Twenty-four years is a long time to stay anywhere. It is roughly the age of the average Journeys shopper's parents, the length of a mortgage, and the exact amount of time Stacy Doren spent at Levi Strauss & Co. before deciding, in the summer of 2024, to do the one thing that comfortable careers rarely encourage: leave.
The leap was not into another denim job. It was into footwear, into teen fashion, and into a title she had somehow never held despite a resume that reads like a marketing greatest-hits album. In August 2024, Genesco named her Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Journeys, the mall-based chain that has been selling sneakers to skeptical teenagers since before most of those teenagers were born. It was, remarkably, her first time as a CMO.
To understand why a company would hand its first-ever chief marketing seat to someone who had spent her whole adult life at one employer, it helps to rewind past the denim. Doren did not begin in fashion at all. She began in cereal. Fresh out of the University of Iowa with a marketing degree, she took a job at Quaker Oats, where she cut her teeth on demand planning and trade marketing for a portfolio that included Gatorade, Cap'n Crunch, Quaker Oatmeal, and the immortal Rice-A-Roni. It is not the origin story you would script for a future fashion executive, but it taught her the unglamorous machinery underneath every glossy campaign: supply, demand, and the cold arithmetic of shelf space.
She joined Levi's in 1999 and never really left the building until she did. Over two and a half decades she worked, in her own accounting, across every corner of marketing: direct-to-consumer, wholesale, brand, global, regional. For eight years she ran the Latin America region and the Americas at the same time, a workload that would make most people negotiate for a second title. Then came a decade as Vice President of Levi's Americas Marketing, leading a 50-person team responsible for the company's largest business segment.
The campaigns that put a 150-year-old brand back in the party
If you attended a cultural event of any significance in the 2010s, there is a decent chance Stacy Doren's team helped stage it. Coachella. Super Bowl 50 at Levi's Stadium. A women's relaunch with the photo collective Girlgaze. SXSW. Rolling Stone's 50th anniversary. The Google Jacquard smart-jacket launch, which was as ambitious and slightly baffling as it sounds. A Times Square flagship. A Levi's x Target home collaboration. A partnership with Amazon's fashion competition show "Making the Cut." The through-line was not the venue but the intent: to drag a heritage brand out of the nostalgia bin and set it back down, as she has put it, at the center of culture.
She has been candid that she never had an official mentor. What she had instead was a series of people, mostly women, who believed in her potential more than she believed in it herself. It is a theme she returns to often, and one she has clearly filed away as a management instruction rather than a sentimental footnote. Her rule for teams is blunt and unromantic: "You're only as good as your team. And everyone needs to be held accountable for his or her job." She also refuses, on principle, to sit still. "Don't stay stagnant," she has said. "It's one of the reasons I believe I've been so happy with my career." Twenty-four years at one company is an odd sort of proof for that philosophy, until you realize she treated Levi's as roughly a dozen different jobs stacked end to end.
Nashville, teenagers, and the great mall comeback
Which brings us to Journeys, where the challenge is different in almost every dimension except the one that matters most: culture. The customer is between 13 and 22, native to the internet, allergic to being categorized, and, against every prediction of the last decade, increasingly fond of the shopping mall. Doren has been happy to lean into that last part. "There's been a ton of news lately about just the resurgence of the mall and how Gen Z is making the mall cool again," she has noted, sounding less like a nostalgist than a strategist who has read the traffic data.
Her read on the customer is sharp. "Teens don't really wanna be put into a box anymore," she has said. "They're very fluid with their style choices, they're trying on multiple versions of themselves." Journeys, in her telling, is the rare retailer built for exactly that indecision: "Nobody in the mall carries the broad range of products and brands that the teens want today like Journeys does." The 13-to-22 crowd, she says plainly, is the store's sweet spot.
The early work has been less about launching things than about fixing foundations, and, in one notable case, killing them. Working with the agency Anomaly, she set about defining what the team calls a brand map: positioning, purpose, beliefs, tone of voice. "It's been a while since we did any true brand building," she admitted. She also made the sort of decision that separates marketers who talk about discipline from those who practice it. Journeys had been mailing a catalog for decades. Doren ended it, not because it was bad, but because it was expensive and, in her phrase, "at the end of the day, it's an opportunity cost." She got the foundation right, then asked for the investment, then pointed most of it at paid media. In that order.
It is a very Stacy Doren sequence of moves: patient, then bold. She once summarized the whole outlook in a single line about growing up. "I learned early on not to take anything for granted. To have initiative and drive, but also to be patient." Twenty-four years in, and freshly installed in Nashville with a new title, a new age bracket, and a generation of teenagers to win over, she is still following her own advice. She did not wait to be asked.