new-york-retail
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Alicia Haile Heard the Knock at the Office Door
At Thursday Boot Company, customer care was not a department at the edge of the business. Haile used what shoppers kept asking for - a place to touch, try and compare - to help move a digital footwear brand onto the street.
Heather Gruccio
Heather Salvatore Gruccio is Executive Vice President and Chief Merchandising Officer for Ann Taylor and Ann Taylor Factory, the KnitWell Group brands headquartered at 7 Times Square in New York. A Wake Forest communications graduate, she built her merchandising career over nine years at Coach, sharpened it in mid-luxury at Tory Burch, and joined Ann Taylor in 2016 as Senior Director of Merchandising for non-apparel. She moved up to Vice President of Merchandising in 2017, SVP and GMM in 2020, and was elevated to EVP and Chief Merchandising Officer in 2025 after leading a product-and-perception reset that turned a 70-year-old mall brand into a name fashion press started writing about again. Her thesis is unfussy: women still want to look pulled together, they just want to be comfortable while doing it, and heritage is an asset rather than a liability if you actually know how to cut a jacket.
Judy Duzich
Judy Duzich is the merchandising chief at Century 21 Stores, the lower-Manhattan off-price retailer famous for stocking designer labels at 40 to 65 percent off. She joined Century 21 as an assistant buyer in 1990, spent roughly three decades climbing to vice president and divisional merchandise manager, left after the chain shut down in 2020, and returned in 2022 to help rebuild it. When Century 21 reopened at 22 Cortlandt Street in May 2023 - 100,000 square feet across four floors, down from 250,000 across seven - Duzich was the one deciding what actually went on the racks. Her stated brief was to make the assortment more curated, more elevated and more relevant, organized by brand and by style instead of piled into bins, with fresh deliveries arriving constantly so that the store's famous treasure-hunt logic still worked. A Fashion Institute of Technology graduate in marketing and fashion merchandising, she is one of the few people who has bought for Century 21 in three separate decades.
Bloomingdale's
Bloomingdale's is an American upscale department store founded in New York City in 1861 and now a division of Macy's, Inc. It sells designer fashion, beauty, accessories, and home goods across a national fleet of full-line stores, small-format Bloomie's locations, outlets, and bloomingdales.com. Known for its flagship at 59th and Lexington, the Little Brown Bag, and Forty Carrots frozen yogurt, it positions itself as America's only nationwide full-line luxury department store and has been Macy's fastest-growing banner through the mid-2020s.