sustainable-fashion
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David Oates Built Curtsy by Listening to the Closet
A teenage web designer, a moped full of takeout, and a stubborn three-year pivot led David Oates to a useful idea: marketplaces grow when ordinary people can participate without becoming professionals.
Jill Beraud
Jill Beraud is an American consumer brand executive who has spent more than three decades building and running some of the best-known names in retail, beauty, luxury and beverages. She began in brand management at Procter & Gamble, ran her own New York advertising agency, then spent 13 years at Limited Brands, where as Chief Marketing Officer of Victoria's Secret she helped grow the label into a multi-billion-dollar business and also led marketing across Bath & Body Works, Express, Henri Bendel, C.O. Bigelow and Limited Stores. In December 2008 PepsiCo created the role of worldwide Chief Marketing Officer for her, reporting to Indra Nooyi; there she pushed the company away from Super Bowl spending and into the $20 million Pepsi Refresh Project, and later ran the Starbucks and Lipton joint ventures. She went on to serve as CEO of Living Proof, EVP of Global Retail Operations at Tiffany & Co., and CEO of the luxury jewelry house IPPOLITA, before co-founding the plant-based functional beverage company Sh'nnong. Fast Company named her one of its 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2013. She has sat on the board of Levi Strauss & Co. since 2013, was re-elected in April 2026, chairs the Fashion for Good board, and has served on the World of Children Board of Governors since 2009.
Nicks Ericsson
Nicks Ericsson is the Chief Marketing Officer of KEEN Footwear, the Portland-based outdoor shoe company, a role he took on in 2024. A Swedish-trained brand marketer with more than 20 years across fashion, sport, and footwear, he spent over a decade at UGG, where he built the brand's first circular-economy program and pushed its regenerative-agriculture pledge across a million acres of farmland. Earlier he helped scale premium labels including J.Lindeberg and Justin Timberlake's William Rast, and he co-founded The AND Agency to advise companies on responsible brand and sustainability strategy. His stated aim at KEEN is to make it 'the most trusted brand in the world' through consistency and transparency rather than moonshot promises.
Renee Halvorsen
Renee Halvorsen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Marine Layer, the San Francisco apparel brand known for absurdly soft t-shirts and a laid-back California outlook. A Yale-trained economist who began her career in finance and investment banking, she has spent the better part of a decade at Marine Layer, helping grow the business more than tenfold by treating marketing as a blend of art and science and treating customer lifetime value as the metric that matters most. Before Marine Layer she sharpened her craft in strategy and analytics roles at Gap Inc. and Athleta.
Marleen Vogelaar
Marleen Vogelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded Shapeways in 2007, helped build it into the world's largest 3D printing marketplace, left in 2014 to start the on-demand apparel company Ziel, and then returned to Shapeways as CEO in December 2024 after the company went bankrupt - buying back the brand and rebuilding it around a leaner, B2B, profit-first model. A former competitive heptathlete and industrial engineer, she is known for pairing operational discipline with an insistence that a company's mission should not be hostage to its investors, an idea she put into practice by converting Ziel to steward-ownership.
Kristy Caylor
Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of Trashie, the first scaled recycling-and-rewards platform in the US, whose internet-famous Take Back Bag lets people stuff a closet's worth of unwanted clothes and old gadgets into a prepaid mailer and get rewarded in TrashieCash to spend at places like Sephora and Uber Eats. An industrial engineer by training who spent two decades in fashion (Gap, Banana Republic Japan, Gap's Product RED, and the ethical-luxury label Maiyet she co-founded), Caylor built Trashie out of For Days, the circular apparel brand she launched in 2018. Her bet is that sustainability wins when it is convenient and fun rather than guilt-driven, and the numbers back her: hundreds of thousands of bags sold and millions of items kept out of landfills.
Alexander Tschopp
Alexander Tschopp is the co-founder and CEO of Tailored Industry, a Brooklyn-based on-demand knitwear manufacturer and software platform that uses Shima Seiki WHOLEGARMENT 3D knitting machines to produce luxury sweaters with zero minimum order quantities and 3-to-6-day turnaround. A Cornell Dyson School graduate who hooked into business after reading an Andrew Carnegie biography at age 12, he started selling college-branded products to hundreds of retailers as an undergrad before setting out to revive American knitwear manufacturing - eliminating overproduction by matching supply precisely to demand.
