Sabrina Cherubini

A marketer who bet her career on how people feel

There is a certain kind of executive who collects logos the way other people collect passport stamps. Sabrina Cherubini is one of them, except her stamps read Leo Burnett, Havas, Kmart, Sears, Ann Taylor, Hanky Panky, and now FULLBEAUTY Brands. Put them in a row and they look like a scavenger hunt through the last twenty years of consumer marketing. Look closer and there is a thread running through all of it, one she likes to say out loud: people forget what they see or hear, but they always remember how someone made them feel.

It is the sort of line that could sound like a fridge magnet in the wrong mouth. In hers it is closer to a job description. Cherubini has spent her career in the business of feelings that happen to move merchandise, and she has done it on two continents, in three languages of commerce - agency, startup, and Fortune 500 - without ever quite losing the accent of the first.

Paris first, then everywhere

She began in France, where a science-major diploma gave way to a master's in marketing from KEDGE Business School. The pivot from test tubes to brand strategy is the first clue that Cherubini is comfortable being the person in the room who arrived by an unusual door. Her first professional home was Leo Burnett, the agency that gave the world the Marlboro Man and the Jolly Green Giant, where she learned that a brand is a promise dressed up as a picture. Six years at Havas followed, running strategy, which is agency-speak for being paid to think hard about why anyone buys anything.

Then came the part of the résumé that reads like a woman deciding the safe path was boring. She jumped to EKYOG, an eco-fashion label, to run marketing and e-commerce back when e-commerce was still something retailers apologized for. She landed at Women's Startup Lab in the Bay Area, where the currency was equity and optimism rather than television points. And, in a move that says a great deal about her, she used her San Francisco years to found a network for French business women in the Bay Area and to mentor founders through French Tech Hub. The pattern shows up again and again: wherever Cherubini goes, she builds a room for other people to stand in.

The American retail crucible

The next chapter took her into the machinery of big American retail, which is not for the faint of heart. She was Brand Marketing Director at Kmart Apparel and then Senior Marketing Director at Sears Holdings, two names that were, at the time, learning the hard way what happens when a brand stops making people feel anything. From there to ANN INC., where she ran marketing and customer strategy for Ann Taylor and Loft, the twin poles of the American working woman's wardrobe. If you have ever agonized over whether a blazer says competent or trying-too-hard, you have stood inside a question Cherubini was paid to answer.

It was at Hanky Panky, the lingerie house famous for a one-size thong and a cult following, that she produced the number she is proudest of. Over nearly four years as Senior Vice President of Brand and Digital, she helped push the company's direct-to-consumer business from under 20 percent of revenue to roughly half. In plain terms: she taught a wholesale brand to sell straight to the humans who wear it, and to enjoy the margins that come with the relationship. It is a quietly radical thing to pull off, and it is the sort of proof point that gets a person a bigger chair.

The bigger chair

In June 2025 that chair arrived. FULLBEAUTY Brands named her Chief Marketing Officer, handing her the marketing keys to a portfolio that has spent years quietly assembling itself into the biggest name in plus-size and big-and-tall apparel. The roster is a mouthful - Catherines, ellos, Swimsuits for All, Jessica London, Brylane Home, and more - eighteen brands in all, aimed at customers the mainstream fashion industry spent decades pretending did not exist.

Her framing of the mission is the polished sort you would expect from someone who once wrote agency decks: an iconic portfolio, she says, with a powerful purpose - to champion style, confidence and inclusivity for every body. Cynics will note that inclusivity has become fashion's favorite adjective precisely because it sells. Cherubini's answer, implicit in her whole career, is that the two are not enemies. A customer who has been ignored for decades does not need to be told she matters. She needs to be shown, in fit and fabric and photography, and then she remembers how it felt. Which brings us, tidily, back to the fridge magnet that turns out to be a strategy.

The second job nobody put on the org chart

Ask what Cherubini does and the honest answer runs longer than her title. She sits on the board of The Sharing Shelf, belongs to the Women in Retail Leadership Circle, and has a long habit of founding and mentoring the sort of networks that outlast any single job. She has been recognized by Marquis Who's Who, collected a Top Leaders nod from CommerceNext and a marketing-innovation honor from The Lead, and she talks about the future less in terms of titles than in terms of building bigger rooms - more nonprofit work, stronger communities for women in leadership. It is the same instinct that made her start a women's network in San Francisco, scaled up.

The résumé, in the end, is not really a scavenger hunt. It is one long argument that marketing at its best is not manipulation but recognition - the art of making a customer, or a colleague, or an entire underserved category, feel seen. Sabrina Cherubini has been making that argument in Paris, San Francisco, and New York for two decades. At FULLBEAUTY she has finally been handed a stage exactly the size of the idea.