womenswear
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Deirdre Quinn and the factory that became a fashion house
A desk, a phone, and a garment factory were enough to begin Lafayette 148. Thirty years later, Deirdre Quinn is still working out what to change - and what to keep.
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.
Shaye Vercollone
Shaye Vercollone is a New York-based brand marketing leader who became Chief Marketing Officer of TWP, the womenswear label founded by Trish Wescoat Pound. She built a career at the sharp end of luxury fashion marketing, holding senior brand, communications, and social strategy roles at Helmut Lang and Theory before a run as an independent brand marketing consultant. Her work sits at the intersection of storytelling, social, and the quiet, menswear-inspired tailoring that defines TWP.