apparel
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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.
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.
Paul Nugent
Paul Nugent is Chief Marketing Officer at Peter Millar, the Raleigh-based luxury sportswear and golf apparel brand owned by Richemont. A British-trained brand marketer, he has spent more than two decades building sports and lifestyle brands, most recently as CMO of Crocs-owned HEYDUDE, where he steered high-profile campaigns with Sydney Sweeney and Travis Hunter. Before that he led global brand marketing at Under Armour and reshaped the football heritage of Umbro, with earlier stops at ellesse and Codemasters. He joined Richemont's Peter Millar in 2025.
Melissa Haynes
Melissa Haynes is the Chief Marketing Officer of Glik's, one of the oldest family-owned fashion retailers in the United States, founded in 1897. A digital commerce and merchandising leader who cut her teeth as a shoe buyer at Zappos and later ran merchandising at eBags, Shane Co. and Scrubs & Beyond, she now steers marketing and customer experience for the roughly 70-store Midwest chain. Her calling card is hyper-local: she believes Glik's wins by tailoring each store's assortment to the community around it, backed by modern unified-commerce technology.
Marco Cattoretti
Marco Cattoretti is the Vice President of Global Sales at Naeem Khan, the New York luxury fashion house known for red-carpet gowns, embellished eveningwear and bridal couture. An Italian-trained lawyer turned fashion sales leader, he has spent his career building the commercial side of luxury brands, having previously served as President of Tuleh, Global VP of Sales at J Mendel and VP of Sales and Marketing at Romona Keveza. At Naeem Khan he helped launch, merchandise and distribute the bridal collection and is a regular presence at the brand's runway shows and trunk shows.
Matthew Pantoja
Matthew Pantoja is the Chief Brand Officer of Alpha Industries, the outerwear label famous for the MA-1 bomber and M-65 field jacket. Over two decades he has moved through New Era, Reebok, Palladium Boots and Triple 5 Soul, building a career on turning heritage product and youth culture into commercial energy. Since joining Alpha in 2016, he has helped steer the 60-year-old military supplier from surplus-store staple to global lifestyle brand, overseeing product, marketing and brand experiences across every region and channel.
Renee Halvorsen
Renee Halvorsen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Marine Layer, the San Francisco apparel brand known for absurdly soft t-shirts and a laid-back California outlook. A Yale-trained economist who began her career in finance and investment banking, she has spent the better part of a decade at Marine Layer, helping grow the business more than tenfold by treating marketing as a blend of art and science and treating customer lifetime value as the metric that matters most. Before Marine Layer she sharpened her craft in strategy and analytics roles at Gap Inc. and Athleta.
Sarah Sylvester
Sarah Sylvester is the Chief Marketing Officer of Lands' End, the first person to hold that title at the heritage American apparel and home brand in nearly a decade. She joined in April 2026 after almost 20 years at Victoria's Secret, where she rose from intern to Executive Vice President of Marketing and led high-profile brand reinvention work across the Victoria's Secret and PINK labels. A customer-first marketer known for balancing heritage with modern, data-informed storytelling, she now leads Lands' End's brand-building push as part of its turnaround and joint venture with WHP Global.
Shenhav Kimhi
Shenhav Kimhi is the Chief Marketing Officer of Magnetic Me, the New York baby and toddler apparel brand known for its patented magnetic closures. A brand builder and growth marketer, she has led marketing, brand, and e-commerce at fashion and lifestyle names including Crabtree & Evelyn and Public Clothing (home to Derek Lam 10 Crosby and ATM Collection). She holds an MBA in Global Management and Strategic Marketing from Bar-Ilan University and today oversees marketing for a company built on making getting dressed a little less of a fight.
Taylor Capuano
Taylor Capuano is the co-founder and chief creative officer of CAKES body, a viral direct-to-consumer apparel brand she launched in 2022 with her twin sister, Casey Sarai. Starting with $5,000 each in personal savings and no marketing budget, the sisters bootstrapped the company from a side hustle into a business that reported roughly $95 million in net sales in its fiscal year ending June 2025. A December 2023 appearance on ABC's Shark Tank, where they landed a deal with Emma Grede, accelerated the brand's rise. Capuano leads creative and marketing, and has become a public voice for bootstrapped, digital-first growth and family-friendly workplace policies.
Maria Intscher-Owrang
Maria Intscher-Owrang is the co-founder and CEO of Simplifyber, a Raleigh-area materials startup that molds cellulose-based liquid directly into finished textile and composite parts, eliminating spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing. After more than two decades designing for Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, Dirk Bikkembergs and Alexander McQueen, she left luxury fashion to rebuild manufacturing from the fiber up, landing partnerships with GANNI and Kia and a $12M Series A led by Suzano Ventures.
Dan Leahy
Dan Leahy is the co-founder and CEO of MakerSights, a San Francisco consumer-insights platform that helps apparel, footwear, and accessories brands decide what to make before they make it. His pitch is blunt: the fashion industry still builds product the way it did in the 1980s, guessing at what shoppers want and burning through unsold inventory in the process. MakerSights collects consumer feedback at scale and ties it to real sales data so brands like Ralph Lauren, New Balance, Everlane, and Madewell can produce less waste and more of what people actually buy. Before MakerSights, Leahy founded Savored, a restaurant yield-management startup acquired by Groupon, and cut his teeth in finance at Silver Lake and Brown Brothers Harriman. A Maine kid who once mailed handwritten letters to NBA stars begging for autographs, he built a career on the same stubborn premise: ask enough people for what you want, and enough of them say yes.
Kristy Caylor
Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of Trashie, the first scaled recycling-and-rewards platform in the US, whose internet-famous Take Back Bag lets people stuff a closet's worth of unwanted clothes and old gadgets into a prepaid mailer and get rewarded in TrashieCash to spend at places like Sephora and Uber Eats. An industrial engineer by training who spent two decades in fashion (Gap, Banana Republic Japan, Gap's Product RED, and the ethical-luxury label Maiyet she co-founded), Caylor built Trashie out of For Days, the circular apparel brand she launched in 2018. Her bet is that sustainability wins when it is convenient and fun rather than guilt-driven, and the numbers back her: hundreds of thousands of bags sold and millions of items kept out of landfills.