Chapter One: The Narrative
A life spent between the studio and the boardroom.
I have never accepted that commercial rigour and creative conviction belong to different people. Everything I have built rests on the argument that they belong to the same one.
I started where product is judged most severely: the buying floor of Harrods, in a division nobody expected to recover. I introduced twenty-three exclusive brands and doubled its revenues. That was the first time I understood that a business can be moved by what you choose to put in front of a customer.
London taught me category. Karen Millen, Whistles and Jigsaw taught me that accessories and footwear could carry a fashion house, a quarter of Jigsaw's revenues by the time I left, with the United States and Australia newly open. New York and Barcelona taught me creation from nothing: a ten-million-dollar footwear startup built with Marvin Traub, seven sub-brands and a Manhattan flagship.
The Gulf taught me consequence. At Majid Al Futtaim Fashion I inherited a loss-making business and returned it, within eighteen months, to a 316% increase in EBITDA. At Alyasra I was the first chief executive the company had ever appointed, and found one hundred million dollars in a supply base nobody had negotiated as a whole. At Damas I became the first female chief executive in the house's hundred-year history, and moved its customer from men in their fifties to women in their twenties.
Today I advise boards, founders and investors through LEAD Associates from London, on strategy, transformation and the uncomfortable decisions that precede growth.
Five convictions
- I
Method outlasts frameworks
Every business I have led arrived with a strategy deck. What it lacked was someone willing to decide. Method matters, but the decision is the work.
- II
Creativity is a commercial instrument
Product, brand and experience are not the soft edge of a business. They are where margin is created, defended and lost.
- III
Heritage must be re-earned
A hundred years of history buys attention for a moment. Relevance is renewed by each generation, or it is surrendered.
- IV
Culture delivers the strategy
Numbers recover quickly. People recover slowly. A transformation that ignores this reverses within two years.
- V
Scale must not cost desire
The hardest discipline in luxury is knowing which growth to decline. Restraint is a commercial position, not a sentimental one.
Chapter Two
Transformation PhilosophyNext: the method itself. How a business is diagnosed without sentiment, where value actually sits, and the disciplines that turn a three-year plan into delivered profit.