The Glossy 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.