The Glossy Podcast

Direct-to-consumer jewelry brand Aurate isn’t online-only, it’s channel agnostic. The brand, launched in 2014 as an e-commerce site, now has four brick-and-mortar stores and plans to open more on the West Coast this year. While online is still the main channel, for Aurate, the important thing is that no matter where it sells, it stays in control of the transaction. Bouchra Ezzahraoui, cofounder of Aurate, joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss bootstrapping her business, reacting quickly to customer responses and accommodating the way people shop for jewelry today.

Bluemercury founder Marla Beck built an anti–department store beauty and skin-care shopping experience 20 years ago. Now, Bluemercury has joined Macy’s to offer its democratizing shopping and spa services to department store customers. Beck joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss how beauty has evolved in the Instagram era, who wins when customers are in charge and how product innovation is changing the industry.

J.Crew Group-owned Madewell is often pegged as the namesake brand’s younger, hipper sister (although president Libby Wadle refutes the notion that Madewell is millennial-geared). As J.Crew scrambles to revitalize stalled sales growth, Madewell’s story couldn’t be more different. Wadle joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss how a brand in the J.Crew umbrella stays nimble, what the brand identity is, and how customer feedback and data feeds into that process.

The Real Real, an online marketplace for authentic luxury consignment, is growing and retail stores are their big next step. But over the years, they have also been pitted as a competition to luxury brands and had a difficult relationship with them. Rati Levesque, chief merchant, says she's seeing the dynamic shift as they're starting to drive traffic back into luxury stores. Levesque explores their relationship with brands, similarity to departmental stores and more on this podcast.

During her time running the DKNY PR Girl Twitter account, Aliza Licht was only asked to delete one tweet. Licht worked on the PR and communications team at DKNY when the company began putting together initial Facebook and Twitter strategies. Social media marketing strategies have only become more complex since then, but the brand-as-relatable-friend voice has held strong. After leaving DKNY, Licht wrote a book titled “Leave Your Mark,” and she currently serves as the evp of brand marketing at Alice + Olivia. She discusses the evolution of authenticity in social media, branding and storytelling, and Amazon vs. wholesale.

With Caraa, Aaron Luo is looking to prove aesthetic isn't everything. Luo joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss why his brand didn’t raise any VC funding, how he chooses brand partnerships and why he decided to test selling products on Amazon.

When Eileen Fisher started her namesake brand in 1984, it wasn’t the plan from the outset that the label would eventually become synonymous with sustainability in the fashion industry. Her goal was simply to do a better job of making clothing that would outlast everything else in her customers’ closets. The Eileen Fisher approach to sustainability has since evolved to focus on reducing waste through a circular recycling program, a line of “remade” Eileen Fisher items designed from damaged or stained pieces from past collections, and an emphasis on storytelling and education. Now the head of a certified B-Corp organization, Fisher joined the Glossy Podcast to share how the brand’s manufacturing partners, customers and competition have changed.

After working as a makeup artist for 25 years, Kirsten Kjaer Weis was tired of rejecting and moving on from different luxury beauty products because the synthetics in them, she believed, caused allergic reactions. She founded her brand, Kjaer Weis, in 2010 on the premise that an all natural beauty brand could also perform like a luxury beauty brand. Kjaer Weis joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss the evolution of the green beauty industry, balancing organic and luxury, and the definition of natural beauty.

Jackie Wilson isn’t known to customers as one of America’s prominent fashion designers, but retailers know her. Her company, the American Fashion Network, is responsible for designing private-label fashion lines for retailers like Kohl’s, Amazon and American Eagle. And she's often the one pushing behind the scenes, convincing retailers to double down on lingerie-style tops, cutouts and fabric trends. Wilson joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss how Zara changed the private-label business, and how Amazon is changing it again. At the core of the shift is speed and, according to her, fashion is only going to keep getting faster.

Net-a-Porter recently relaunched its editorial content to reflect a new approach: Porter, Net-a-Porter’s print magazine, combined with The Edit, Net-a-Porter’s online blog, for a more cohesive content strategy. In total, Net-a-Porter’s editorial team employs 70 people across print and digital. Whereas before, they were working in siloed teams, Net-a-Porter’s global content director and Porter editor-in-chief Lucy Yeomans said there’s now more collaboration across channels, including around new events and series that reach across both. Yeomans joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss why Net-a-Porter considers content and commerce an integral part of both its marketing and merchandising strategies, how fashion media has evolved and why a cohesive brand voice is so important.

