She has done the thing she is standing there talking about.
Twenty-five years at the top of global business. As Director of Global Retail at Godiva she built the international network behind it: joint ventures, licensees, franchisees and corporate stores across Japan, the Pacific Rim and Europe, a $300M brand with 400+ points of distribution. At Dove Spa, Unilever handed her North America as a blank page and she decided what the brand was, found the sites, designed the store and opened it. She was already building on the side by then. A global newsletter with thousands of subscribers, run for six years.
In 2009 her husband suffered a catastrophic brainstem stroke. She carried the global role for two more years before the travel made it impossible. She was the caregiver on someone’s payroll, the senior person who went quiet, and the executive nobody knew how to talk to.
Then she built anyway. An award-winning wellness centre with fifty teachers and its own accredited school, a hub that trained thousands of entrepreneurs globally, a franchise practice, and nine more brands in the last five years including a podcast that broke into Apple’s Top 50 across all shows on launch. That is why she can hold both rooms: the founders who need to know how a brand actually gets open, and the leadership teams losing people exactly like she was.
