I have opened three markets from zero and built thirteen brands. Most of it after the year that was supposed to end my career.
Director of Global Retail at Godiva. Managing Director for Dove Spa in North America. Then caregiver, founder, and the operator brands call when they need to exist somewhere they don’t yet. One thread through all of it: experience is an asset, not an apology.
Twenty-five years opening things.
As Director of Global Retail at Godiva Chocolatier, Fay built the international network from the ground up: identifying and structuring joint ventures, licensees, franchisees and corporate stores across Japan, the Pacific Rim and Europe. A $300M brand, 400+ points of distribution, and Canada launched from zero to $10M.
At Wilkinson Sword she was brought in to open Canada, a market where the brand had no customers at all. At Dove Spa, Unilever Ventures handed her North America as a blank page: she decided what the brand was here, then found the sites, designed the store, hired the team and opened it.
And the whole time, quietly, she was building on the side: Blue Avalon, a global subscription newsletter with thousands of readers, and a paid consulting practice alongside it. Six years, while running international operations. The building habit came first. The crisis only raised the stakes.
In 2009, my husband had a catastrophic brainstem stroke.
Fay became a full-time caregiver, the single income, and a mother of three with the youngest just four, while also supporting two terminally ill in-laws. She did not walk away from the global role. She carried it for two more years, and left only when the travel became impossible.
She was the caregiver on someone’s payroll, the senior person who went quiet, and the executive nobody knew how to talk to. It is why the workforce keynotes land: she has been the person in the room they are about.
So I built something I could run from here.
In 2011 that was Clarity Centre. An award-winning wellness centre built from nothing: fifty teachers, over a hundred classes a week, a practitioner network, and a registered yoga school with its own curriculum, teacher training and certification. A venue, a network and an accredited school, in one build, opened by a full-time caregiver.
Then The Mastermind City, an entrepreneurial hub that trained thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Then FC & Co, the franchise consulting practice she still runs, the reason she is a Judge of the Elite Franchise 100 and writes for their magazine. And Sunnyside Grill, where she was handed a blank page and built the entire franchise system.
Rebuilding a nervous system under twenty years of pressure.
Reinvention isn’t only strategy. Surviving that stretch took real practice, and Fay went and mastered the tools, which is also why Clarity Centre had a school inside it, and why the health and mindfulness brands exist at all.
Brands hire me to exist somewhere they don’t yet.
Today Fay does three things for companies: market entry into North America, franchise and licensing systems through FC & Co, and concept to open. That means taking a brand from a blank page to a trading business. Clients have included Yves Saint Laurent, The Body Shop, Samsonite, Spence Diamonds, Firkin Pubs and Village Candle.
Alongside it she has built nine more brands of her own in the last five years, across media, membership, software, live events and physical product, and she speaks, in two tracks: how brands actually get built, and how companies keep their most experienced people. Her book, Nothing You Survive Is Wasted, is the argument and the blueprint.
Thirteen brands, three markets opened from zero, and not one of them a deck.
Nothing you survive is wasted.
A market you’re not in yet, a business you want franchised, or a brand that doesn’t exist. Tell me what you’re trying to open.