After Tamara Mellon left Jimmy Choo, the luxury footwear brand she founded in 1996 while in her 20s, she had to figure out again how to establish her positioning in the industry, this time under her own name. It wasn’t a smooth transition. After the first incarnation of the Tamara Mellon brand went bankrupt, she started over following the direct-to-consumer model that customers today are much more familiar with than they were at the start of the decade. Mellon joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss how she started building a brand for the third time, how it sits in the luxury market, and the future of retail business models.

Jessica Lee was on the M&A team at Gap Inc., scouting for potential young brands appealing to a more modern customer that the corporation could snap up, when she decided to set off on her own and found a new mid-priced women’s fashion brand. Modern Citizen, launched online in 2016, with a trendier take on direct-to-consumer fashion than comparable brands like Everlane, more affordable prices than Reformation and a focus on building a community from scratch. Lee joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss differentiating the company in a crowded market, marketing with a non-existent budget and building the brand's first store.

Adam Pritzker, of the Hyatt Hotels family, built Assembled Brands off of the idea that fashion could benefit from the same open-source approach to resources, data and education as the technology industry. Assembled Brands, now six years in, is a holding company for brands including The Line, Khaite, Pop and Suki and more, with the goal of supporting inventory planning, financial modeling, distribution and infrastructure organization for a new retail industry. Pritzker joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss how brands need to adjust to keep up with today’s customers, why there's power in numbers and what type of technology will actually change retail.

Lawrence Lenihan is the co-founder and co-CEO of Resonance, a venture operating and holding company for small fashion brands that he started with business partner Joseph Ferrara in 2015. His opinion on fashion feels romanticized, but he hopes to ground it in a viable business model that could change the format through which emerging designers get brands off the ground, and make them profitable. Lenihan joined the Glossy Podcast to talk about how to bring the Zara model down to businesses on the smallest level, how data has interrupted creation and what's to come of the billion-dollar apparel brand.

Olivia Kim joined Nordstrom and moved from New York to Seattle in 2013 as the director of creative projects. Now vp of creative projects, she’s in charge of Nordstrom’s pop-up shops, brand collaborations and exclusives with digitally native brands. Essentially, her role boils down to recruiting new customers to Nordstrom by making it more of a destination for fashion inspiration and brands that can’t be easily found elsewhere. On the Glossy Podcast, Kim discussed how she formed her position and, eventually, department, how fashion collaborations have evolved, and what appeals most to customers.

When Ann Mashburn launched her namesake women’s brand in 2010, she had some concerns about the concept panning out. Mashburn’s first store, which she opened in Atlanta alongside her husband Sid Mashburn’s namesake men’s store, has now been in business for seven years, and the company has since launched e-commerce and opened three more retail stores. Mashburn joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss how she made the leap from editor to brand owner, how she grew her team from the ground up and how she built her brand with word-of-mouth marketing.

Under Nancy Green, Athleta has leaned into being a brand associated with both women’s empowerment and sustainability, by carving out a list of related core values and updating its branding around those. On Tuesday, the company announced it was officially a certified B Corp brand, a stamp of officiation for purpose-driven brands that follow environmentally and ethically conscious practices. Green joined the Glossy Podcast to talk about how Athleta differentiates itself within the broader Gap corporation, how to outlast the athleisure bubble, and what threats and opportunities retailers face today.

Since Milly launched in the early 2000s, the rules luxury brands are supposed to follow have changed. Now that department store traffic is falling and boutiques are struggling to master e-commerce at scale, luxury brands that could once rely on wholesale networks for growth now have to allocate time, money and resources to building up direct retail channels, both in brand stores and online. To recapture stalled growth, Milly has started direct-to-consumer operations and brought sales and marketing teams in house, and will launch a capsule collection later this year targeted at millennials, with more affordable prices and more frequently released pieces. Andy Oshrin, the CEO and co-founder of Milly, joined the Glossy Podcast to share more about the brand’s evolution, the challenges that come with rerouting business and the role customer data plays.

Deborah Lippmann's nail polish and treatment brand is credited for being the first luxury line to sell products like base and top coats, cuticle oils, hand creams and polish remover alongside colored polishes. Today, Lippmann sells her polishes and treatments at Sephora, department stores and select luxury salons, as well as her own salons in Arizona and California. She also works with designers like Jason Wu and celebrities like Lady Gaga in backstage primping sessions. Lippmann joined us to discuss the importance of choosing the right retail partners, the competition in the industry and plans for her next investment.