine Brodie examined it. Then she did something about it, which is a rarer thing.

Brodie became Chief Marketing Officer of Frances Valentine in January 2025. Frances Valentine is the New York label founded in 2016 by Elyce Arons together with Kate Spade - her college friend and business partner of two decades - and Andy Spade. It sells handbags, shoes, statement outerwear, jewellery, fragrance and, more recently, things for the house. The brand's public personality is joyful in a way that borders on defiant: colour applied without apology, prints that behave as though minimalism was a brief and regrettable fashion.

What Brodie brought to it was not taste - Frances Valentine has never had a shortage of that - but plumbing. Twenty years of it. Her first job in the trade was as an eCommerce manager at Kate Spade New York, back when running a brand's website was considered a technical curiosity rather than the business itself. From there: eCommerce and then digital marketing at C. Wonder, digital marketing at Club Monaco, e-commerce at Draper James, and a run as Vice President of Marketing & eCommerce at Rifle Paper Co., the Florida stationery house that turned florals into an empire. A stint as VP of Marketing at CAKE followed. Then New York called her back, to the brand her very first employer had gone on to found.

Careers do not usually arrange themselves into shapes that satisfying. This one did, and it seems churlish not to point it out.

The Market Hiding in Plain Sight

The insight at the centre of Brodie's tenure is uncomplicated, which is why so many people missed it. The fashion industry treats women over fifty the way a bad host treats an early guest: acknowledged, seated, then ignored for the rest of the evening. They have the discretionary income. They have decades of accumulated opinions about what suits them. What they have not had, until quite recently, is anyone making content for them that does not read as an apology.

Frances Valentine went the other way. Under Brodie, the brand built what Retail TouchPoints described as a vibrant, social-first brand experience around women fifty and up - a community organised around colour, joy and personal connection rather than around aspiration and mild self-reproach. The results have been, by the polite standards of retail journalism, viral.

It should be said that this was not a rescue mission. Frances Valentine was already growing quickly; Arons has described the business as up 40 percent, split roughly half e-commerce, thirty percent retail across a fleet approaching nine stores, and twenty percent wholesale. Brodie's task was less about finding growth and more about giving it a coherent voice while it happened - which is the harder job, and the one that gets less credit.

The Department That Thinks It's a Film Studio

Ask most fashion brands how they make content and you will be walked through a calendar. Four shoots a year. A location scout. A deck. Six weeks of internal review during which the idea slowly loses whatever made it worth doing. The output is beautiful, expensive and arrives on the internet already slightly out of date.

Brodie's team does not work that way. Frances Valentine treats content creation like its own production studio - video-first, creator-style, produced continuously and in-house. The distinction sounds like a matter of logistics. It is actually a matter of tone. Content made at speed by people who work at the brand sounds like people who work at the brand. Content made in a quarterly cycle by an agency sounds like a quarterly cycle.

The second decision was braver. Rather than renting credibility from influencers, Frances Valentine put Elyce Arons herself in front of the camera and left her there. The co-founder became the brand's face and personality across social - not as a corporate cameo, but as the recurring lead. She is in her sixties. She is talking to a customer roughly her own age. Nobody had to explain the target demographic to her, because she is it.

There is a lesson buried in this that a great many chief marketing officers pay consultants to avoid learning. Authenticity is usually not something you have to buy. It is frequently sitting three doors down the corridor, mildly surprised to be asked.

Catalogue, Storefront, Phone Screen

The complication in Brodie's job is that Frances Valentine refuses to be a single kind of business. It mails a printed catalogue, an artefact most digitally native brands regard with the affection one reserves for a fax machine. It runs stores on Madison Avenue and in Sag Harbor, Dallas, Houston, Palm Beach, Naples, Birmingham, Atlanta and Alexandria, with Nashville, Charlotte, Chicago and parts of California under discussion. It sells wholesale. And it maintains one of the livelier social accounts in American fashion.

Each of these speaks a slightly different dialect. The catalogue is patient and tactile. The store is theatrical. The social feed is fast and faintly conspiratorial. Making all of them sound like the same brand - without flattening any of them into the same brand - is the actual work, and it is mostly invisible when done well. This is the recurring indignity of good marketing: the better it functions, the more it looks like nothing happened at all.

Brodie's background makes her unusually suited to this particular mess. E-commerce people are trained in the unromantic end of the business - conversion, retention, email, the fine print of a checkout flow. Brand people are trained in the other end. Brodie has spent two decades sitting at the seam between them, which used to be a slightly awkward place to build a career and is now, in 2026, precisely where the chief marketing officers come from. The unglamorous job quietly became the top job while everyone was looking at the runway.

What It Adds Up To

In June 2026 Brodie appeared on Retail Remix, the Retail TouchPoints podcast, for the first episode hosted by the publication's new editor-in-chief, Kate Robertson. The conversation covered video-first storytelling, creator-style content, the studio model, and the community built around colour and joy. Eighteen minutes. No manifesto, no keynote theatrics.

Which is broadly in keeping with the work. Frances Valentine has not won by shouting louder than anyone else - a strategy the fashion industry has already tested exhaustively and at great cost. It won by noticing that a very large group of people had been left standing at the edge of the room, and by walking over.

There is nothing especially clever about that, and that is rather the point. The best marketing ideas are frequently the ones that look, in hindsight, like simple good manners.