apparel
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How Cross Colours Turned $300,000 Into a Dress Code for Hip-Hop
Two designers watched teenagers improvise a silhouette on the New York subway, put $300,000 behind what they saw, and built one of hip-hop’s first mass-market uniforms. The rise was fast; the lessons in demand, distribution and staying recognizable have lasted much longer.
Blu Boutique’s $14.99 lesson in selling an outfit
A graphic tank, a pair of plaid pants, and a surprisingly useful set of measurements. Blu Boutique’s clothing listings offer a small lesson in making fashion easier to buy.
Uncivilized puts its creative brief on a $50 hoodie
The California design company brings branding, websites, photography and sound under one roof. Its own merchandise makes the personality tangible: pay the muse, laugh at the birds, and make the shirt after someone orders it.
Santa Cruz Skateboards has a hand in your nostalgia
A batch of fiberglass boards became a business. A blue hand became its calling card. Santa Cruz now sells the past alongside hardware built to take another beating.
Adam Lebowitz Is Selling Stretch Jeans Everywhere - Even on a Ski Lift
Mugsy's CMO came up through sports media, then traded brand partnerships for the daily arithmetic of DTC. His playbook is unusually public: test more, protect the second purchase, own the mistakes - and keep pitching when the office happens to be a chairlift.
The Menswear Brand That Ships a New Wardrobe Every Single Day
Siddharth Dungarwal turned a shut-down B2B clothing business into a menswear machine that launches around 35 designs a day - and got all five sharks to write a cheque.
Where Men's Brands Go to Grow Up Slowly
The Digital Stronghold quietly gathered five men's apparel labels under one roof - from Taylor Stitch to Boston Scally - on a single contrarian bet: the fastest way to kill a good brand is to grow it too fast.
How Intertop Turned the Shoe Store Into Ukraine’s Fashion Operating System
Intertop began with shoes. Three decades later, it is stitching stores, software, logistics and global brands into one of Ukraine’s most consequential retail platforms.
The Bootstrapped Bengaluru Label That Sold India on the Rs 3,000 Shirt
How Manish and Akshika Poddar turned a family garment factory's European know-how into one of India's fastest-growing premium fashion houses - and stayed bootstrapped until the numbers spoke for themselves.
The $8,000 Bet That Put a Pink Whale on American Prep
Two brothers quit jobs they disliked, borrowed $8,000 on credit cards and started selling neckties from a Jeep. Twenty-eight years later, their most valuable product may still be the feeling stitched into a smiling pink whale.
David Epstein
David Epstein is President and CMO of the Sportswear Division at Q4 Designs LLC, a New York apparel firm that designs, sources, and builds sportswear and outerwear for brands like DKNY, Reebok, Jessica Simpson, and Steve Madden. He climbed from a retail store manager on the sales floor to running a division inside one of the garment district's busiest design-and-sourcing houses, spending more than two decades learning apparel from the ground up.
David J. Katz
David J. Katz is Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and self-styled 'Alchemist in Residence' at Randa Apparel & Accessories, one of the world's largest apparel and accessories companies, home to brands like Levi's, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Haggar and Dickies. He blends data, neuroscience, behavioral economics and storytelling to understand and influence consumer behavior across roughly 1,200 employees and more than 20,000 retail touchpoints worldwide. A LinkedIn Top Voice, co-author of the best-selling 'Design for Response,' and a frequent speaker at Shoptalk and NRF, he is a widely cited voice on retail, marketing and the arrival of AI in the store.
David Stoddard
David Stoddard is a co-founder of Brixton, the Oceanside, California lifestyle apparel brand he started in 2004 with two friends and a single vintage-inspired hat. He built the company out of a garage after a decade working his way up from a $6-an-hour warehouse job at TransWorld Magazine, and grew it into a globally distributed brand known for heritage headwear and clothing. He now serves as a marketing and creative leader for the company, and speaks locally about entrepreneurship and betting on where you come from.
Debbie Woloshin
Debbie Woloshin is the Chief Marketing Officer of Stitch Fix, the personalized styling and apparel company. A brand builder with more than 30 years in fashion marketing, she joined in 2022 from Marc Jacobs, where she led a global digital transformation. Across earlier roles at the Jones Group, Ann Inc., the Frye Company, L'Oreal and Nine West, she has shaped some of fashion's most recognizable brands and orchestrated collaborations with talent from Taylor Swift to Kate Hudson. At Stitch Fix she launched the 'Retail Therapy' brand platform and pushed a marketing strategy that pairs empathetic storytelling with AI-powered personalization.
