10 Questions with Sandra Campos

I can’t think of a better post to start off 2023 with. It’s with such great pleasure that I’m sharing my conversation with Sandra Campos – a visionary fashion and retail executive – on all things pertaining to the future of commerce, leadership, giving back, and so much more.

Sandra is a global CEO and founder who has led several businesses from the startup stage to enterprise values in excess of $1 billion. Her experience spans across retail, CPG, and SaaS technology with an emphasis on digital commerce and end-to-end supply chains.

In 2018, Sandra became Diane von Furstenberg’s first-ever Latina CEO. After DVF, she became the interim CEO of retail tech start-up Project Verte and the founder of Fashion Launchpad, an online education platform she launched shortly before leaving Diane von Furstenberg. Prior to these roles, she had served as Co-President of Women’s Apparel Group at Centric Brands (Juicy Couture, Bebe, Buffalo, Tretorn, BCBG, and Hervé Legér), President of O Oscar (an Oscar de la Renta division), and Senior Vice President roles at Polo Ralph Lauren and Nautica.

Today Sandra dedicates most of her time to sitting on the boards of companies such as Fabric, Big Lots, and Daniel’s Jewelers. She also heavily invests in the next generation of talent across various industries and underrepresented communities.

I first met Sandra in New York City – her hometown – last year. I was so excited to speak to her given her wealth of industry experience and knack for building enduring brands (thanks again to Ilana Belkin for the kind intro 🙂). Our coffee chat ended up being a several hour conversation that could’ve gone on forever! It was such a treat to have Sandra breathe life into her personal story and professional experiences. But beyond that I felt like I just connected with someone who truly cares about what she does and giving back to the next generation. I of course asked her to do a Fire Ant interview so I can share with you all some of the themes we covered. And I’m so glad she agreed.

There’s so much to take away from what she says below. I hope you enjoy the insights just as much as I do.

Your professional career has seen you take on numerous executive roles at some of the most popular and iconic brands out there, such as Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Juicy Couture, Bebe, and BCBG. Based on your experience, what are the core ingredients needed to build a brand that stands the test of time?

I have been fortunate to be associated with – and be a leader of – a lot of these organizations that have classic timeless brands that will live on through generations.

A lot of brands that haven’t survived have walked away from their core brand DNA or their reason for being. The consumer has so many choices that the importance of distinction and differentiation has never been more important. At the end of the day, a solid branding strategy ensures that you have consistency across all the consumer touch points, to make sure that you stay true to the core values and purpose, that you’re building around the community that you’re trying to target, and that you’re not just working to change with new generations.

Michael Kors is a great example. Although I didn’t work in that company, I was just with one of their executives who shared this story so I feel comfortable sharing it. She was talking about how at one point in time, they felt that they needed a change from their iconic jet setting imagery in order to be more relevant and modern. So they changed their marketing strategy and had models in the studio against backdrops ala Reformation or Glossier and so many other DTC businesses. For two years, their business was negatively impacted and they lost their core. So they went back to their roots that address the aspirational, luxury, jet-setting consumer and the business regained its momentum.

If you look at Ralph Lauren as an example, Ralph Lauren has a specific aristocratic aspirational lifestyle that hasn’t changed. They may be changing fits, proportions of the styles, or colours based on what’s happening within the season, but they’re not changing who they are and I think that’s really important across the board.

And yes, brands need to become more modern as the decades move on – especially if you’re a brand that’s been surviving for decades. But you can’t just change who you are. I’ll use Diane Von Furstenberg herself as another example. She’s a fantastic woman who truly has given so much to fashion and culture and especially as a strong motivator for women over the last 47 years. She is who she is – very much about being a woman “in charge” of her life, and she invented the wrap dress and designed a special method for printing (in Italy) when she first started. This product and mission is her true personal and brand DNA that she developed when she was in her 20s. She couldn’t be anything but that – that’s what people know and love her for. She stands for a confident woman and her wrap dresses are intended to make a woman feel confident, no matter where you are, via the colour and print. And at the end of the day, when she walks away from that, it doesn’t resonate. And when she comes back to it, that’s what her customers gravitate to.

