I’m fashion born, beauty bred.
I've been designing it, selling it, writing about it, and making people want it since day one. I have an undying passion for turning pretty into pretty smart.
In the beginning…I grabbed the world by the scissors and started a fashion bodysuit business (hey, bodysuits were big, don’t judge!). Donna Karan took the meeting. So did QVC, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Fruit of the Loom. In two years, we had 150 accounts worldwide.
But the Sarah Lawrence girl in me wanted to write. New Woman magazine offered me the chance to blend brains and beauty, and I went to work in the editorial department as an Assistant Beauty Editor.
Dreams of twinsets still danced in my head, so when The Limited came calling with arms full of copywriting and marketing, I made the jump back into fashion. Suddenly my words made things fly off the shelves. I could move t-shirts with word play; sell key items like hot cakes. I worked on everything from new store concepts (Bath & Body Works ring a bell?) to CRM strategies.
When my mentor moved to McCann Erickson and the L’Oreal account, beauty came back with a vengeance called Associate Creative Director. I learned quickly and found myself shooting commercials with their celebrity stable. Never underestimate the fun of putting words into the mouths of beautiful women! Hair color! Lipstick! Mascara! I died and went to makeup heaven.
Old loves died hard. So throughout my career I have dipped my pen in the fashion well. I’ve done special projects for Brooks Brothers and Ann Taylor, and specialty retailers like Discovery Stores, not to mention magazines (remember those?).
Cut back across the beauty aisle, and I did a 13-year stint as Creative Director on Pantene at Grey NYC. A digital-first account when that was a new and shiny idea at P&G. And yes, it was still fun making beautiful women even more beautiful and say my words.
But for all my consistency, new never gets old. So, I broke out beauty’s ivory tower and reveled in the remarkably human. Preparation H? Yes, please! Cold sores, common colds, never ending breadsticks…turns out humans are everywhere. Since then, I’ve defrosted the frozen diet food category, embraced life-and-death realities (from liver transplants to tube feeding), and yes, dabbled in great clothes and jewelry along the way. (You can take the girl out of the wardrobe closet, but you can’t take the wardrobe closet out of the girl.)
At the beginning and end of every day, I don’t believe anyone is a “consumer.” We are all just people, and we’re moved by things both simple and profound. The secret truth at the heart of everything I do is that I am “people” too, and advertising frequently works on me, a fact to which my family, my makeup drawer, my freezer, and my habits will attest!
It’s a beautiful world. I just advertise it.