Erin Daley
Erin Daley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Ariat International, the Union City, California maker of performance footwear and apparel for riders, ranchers, and outdoor athletes. A brand builder who started on Crest Whitestrips at Procter & Gamble and later ran marketing as SVP & CMO at e.l.f. Cosmetics during its high-growth years, she now leads brand and growth for a company doing roughly $420M in revenue with about 1,600 employees. She holds an MBA from Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, where she has taught and coached marketing students since 2015.
Gian Luca Bersezio
Gian Luca Bersezio is the Chief Marketing Officer of Max Mara Fashion Group, the Italian luxury house behind Max Mara and Max&Co. A marketing and brand-communication leader with more than 15 years across global fashion and lifestyle brands, he built his reputation as director of global brand and communication at Timberland - where he led campaigns like the 50th-anniversary 'This Is Not A Boot' and high-profile collaborations - before moving into the Max Mara group. He is known for blending creative instinct with commercial strategy across brand positioning, campaigns, retail and omnichannel growth.
Iris Yen
Iris Yen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cupshe, the California-founded swimwear and beachwear brand that grew from a single-category bet into a global direct-to-consumer business with roughly $420 million in annual revenue. She joined in February 2025 after a run through some of the loudest brand-building rooms in the business: Head of Media, Content and Partnerships at Nike; VP and Head of Media, Strategy and Audiences at Red Bull; VP and Head of Communications at GUESS?, Inc.; VP of Communications at American Eagle Outfitters; and VP of Global Marketing and PR at Quiksilver. She started in music, running marketing and PR at Universal Records in the early 2000s, and has built campaigns around names including Britney Spears, Nelly, Kelly Slater, Tony Hawk and Torah Bright. A Washington University in St. Louis graduate who studied anthropology alongside marketing, Yen tends to treat brands as cultures rather than catalogs - a habit visible in Cupshe's 10th-anniversary work, its fourth Miami Swim Week runway show, and its 2026 Casa del Sol collaboration with Jessie James Decker.
Jens Nicolaysen
Jens Nicolaysen is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Shinesty, the Boulder, Colorado apparel brand whose stated mission is to force the world to take itself less seriously. A 2010 marketing graduate of CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business, he spent his early career doing brand strategy and innovation consulting for large consumer companies before launching Shinesty in mid-2014 with fellow Leeds alum Chris White. The company began as a vintage-clothing resale operation with buyers scouring thrift shops in college and ski towns, pivoted to original designs in 2015, and grew into a direct-to-consumer underwear and loungewear business best known for its trademarked Ball Hammock pouch underwear, its holiday and theme-party outfits, and a joke-first marketing voice that Nicolaysen oversees across email, paid media, catalogues and video. Shinesty's story became a six-episode MTV2 series in 2017, the company was named an Inc. 5000 honoree in 2022, and it has raised roughly $8.2 million through a Series A.
Jack Reynolds
Jack Reynolds is the Chief Marketing Officer of Free People and its activewear offshoot FP Movement, both part of Philadelphia-based Urban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN). He was promoted to the CMO role in April 2021 after several years running e-commerce and digital marketing for the brand, and before that spent roughly 13 years at Bertelsmann Media Group managing online and direct programs. He studied English and Philosophy at Dickinson College and originally wanted to work in music as an A&R representative, drifting into marketing while figuring out how to promote artists. Under his marketing leadership, FP Movement has grown from a single 2020 store into a fast-expanding activewear label, backed by campaigns like the 2024 Anomaly-created "Stand Out, Never Still" (starring a pink sheep named Tilly and five Olympic hopefuls) and the 2025 signing of snowboarder Bea Kim as the brand's first winter-sports ambassador ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Jenna Woodhull
Jenna Woodhull is Chief Merchandising Officer at Sendero Provisions Co., the Waco, Texas apparel brand that started with a single hat in 2014 and now sells a full Western-meets-outdoor line. She has spent close to three decades in apparel, beginning as a Volcom sales rep in the late 1990s, moving through Hurley as National Sales Manager and Director of Retail Marketing, returning to Volcom as global VP of design and merchandising from 2010 to 2013, then co-founding the Newport Beach brand agency and showroom Band of Martians. She spent roughly ten years at Brixton, rising to Senior Vice President of Design & Merchandising and later Chief Merchandising Officer, before a stint as global head of women's product at Liberated Brands overseeing Volcom, Billabong and RVCA. She joined Sendero in February 2025 to run merchandising strategy, product vision and category expansion. She is known in the industry for balancing creative instinct with commercial discipline, and she describes her own style as vintage classic, usually finished with boots.
