off-price-retail
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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.
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.
Leana Less
Leana Less is a global marketing leader who in 2024 became the first-ever Chief Marketing Officer in the 111-year history of Bealls, Inc., the family-owned Florida off-price retailer. A South African who built a 27-year career spanning MediaCom Africa, nearly 13 years at The Coca-Cola Company, global consumer marketing at Estee Lauder's Aveda, and a marketing transformation at Chico's FAS, she is known for turning marketing from a cost center into a growth engine across brand, ecommerce and loyalty. She describes herself as 'an activator' who refuses to wait for the green light.
Sara Griffin
Sara Griffin is a retail marketing executive who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Belk, the Charlotte-based Southern department store chain. She built her career over a decade at Saks OFF 5TH, where she rose from marketing leadership to Chief Marketing and Analytics Officer, launched the SaksOFF5TH.com site in 2013, helped build the retailer's Canadian store fleet, and created the tender-neutral OFF 5TH Rewards loyalty program that surpassed 2.5 million enrollments. A Yale graduate with a Wharton MBA and a former Monitor Deloitte consultant, she later served as CMO of The Shade Store before joining Belk. She is known for tying data, analytics and marketing together to deliver personalized shopping experiences.