Are there tactical strategies that brands can adopt to stay fixated on their Northstar identity?

If you look at some of these timeless brands, they always have a brand guideline. Hermès is a great example. Hermès isn’t changing their core products from season to season. Chanel’s not changing their core customer from year to year. If you consider Tiffany’s, you think about the blue box and it’s meaning. Who doesn’t want a gift inside an orange Hermès box or the blue Tiffany box? It stands for heritage, luxury, quality and becomes an heirloom in their customers’ closets. You can look at a number of these different businesses and why they have staggering growth and everlasting endurance.

So brand guidelines would definitely be the first place. It addresses everything – from typography, to colour, to the copy and a voice that represents their brand DNA. Developing the brand guideline as a library and as a resource for everyone within the organization – regardless of what role they play – is important for all team members to be able to truly understand what the brand stands for and the legacy they’re building. When that exists, there’s no question what works or doesn’t work for the brand.

You’re spending a lot of time sitting on boards now and investing in the next generation of fashion and retail leaders. What sorts of companies, startups, or emerging technologies are getting you excited which have the potential to help brands better tell their stories and transform how we consume products and engage in commerce?

On the front end, Shopify is still the easiest platform that changed how entrepreneurs sell their products and every app that lives within their ecosystem has a way to help founders and their teams accelerate their businesses. I think there’s great new digital marketing technologies that really enable you to segment your customer and focus on how you communicate with them. There are startups focused on automation that reduce workloads and inefficiency as well as new creative resources incorporating AI such as Copy.ai. They provide many options for copy across ads, social media, blogs, and more.

I would also say one other major evolution is with marketplace. As we have emerged from having single-branded websites to having multi-branded retailers on commerce and digital, third-party marketplaces now enable businesses to create a niche with cross-collaborations across various categories. Amazon is clearly the largest, but there are now more and more marketplaces that have created their own niche defined by their target audience – whether they’re focused on sustainable products only, or products for the outdoors, or community marketplaces for the bride. It ends up boiling down to the consumer they target, and building product offerings that support the needs of that consumer.

There’s also the need for an agile tech stack that can help businesses create loyalty programs, easier deliveries via drop-shipping from vendors, promotion automation, prescriptive pricing, wait-lists, the list goes on. There’s just so much when you go through every aspect of the retail ecosystem.

What I am most excited about though is being able to communicate with the consumer through so many talented creators. There is so much content that is needed across so many platforms that it’s almost impossible to do internally. Creators can reap the financial rewards across a host of brands and the content that is generated with UGC (user generated content) is more authentic for the brands or retailers. It really is a must as a component of a businesses’ marketing strategy as TikTok completely changed the game and accelerated that need even further.

The next generation of creators are out there but it does require a lot of work to sift through their histories and to ensure their beliefs are aligned with those of the brand/retailer. Agencies and technologies aggregating these creators and allowing brands to be able to find them easily. Minisocial is an example.

Sustainability is such an important topic in retail and fashion right now. And I know it’s a topic near and dear to your heart. What does the word sustainability mean to you? What does it encompass?

The discussion has been important for a long time, but I would have to say we have to really ask ourselves: Are we making a difference? Have we made a difference?

Patagonia, for example, has always walked the walk. They’re probably my favourite company of all time because they just do so much with honesty and authenticity. They focus on their mission, ensure their innovations serve their purpose and the end goal of helping the environment.

European companies, IKEA being one of them and Burberry being another, have been focused on sustainability for decades. Burberry for at least 16 years, IKEA for more than 25. They have built large teams that ensure their sustainability initiatives are incorporated into all departments and that they are accountable for their output. Their investment is a constant pillar and one that separates these companies from others within their categories. Between re-commerce program launches and focusing on circular materials, sustainability impacts the entire supply chain from the beginning all the way to when it gets in the hands of the consumer.