Jonathan Bottomley
Jonathan Bottomley is EVP and Global Chief Marketing Officer of Calvin Klein and, since May 2026, EVP of Group Consumer & Brand Strategy at parent company PVH Corp. Oxford-educated in modern languages, he spent roughly two decades in advertising - most notably eleven years at BBH London, where he rose to joint chief strategy officer and worked on Axe/Lynx, Google, Audi and Samsung - before crossing to the client side as Ralph Lauren's first-ever CMO in 2017 and later CMO of Boll & Branch. Since joining Calvin Klein in June 2022 he has rebuilt the brand's marketing around what he calls an 'entertainment mentality': casting talent with 'cultural velocity' rather than raw follower counts, and pairing archival brand DNA with modern CRM and first-party data. The results have been loud - the January 2024 Jeremy Allen White underwear campaign generated an estimated $74 million in media impact value and roughly 30% year-over-year growth in underwear sales the week it launched, followed by Bad Bunny in 2025 and Dakota Johnson in 2026.
Josh Tabaj
Josh Tabaj is the Chief Marketing Officer and one of four co-founders of Branded Bills, the Arizona headwear and apparel company that turned a hand-branded leather patch into a national custom-merchandise business. Branded Bills started around 2015 in a Mesa garage with a branding iron, a knife, and roughly $1,000 from each founder; its first patch hat went to a South Dakota brewery. The company grew from state-pride hats into a vertically integrated operation that sources and produces its own headwear, runs a custom and corporate-branding division, sells officially licensed collegiate gear, opened its first physical store inside the Phoenix Suns' Footprint Center in 2022, and moved into a 96,000-plus square foot Tempe headquarters in 2025. Tabaj handles the marketing side of that machine - the brand voice, the customer story, and the argument that a logo deserves better than a screen print.
Katherine Beede
Katherine Godfrey Beede is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of The TJX Companies, the Framingham, Massachusetts off-price retail group behind T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Homesense, Sierra, Winners and TK Maxx. She stepped into the top marketing seat in February 2024 after roughly a quarter-century inside the company, having previously run marketing for HomeGoods, then T.J.Maxx, then the combined T.J.Maxx and Marshalls division known internally as MarMaxx. Before TJX she spent a decade on the agency side in Boston and Philadelphia, at shops including Hill Holliday, LevLane, Arnold Worldwide and Holland Mark Martin. Her remit now covers marketing for a roughly $60 billion retailer with more than 5,200 stores across nine countries, built on a business model that sells a shopping trip nobody can fully predict - the so-called treasure hunt. She keeps an unusually low public profile for a Fortune 100 CMO.
Katherine Brodie
Katherine Brodie is the Chief Marketing Officer of Frances Valentine, the New York fashion house co-founded by Elyce Arons with her best friend, the late Kate Spade, and Andy Spade. Brodie joined in January 2025 after roughly two decades spent building direct-to-consumer engines for design-led brands: eCommerce at Kate Spade, digital marketing at C. Wonder and Club Monaco, eCommerce at Reese Witherspoon's Draper James, and VP of Marketing & eCommerce at Rifle Paper Co., followed by a VP of Marketing post at CAKE. At Frances Valentine she runs a marketing operation that behaves less like a department and more like a production studio - video-first storytelling, creator-style content, and a community organized around color and joy. The strategic bet is contrarian by industry standards: while most fashion brands chase shoppers under 35, Brodie's team has built a viral social presence around women 50 and up, with Arons herself as the on-camera personality. The approach has coincided with rapid growth for the brand across e-commerce, its expanding retail fleet, and wholesale.
Kelly Olmstead
Kelly Olmstead is the Chief Marketing Officer of Allbirds, the San Francisco sustainable footwear and apparel brand. She brings more than 25 years across sporting goods, footwear and apparel, including nearly two decades at Adidas leading brand, retail and digital marketing for North America, and a stint as CMO of children's clothing brand Hanna Andersson. Since taking the top marketing seat at Allbirds in December 2023, she has anchored the company's turnaround on brand building over pure performance marketing, launching the 'Allbirds by Nature' platform and betting that consistency, storytelling and a beloved product can lift the brand's awareness the way it lifts its Net Promoter Score.
