Kristin Patrick is a boundary-breaking leader with a track record for driving brand innovation and business transformation of top global brands in the lifestyle, entertainment, fashion, CPG and beauty industries. Kristin has a passion for building brands and businesses that challenge the status-quo, make an impact in culture, and create value by enveloping the consumer with content, product and experiences. Navigating the world’s most prominent companies through the cultural landscape of our collective moment, she combines her unique blend of strategy, business acumen, brand expertise, powerful gut instinct and ongoing connection to generational dynamics and popular culture to bring global brands to the next level of scale and relevancy. In her current role as EVP & Global CMO of Claire’s, Kristin is transforming the iconic mall retailer into a global fashion brand powerhouse, empowering the most significant and change-making generations of young people through self-expression. To empower these Gen “Zalpha” consumers, a term for Gen Z and Gen Alpha that she is credited for popularizing by The New York Times, Kristin has activated the brand’s purpose of encouraging them to express and celebrate their truest selves and ignited it as a launch pad for some of the most innovative moments in the company’s history. In only months, Kristin has struck a new relevance among consumers and stakeholders, taking Claire’s 50-year-old legacy to a new level of innovation and inspiration. She established a compelling new brand platform and brought new structure and marketing cohesion through the company’s first fully integrated communications approach. She has brought Claire’s into the Metaverse with unique IP and established partnerships with inventive tastemakers like Nicola Formichetti to bring this new era for Claire’s to life across all brand touchpoints and more. Under her leadership, Claire’s is inspiring these generations to discover and express themselves through new business categories, retail formats, phygital experiences and content. Prior to Claire’s, Kristin served as the first-ever Global CMO of the Pepsi brand where she developed global positioning under a unified vision and realigned the marketing organization to create 21st digital support around the world. Tapping into her keen eye for design and appreciation of creators who define the zeitgeist, Kristin created boundary pushing creative and visual campaigns and partnered with high fashion collaborators to reimagine the Pepsi brand. During her tenure, she was also given purview over the full PepsiCo Global Beverage Brands portfolio, where she was responsible for delivering the company’s long-term global growth strategy and expansion plans across the entire Billion-dollar portfolio of brands. From there, Kristin ushered in a new era of digital, content and data competency while continuing to build global plans and programs across PepsiCo’s portfolio. We’re thrilled to announce that we will welcome Kristin and her creative collaborators to the stage at Fashion Tech Forum, taking place on April 11th in New York City. There, we will discuss her transformation of Claire’s, and how she is ushering in new relevancy by placing the brand squarely in the center of youth culture and igniting the creativity of Gen Zalpha - this next and most important generation of consumers.
To read more about Claire's and Generation Zalpha you can read the New York Times article here.
To learn more about Karen Harvey, Fashion Tech Forum and The Karen Harvey Companies, visit thekhc.co
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