In my role at Tiffany – and at Liberty in London before that – I have had the pleasure of working with some of the finest creative talents in the world. Together, we have turned retail spaces into worlds of wonder. Places where customers come just to be, to escape the real world, and immerse themselves in a fantasy land for a while.

At the center of what I do is the challenge of building the right team – of identifying the right talent for the job – whether that’s artists, designers, illustrators and stylists, or managers and operations specialists. Sometimes that means casting my net wide, sometimes it means finding or nurturing latent ability within an individual. 

In my role at Tiffany the one thing that has consistently defined success in our work has been a rich and uncompromising approach to inclusion and diversity. I believe that only by having those different viewpoints, those contrary perspectives that come from unique experiences of the world, have we been able to bring a particular kind of magic to Tiffany.

Creating a space where each team member is safe and able to express themselves is critical. Providing enough context and the right guardrails, but allowing creative people to experiment, dream, challenge and try on different ideas, always produces better results. I’ve seen this time and time again.

Yet to create these worlds, these expressions of the brand, requires so much more than an idea, or even the right team. Retail stores are complex organisms, and balancing the demands of different departments, each with their own stake in these projects is an essential part of the process. 

My departments are all, in their own ways, problem solvers. We provide the other parts of the business that come to us with solutions, ideas, strategies. We turn the words of a brief into something tangible that resonates with people, something that our customers – and future customers – can believe in.