I think we have to really consider each individual brand and what they can do to manage the massive problem we have as an industry. It ranges from samples and fabric wastage to all of the money, time and effort that goes into all of the product development process. How many of those samples make it from development to retail and how many trials have simply been trashed? If we are talking about apparel brands, as an example, the adoption rate sometimes can be quite low. And so all that development work in the prototypes, samples, pre-production fitted garments, fabrics – not to mention the shipments that go from manufacturer to corporate office and back during all of this process. That’s not sustainable at all which is why certain technologies such as Clo have the ability to change our process for the better, so that tech packages are transferred digitally and fewer samples are required to save time and money.

Sustainability in fashion is a huge challenge and undertaking. It’s a very cumbersome project for any business much less one that has lead times that are 9-12 months out and has to predict what consumers will want twelve months from the time of development. It requires prioritization, investment, patience, alignment, and accountability to key metrics that make sense. I believe ESG initiatives are going to stay at the top of the priority list for global companies and there will need to be a future system of grading and accountability.

You’ve worked alongside very successful designers and creative talent over the course of your career. How has that experience shaped you as a business professional and what have you learned from it?

My entire career has been working alongside creatives. Even as an entrepreneur I had a creative as a partner. It’s important to understand how the left and right brains are different, and working with people who are more one versus the other requires different sensitivities. Especially in an industry that has so much subjectivity involved! No matter what, as much as I would have loved to have been a creative in my life, that is not what I’m equipped to do. I love strategy and operations, so that’s where I fit into these businesses.

Certainly, in retail and fashion, product is everything. A consumer purchases based on emotion and statistically a consumer looks at the colour/print first, fit and fabric second, and price last. Creativity impacts two out of the three and goes into designing a product, the packaging, communication, and marketing. We need a lot of creative people in our industry – that’s what keeps customers coming back for more.

My first experience working with a creative was at Donna Karan. I worked at the company when she was one of the top performing and most innovative designers in the industry and the brand had a lot of power with retailers. We were launching a secondary label at that point, DKNY, and I was able to learn what merchandising actually is, what product focus actually means, the importance of consistent branding and messaging, and team alignment.

Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Diane von Furstenberg are all creative visionaries who think about every single aspect of their company and how it’s going to be perceived – not only from a retail environment perspective if you’re selling to retailers, but also from a consumer perspective. Their discipline and unique proposition for their brands have created their legacies.

When there’s a Northstar – either creatively or operationally – it helps elevate everyone in the organization. Building a brand that’s timeless, classic, and really resonates with the consumer, and staying the course is of course a significant piece of any consumer business and then you also have to be operationally disciplined and generate profit.

Investing in diversity and shedding a light on underrepresented groups is another big part of your DNA. What advice would you give to other founders and executives/the next generation who want to make their mark and build something that stands the test of time?

I’ve been through various elements and a lot of experiences throughout my career. When I go back, and I look at what I have learned, there have been some important experiences that have helped me. For example, I’ve been working with Gen Z since 2009 when I launched Selena Gomez’s business, which was the first Celebrity team brand management company that my business partner, Tony Melillo and I created. That was a pivotal time for me in my career and when the future changed for me – when I started looking at Gen Z and millennials and how they were interacting online, what they were looking for from their celebrities, and the talent and the people that were inspiring them.

As I fast forward today and I’m involved in advising both millennial and Gen Z types of businesses, I see a very different type of founder with a lot more to think about and a lot more noise to cut through. There’s more opportunity and more resources. Anyone can be an entrepreneur and start a business but not every business can scale or grow profitably. Communities and organizations that are helping founders are incredibly important in providing knowledge and skills that are required today in running omni-channel businesses.

When it comes to women, we are still considered “diverse” yet we represent more than half of the population and more than half of all consumer decisions. Hispanic women, as a cohort, still only represent one percent of boards and make .54 cents compared to a non-Hispanic male. I do see a more empowered founder today than ever before due to the power of the Internet and their communities. There’s a lot of transparency and tools that exist for founders whether they’re searching for a pitch deck for fundraising purposes or learning about SEO and competitive keywords – the information is readily available to help a business be more prepared.

The sessions that I have with founders I advise are focused on the tactical and strategic components – these founders have been able to really build the elements of the brand on their own. I am so inspired by uber-founder Shai Eisenman from Bubble Beauty, who has spent years focusing on the Gen Z consumer and creating a skincare category for teens, and Emma Butler who founded Liberare, a company focused on creating products to help make lives better for the disabled.