Nick Benavides
Nick Benavides is the cofounder and CEO of Everywhere Apparel, a Los Angeles materials-science company that turns cotton waste into 100% recycled, GRS-certified blank apparel through its CirCot process - no water, no dyes, no microplastics. A Stanford religious-studies grad who went from Bain to helping start the trading app Robinhood, he pivoted from finance to fashion after he and two co-founders, frustrated by the lack of genuinely sustainable band merch for their indie record label, decided to build the supply chain themselves. Everywhere now produces recycled garments for artists like Chappell Roan, Paramore, Wilco and Dead & Co., and was named Counselor's 2025 Sustainability Advocate of the Year.
Ryan Berg
Ryan Berg is the co-founder and CEO of The Aruna Project, a Cincinnati-based athleisure bag and accessories brand stitched entirely by survivors of sex trafficking. With his wife April, he built a hybrid model that fuses a for-profit fashion label with nonprofit holistic care - transitional housing, counseling, healthcare and a living wage - to create what he calls lifelong freedom. The work started after a single TV news brief about children rescued from a brothel sent him hunting for that brothel on a business trip to India, where he found a two-mile stretch holding an estimated 15,000 enslaved women. The Aruna Project says it has helped free and employ more than 160 women across India and the Tri-State and contributed to an 86% drop in trafficking in that part of India.
Yidi Campbell
Yidi Campbell is the founder and CEO of Indyx, a San Francisco connected-wardrobe platform that lets people catalog, style, and resell the clothes they already own. A Georgetown business graduate, she moved from investment banking at Credit Suisse to corporate development at Gap Inc. and strategy at Athleta before launching Indyx in 2021 to fight fashion overconsumption from the closet outward.
Allison Lee
Allison Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Revive, a New York fashion-tech company that helps brands recover value from returned and unsellable inventory through AI-driven inspection, refurbishment, and resale. A Korean immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at 13 and studied psychology at UC Berkeley, she first built Hemster, a SaaS tailoring platform, in 2017. When the pandemic stalled in-store tailoring, she pivoted the underlying fit-data infrastructure into Revive, which she has grown 46x in under a year and which has processed roughly $23M in merchandise. She is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Vanessa Barboni Hallik
Vanessa Barboni Hallik spent fifteen years trading foreign exchange and emerging markets at Morgan Stanley, rose to Managing Director, then walked away to build Another Tomorrow, a B Corp certified luxury label that treats clothing as an asset. Every garment carries a digital ID tracing it from farm to closet and back into an authenticated resale program. She launched the brand six weeks before COVID-19 shut down the world and kept building.
Natasha Franck
Natasha Franck is the founder and CEO of EON, a New York company giving every garment a unique Digital ID so it can be traced, resold, repaired and authenticated across its entire life. She left a career in urban planning and smart cities to build the CircularID Protocol, an open standard now powering Digital Product Passports for brands like Coach's Coachtopia, Chloe and Mulberry, and feeding into EU regulation that will make these passports mandatory.
Rati Levesque
Rati Sahi Levesque is the President and CEO of The RealReal, the publicly traded luxury resale marketplace she helped build from a single employee desk in 2011 into a $2 billion GMV business. A born-and-raised San Franciscan with a UC Santa Cruz economics degree and a former Russian Hill boutique behind her, she succeeded founder Julie Wainwright in October 2024 and steered the company to its first year of positive Adjusted EBITDA in every quarter.
Emily Gittins
Emily Gittins is the Co-founder and CEO of Archive, a B2B SaaS platform that powers branded resale programs for 50+ global fashion companies including The North Face, New Balance, and Oscar de la Renta. A Cambridge mathematics graduate turned Stanford MBA, Gittins built Archive after stints at BCG, Google X, and the Global Fashion Agenda, channeling her technical background and sustainability conviction into a company that has raised $76.9M - including a $30M Series B in February 2025 - and been named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2024.
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.
Sid Gupta
Sid Gupta is the Co-Founder and CEO of Quince, a San Francisco-based manufacturer-to-consumer (M2C) brand that sells luxury-quality cashmere, silk, and home goods at a fraction of traditional retail prices. Founded in 2018 alongside his wife Zunu Mittal and CTO Sourabh Mahajan, Quince reached a $10.1 billion valuation in March 2026 after raising a $500M Series E led by Iconiq Capital. Before Quince, Gupta built Lolli & Pops, a specialty candy retail chain, from 11 struggling locations to nearly 100 stores across 28 states. A University of Chicago economics graduate and Stanford MBA, he has spent his career dissecting pricing inefficiencies in consumer retail - and building businesses to exploit them.
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.