Leana Less

Some job titles arrive with a founding. Bealls, Inc. managed to run a Florida retail empire for one hundred and eleven years without a single one. The family that built its stores from a Bradenton dry-goods counter in 1915 sold plenty of merchandise across the intervening century, thank you, and did it without anyone carrying a business card that read Chief Marketing Officer. Then, in the summer of 2024, they hired Leana Less, and the century-long streak politely ended.

It is a curious thing to be a first at a company older than television. There is no predecessor to blame, no dusty binder of "how we've always done it," and no shoes to fill because nobody wore them. Less appears to find this liberating rather than terrifying, which tells you almost everything about her. Her stated marketing superpower is not a slogan or a spreadsheet. It is a temperament. She calls herself an activator.

"I'm going to start and if I get to that stop street I'll figure out what to do and I'll continue to move," she has explained, "but I don't wait for the green light." It is the sort of line that sounds glib until you notice she has actually lived it across four continents and four wildly different industries. The green light, in her experience, is a myth invented to keep cautious people stationary.

Her beginning was a long way from Florida. Less grew up in South Africa, in a culture she describes as strong on hierarchy and respect for elders. This produced a well-mannered young professional who, by her own admission, was reluctant to so much as bother a senior colleague. She had to unlearn it. The lesson she eventually internalized, and now hands to anyone who will listen, is that respect and hierarchy are not the same thing, and that speaking up early is not rudeness but survival.

She began in the South African advertising trade, then rose to director and board member at MediaCom Africa, steering new business and marquee accounts for the likes of Coca-Cola Sub-Saharan Africa, Procter & Gamble and Nokia South Africa. It was a client relationship, of all things, that pried open the door to the wider world. The relationship led to a role overseeing Coca-Cola's media across Africa, and from there the map of her life simply kept unfolding.

Nearly thirteen years at The Coca-Cola Company took her to Istanbul, Dubai and Atlanta, with titles that grew heavier at each stop: Director of Media for Eurasia and Africa, Connections Director, and eventually Global Vice President of Connections and Media. At the top of that particular mountain she was managing something on the order of seven hundred agency partners across two hundred countries and drafting a five-year digital transformation strategy. When people say a marketer thinks globally, this is the unglamorous, logistically dizzying thing they usually do not mean but should.

Beverages were only chapter one. In 2018 she crossed into beauty, taking over global consumer marketing for Aveda under the Estee Lauder Companies, where she pushed ecommerce growth and brand expansion. Then came apparel: in August 2022, Chico's FAS named her Senior Vice President of Marketing, and she led the company's transformation toward digital, data-led strategy in service of a three-year growth plan. "I am delighted to be joining this women-led organization," she said at the time. "I love what the brands stand for."

The through-line is not the product. Nobody confuses a can of soda, a bottle of shampoo and a discount cardigan. The through-line is the human on the other end, and Less's stubborn curiosity about what that human actually wants. Beauty, beverages, technology, personal care and now off-price retail. Five categories, one question, asked again and again.

Which brings us back to Bealls, and to the size of the thing she has taken on. This is not a boutique. Bealls, Inc. runs some fourteen thousand employees and roughly 1.8 billion dollars in annual revenue out of Bradenton, still owned and operated by the founding family after more than a century. Chairman and CEO Matt Beall said she was arriving "at a pivotal time in our history," and that her "fresh and innovative perspective will be integral to developing strong campaigns." Translation: the family that never needed a CMO has decided the next chapter requires one.

Her brief is broad by design. She leads brand marketing, ecommerce and guest strategy, including the loyalty programs, and her ambition is to drag all of it into a single coherent engine. On the industry podcast circuit she has been described as reframing marketing from a reactive service department into an end-to-end growth function, and reframing loyalty from a promotional lever into what one write-up called a growth unlock. In plainer English: stop treating the loyalty program as a coupon machine and start treating members like people you actually know.

"Building on what the team has established," she has said of the assignment, "we'll define the modern era for Bealls Inc. focused on acquisition of new guests and elevating our experience for existing guests." It is a tidy summary of a large job. New people in the door, and a better time for the people already there.

What keeps this from being another corporate-appointment story is how she runs a room. Less leads by three words she repeats often: transparency, resilience and joy. Transparency because she keeps her teams honestly informed about goals and progress. Resilience because, as she puts it, "I don't get thrown off if things aren't going well. Let's find a solution." And joy because she insists on celebrating the small wins, the incremental steps that keep a team moving toward the large, distant one.

She staffs the same way she leads. "You need to be able to see what people are good at and task them to do that," she says, and her advice to anyone starting out is disarmingly simple: "Do the things that you're brilliant at doing and continue to do that even better." It is the kind of counsel that sounds obvious and that almost nobody follows, because it requires the discipline to stop doing the things you are merely adequate at.

There is a neat symmetry in where she has landed. A marketer who spent her career translating global brands into local markets has come to run a proudly regional, family-owned chain that has never once needed to explain itself to Wall Street. Bealls waited one hundred and eleven years to write the job description. It seems to have found someone who does not much care that the page was blank, because she was never going to wait for permission to start writing anyway.