leather-goods
(5)
Joon Silverstein
Joon Silverstein is the Chief Marketing Officer of Coach, the New York leather goods house inside Tapestry Inc., and the founder of Coachtopia, the circular sub-brand she launched in 2023 to build luxury products out of what the industry usually throws away. She trained first as a cultural anthropologist - a BA from Columbia, fieldwork as a Fulbright Fellow - then added an MBA from Harvard Business School and a stint at The Boston Consulting Group before leading change at Louis Vuitton and Victoria's Secret. She joined Coach in 2014 as SVP of Global Customer Experience and worked her way through digital, ecommerce, creative, sustainability and North America marketing before being elevated to CMO in January 2025. Her signature move is treating consumers as collaborators rather than targets: Coach's spring 2026 'Explore Your Story' campaign was co-created with Gen Z communities from the US to China, and the brand posted 25% revenue growth in fiscal Q2 2026 on the back of its strongest new-customer acquisition on record. She gave a TED Talk at TEDNext 2024 arguing that waste is a human invention, not a law of nature.
MacCoy Merkley
MacCoy Merkley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Portland Leather Goods, the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. A former wedding photographer, he answered a Craigslist ad for a digital media specialist in 2018 and went on to help scale the company from roughly $3.5M to more than $100M in annual revenue. He is known in direct-to-consumer circles for a product-first, no-nonsense approach to marketing, heavy use of Meta advertising, strategic discounting, and a very active personal presence on LinkedIn and X.
Karla Gallardo
Karla Gallardo is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cuyana, a San Francisco-based sustainable fashion brand built on the philosophy of 'fewer, better things.' Born in Ecuador and educated at Brown University and Stanford GSB, she co-founded Cuyana in 2011 with Shilpa Shah to create timeless, high-quality women's essentials through ethical, transparent supply chains. Under her leadership, Cuyana has grown to 160+ employees, raised $44.8M in funding (including a $30M Series C), and built a loyal customer base that includes Meghan Markle and Jessica Alba. The company achieves a remarkable 90% full-price sell-through rate — rare in fashion — and has been recognized for pioneering sustainable luxury retail in the U.S.
Shilpa Shah
Shilpa Shah is the co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of Cuyana, the San Francisco-based sustainable luxury fashion brand built around two words: fewer, better. A UC Berkeley-trained UX designer who spent a decade building interfaces for Disney, AT&T, and Sun Microsystems before pivoting to business school at 32 — pregnant during her first semester — Shah co-founded Cuyana in 2011 with Karla Gallardo. The company has grown into a cult-favorite direct-to-consumer brand with 7 retail locations, 150+ employees, celebrity fans including Jessica Alba and Ayesha Curry, and $30 million in Series C funding from H.I.G. Capital. At Cuyana, Shah is the architect of the customer experience, championing quality over quantity in an industry obsessed with the opposite.
Wendy Yu
Wendy Yu is the CEO of Cuyana, the San Francisco-based sustainable fashion brand built on the philosophy of 'fewer, better things.' A data-and-analytics-trained operator with a BS from MIT and an MBA from the University of Michigan, she worked her way through gaming, consulting, and digital marketing before joining Cuyana as Chief Digital Officer in 2018. When founder Karla Gallardo stepped down in 2025 after 14 years, Yu stepped into the CEO role - bringing her decade-plus of growth marketing and digital operations experience to the helm of a brand that has generated nearly half a billion dollars in lifetime DTC sales.