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Elyce Arons and the business of keeping a friend’s good taste
A Kansas dorm-room friendship helped launch Kate Spade. At Frances Valentine, Elyce Arons is still turning shared jokes, vintage finds and clothes worth keeping into the next chapter.
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.