jewelry
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Andra Mielnicki Knows Luxury Is a Feeling Before It Is a Product
From Avon and IndyCar pit lanes to fragrance launches and Cartier watch dinners, her career offers a practical lesson in making heritage feel present: find the brand's truth, then translate it for the room you are in.
Michelle Peterson
Michelle Peterson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Kendra Scott, the Austin-based fashion and fine jewelry brand. A chemical engineer turned marketer, she spent 18 years at General Mills before leading marketing at Life Time, Holiday Inn Express, and the juice brand Pressed. At Kendra Scott she unified the brand and performance teams into a single 'brand builder' organization, driving record direct-to-consumer traffic, customer growth and loyalty around a 'connection before transaction' philosophy. She was named a 2023 Adweek Marketing Vanguard.
Vanessa Wallace
Vanessa Wallace is the Chief Marketing Officer of GLD, the Miami-based lifestyle jewelry brand known for its ties to sport, music and street culture. A former CMO of Savage X Fenty and a 19-year Nike veteran who led Jordan Brand marketing in North America, Wallace built a career on storytelling, cultural relevance and championing overlooked communities. She joined GLD's board in August 2025 and stepped into the CMO seat in early 2026.
Anna Harman
Anna Harman is the co-founder and CEO of Studs, the New York-based ear-piercing and earrings brand she launched with Lisa Bubbers in November 2019. A former mutual-fund lawyer and Bridgewater Associates operator turned consumer-retail entrepreneur, Harman built Studs to fill the gap between Claire's and the tattoo parlor: a clean, needle-piercing studio paired with curated 'Earscapes' of affordable jewelry. The store was profitable in its first month and has since grown to dozens of locations nationwide, raising a $20M Series B in 2021 and roughly $25.6M in total funding.
Louisa Schneider
Louisa Serene Schneider is the founder and CEO of Rowan, the ear-piercing company that hires registered nurses to do the piercing and runs its own medical advisory board. She started it from her attic in 2017 after a career in M&A and retail trading at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, and built it into a chain doing roughly $70-100 million a year with dozens of studios and hundreds of employees, more than half of them nurses.