retail-strategy
(14)
Angelina Yagudayev Built a Canadian Apparel Business. Now She Is Matching Stories With Shelves Worldwide
Her career is a study in commercial range: start with one market, learn every handoff, then turn brand recognition into something a retailer can actually sell.
Gardar Stefansson Put Stevia in the Fine Print - and Jam on 10,000 Shelves
An expiring pile of sweetener became a kitchen experiment, then a pantry brand. The useful part of Gardar Stefansson's story is how often progress arrived after he admitted the first idea was wrong.
Kirk Keel Built 99 Shirt Sizes - Then Learned the Customer Was Somewhere Else
The engineer-turned-marketer built Stantt around an elegant sizing algorithm. The harder invention was a business willing to follow customers from a screen to a fitting room - and back again.
Gwen Hurt Built a Wine Company From One Pair of Shoes
A layoff closed Gwen Hurt's 15-year chapter in global tech. A pair of gold kitten heels, a wine-making hobby and one formidable daughter supplied the next act.
Chaz Flexman Is Teaching the Grocery Aisle to Show Its Work
After years moving between venture capital, connected hardware and consumer brands, Chaz Flexman found his most useful dataset in the supermarket. At Starday Foods, every snack is also a test of whether software can make product development less dependent on guesswork.
Stephanie Bleau Took Retail Lessons Back to the Classroom
After three decades spent turning customer insight into retail decisions, the former Reitmans and Bentley executive is teaching a new generation how strategy survives contact with real life.
Tracy Fellows Knows a Brand Is a Place People Enter
From Canadian Tire's aisles to Holt Renfrew's windows and a historic golf club's fairways, Tracy Fellows has spent her career turning strategy into something customers can walk through.
Kimberly Menzer Is Building a Marketing Career Where Fashion Meets Data
Her public resume is brief, but its sequence is revealing: social strategy, execution, marketing analytics, data analysis and visualization. Kimberly Menzer's career offers a quiet case study in how retail leadership is being rebuilt for a measurable age.
David Clayton Works Where the Aisle Meets the Algorithm
At Target, David Clayton sits at a useful intersection: sales, marketing and business intelligence. His career offers a practical view of what modern retail leadership looks like when the store, the app and the data all have to agree.
Mimi Swain
A cold email got Mimi Swain into Ring. A decade of turning customer signals into commercial systems put her in charge of marketing Amazon's best-known devices.
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.
Monica Ashauer
Monica Ashauer is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Birdy Grey, the direct-to-consumer bridal brand that put stylish bridesmaid dresses on the map for under $100. A Wharton-trained, ex-McKinsey strategist, she paired with best friend Grace Lee Chen in 2017 to fix a broken category - the six-month wait, the non-returnable polyester, the $300 dress worn once. The result: a hybrid made-to-order model that built reverse working capital, crossed $100 million in revenue by 2024, and made Birdy Grey a wedding-season staple. In 2025 she stepped from President into the Chief Strategy Officer seat and joined the board as Executive Chairman.
Janell Fischer
Janell Fischer is VP of Global Retail Marketing and Customer Experience at Google, where she has spent over a decade architecting how the world's most valuable tech company shows up in physical spaces. She pioneered Google Shops — the immersive store-within-a-store concept launched inside Best Buy Canada in 2016 — and has since expanded Google's retail footprint through partnerships with b8ta and other retailers. Before Google, she held Director-level retail marketing roles at Apple and Sony Electronics, making her one of the few executives who has shaped the physical retail presence of all three consumer electronics giants.
Yann Calvez
Yann Calvez is a Microsoft executive based in Seattle, currently serving as VP of Partner Sales, Marketing & Operations within the Device & Partner Sales (DPS) organization. A graduate of emlyon business school, he spent more than fifteen years climbing through Microsoft's consumer device ranks - from coordinating marketing in France, to building worldwide Surface retail strategy, to leading the Surface Business Group for Western Europe.