Kenny Mitchell
Kenny Mitchell is the senior vice president and chief marketing officer of the Levi's brand at Levi Strauss & Co., where he steers global marketing for one of the world's most recognizable denim labels. Before joining Levi's in 2023, he built and scaled the marketing organization at Snap Inc. and held senior roles at McDonald's U.S., Gatorade and NASCAR. Over a 20-plus year career he has collected multiple Cannes Lions, two Emmy nominations, and a long list of industry honors, and he sits on the board of e.l.f. Beauty.
Krista Dalton
Krista Dalton is Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Tecovas, the Austin-based western wear brand built on handmade cowboy boots that has grown into a lifestyle label with more than 50 US stores. She spent nine years at Target, where she moved from allocating plus-size and maternity apparel to becoming the first person the company shifted from stores to Target.com in 2013, then seven years at Overstock.com (now Beyond Inc), ending as Chief Customer and Merchandising Officer with a team of over 1,300 and an $800M-plus P&L. At Tecovas she has pushed the brand into work boots and women's workwear, run TV blackout tests to prove what awareness actually buys, sent her team into customers' closets, and built a custom AI agent to chew through the roughly 16 reports she used to read by hand. Footwear News named her to its Women Who Rock class of 2026, where she argued that authenticity is the new competitive advantage.
Kristen D'Arcy
Kristen D'Arcy is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Digital Growth at True Religion, the El Segundo, California denim and sportswear brand where she became the company's first-ever CMO in July 2023. With roughly two decades of marketing and e-commerce experience, she started on the agency side at Tribal DDB Worldwide and R/GA before moving brand-side to Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Coty, American Eagle Outfitters, PacSun and Homedics. At True Religion she has rebuilt the brand's cultural footprint through campaigns pairing fashion with music and sport - partnerships with the NFL and NBA, activations at the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Game and Coachella, and campaigns starring Megan Thee Stallion, Key Glock and Quavo - while pushing e-commerce from roughly 35 percent of the business toward half of it. She has been named to Ad Age's Best Marketers Under 40, Brand Innovators' Top 50 Women in Brand Marketing, and Business Insider's Top 25 Most Innovative CMOs.
American Eagle Outfitters Inc.
American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. (NYSE: AEO) is a Pittsburgh-headquartered specialty apparel retailer that has spent nearly five decades selling jeans to teenagers and young adults - and, more recently, learning how to sell a great deal more than jeans. Founded in 1977 by brothers Jerry and Mark Silverman, the company now runs a five-brand portfolio: the namesake American Eagle denim and casualwear label; Aerie, the intimates and swim brand built on unretouched imagery; OFFLINE by Aerie in activewear; Todd Snyder in premium menswear; and Unsubscribed, a slow-fashion experiment. Fiscal 2025 revenue reached roughly $5.5 billion across about 1,168 company-operated stores, 357 internationally licensed locations, and a digital business spanning ae.com, aerie.com and toddsnyder.com. The company describes its flagship as the leading jeans brand for US shoppers aged 15 to 25. Its recent story is one of divergence: Aerie crossed $2 billion in trailing-twelve-month revenue and posted 25% comparable-sales growth in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, while the American Eagle brand has been flatter - even after the widely debated Sydney Sweeney denim campaign of July 2025 delivered what management called unprecedented new-customer acquisition.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF) is a Columbus, Ohio-based global specialty apparel retailer that operates a family of brands - Abercrombie & Fitch, abercrombie kids, Hollister, Gilly Hicks, Social Tourist and the YPB activewear line - across roughly 840 company-operated stores, a franchise network and a digital business that accounts for close to half of revenue. Founded in 1892 as a Manhattan outfitter that supplied Theodore Roosevelt's safaris and counted Ernest Hemingway among its customers, the company spent the 2010s dismantling the exclusionary teen-mall identity it had built in the 1990s and 2000s. Under CEO Fran Horowitz, who took over in 2017, it split its two flagship brands into distinct demographic lanes - Abercrombie for millennials in their twenties and thirties, Hollister for teenagers - shrank store footprints, and rebuilt merchandising around a lean-inventory 'chase' model that reads early demand signals and reorders fast. The approach produced record fiscal 2025 net sales of $5.27 billion, a third straight year of double-digit operating margin, and one of the more complete reputational reversals in modern American retail.