I focus on helping them anticipate some of the challenges, navigate through partnerships or collaborations, investor or retailer relationships, manufacturing, sourcing, and logistics or other areas they may want to brainstorm or hear a different perspective on. It’s hard being a founder and CEO so it’s always helpful to have an experienced advisor or board member you can rely on.

As a role model for other young and ambitious professionals, what would you say has allowed you to sustain your creative energy and ability to accomplish so much over the course of your career?

Number one is curiosity. Having grown up with entrepreneurial parents and being a first-generation Mexican-American, I was always hardworking and driven. My mother encouraged not only education in the traditional sense, but also lifelong continuing education. That need to constantly learn more is just something that’s inherent within me and I’m a little bit obsessive about it, to the point where I constantly want to learn new things and add more skill sets to what I have. I do believe it has helped me become a more well-rounded individual and executive who can add value to organizations – whether it’s operating, being on the board or advising. Secondly, determination to achieve my goals. I have always set goals that were a reach and have tried to manifest much of that in my life. There have been a lot of twists and turns throughout my career but I have never given up and when I am told “no”, I let myself feel disappointment for a bit but then I pick myself back up and keep moving forward.

With regards to helping the next generation, I am inspired by the quote: You cannot be what you don’t see. I am focused on using my platform to raise awareness for others through helping underrepresented founders gain access to capital or helping entrepreneurs gain skills that will help them scale their businesses and amplify their messages. It requires a lot of partnerships and a lot of allies to truly make a difference but I’m determined that the next generation of Latinos (as) will have better results because of those who have extended a helping hand.

Based on all these personal and professional experiences, how would you describe your leadership style and what would you say is the key to being successful as a CEO of a brand? Based on what you’ve just said I have to assume a lot of your leadership values are based on egalitarianism and meritocracy?

Leadership has changed over time and the priorities for a CEO today are so much more complicated than they were even five years ago. It’s much more about ensuring that you are providing a safe space and a place where anyone can grow, learn, be valued and respect, and be promoted. There’s so much happening today – whether it’s quiet quitting or pay transparency, employees have a lot of negotiating power and it’s true that employees are more likely to stay in companies where they are valued and where they see a path to future success.

My own leadership style has been affected by maturity, the companies I worked for or the circumstances of the business at the time. Life experiences have helped me become a more compassionate and empathetic leader – I hope. I’ve tried to be a leader who is understanding and helps to develop others. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes people are open to it. Sometimes people aren’t open to you. That’s the beauty of human nature, it’s always going to be a little bit like that.

My focus in any business is to build something that’s special, to help others enrich themselves, to learn and to grow and to provide opportunities.

Who or what are your biggest sources of inspiration right now as you keep your trains moving on both the professional and personal fronts? And as you look at the future?

The most interesting part of business today is seeing the openness to topics and areas that we didn’t necessarily want to talk about before. Menopause and sexual wellness are topics that wouldn’t have been openly discussed previously, much less businesses that we’re promoting. Consumer products and trends are evolving rapidly and I am pretty good about staying on top of cultural insights and consumer behaviours. I’m very curious about every industry. So I can’t say I’m just picking one CPG area or another, but I try to look at culture and what people are responding to. We’re all consumers. We’re all taking Ubers or renting Airbnbs. We’re all trying to live a healthier life. And there are a lot of dynamics that have changed in our lives that require us to be more inclusive.

If I look at the future, I am interested in the aging consumer, animal care, and food accessibility. It’s been so exciting to see farm-to-table foods for humans as well as for animals. We treat our animals as well as we treat ourselves!

I believe we will find ways to continue to automate or simplify our lives, enjoy our time away from the office, and find joy in nature and in family.

As a parting gift, what’s one video, book, resource, whatever that you’d like to leave the readers with, that you think will make them smarter about anything?

I love reading stories about other people and how they built their businesses. I am always listening to the podcast How I Built This.

One recent book that has helped me is Atomic Habits. I like anything to help improve my organizational efficiency or to help motivate me to be a change-maker that benefits future generations.