.png)
The world of FMCG is always fast-paced and highly pressured, but today’s challenges have amplified these pressure points even more. Praeva’s principal and head of the consumer practice, Daria Koren, contributed to the cover story of fashion industry bible Drapers’ October 2026 issue, on the topic of modern leadership in fashion.
With fashion CEOs being asked to steer through a particular set of pressures, having the right skills to lead is essential. The shift to direct-to-consumer trading, speed of AI adoption, navigating tariffs and trying to predict a market that never stays still means that fashion CEOs are working around a complex setting. Judgements have to be made faster, and that makes a clear, current view of the business and the market essential.
Here is what we are seeing from the search table, and the key things a fashion CEO needs to understand.
“In fashion, the AI debate tends to stall on creativity and personalisation. It’s the loudest use case, but it’s arguably one of the least valuable,” says Daria. “The more important shift is in discovery. Customers are increasingly asking tools like ChatGPT for product recommendations and shopping from there. If your products are not listed, you’re not in the conversation and you’re losing out on sales.”
The major shift that CEOs (and their boards) need to understand here is the 180 away from the objective of yesterday. Brands spent a decade escaping wholesale gatekeepers so they could own the customer relationship directly. Now a new gatekeeper has appeared, is growing every day, and plays a massive influence over your audience.
“What decides whether you make the AI shortlist is the quality of your product data,” adds Daria. “CEOs need to move away from personalisation and look instead at data hygiene so that generative engine searches turn up their brand’s products. A good CEO will be looking at how the business is maintaining its data, with a dual outcome: it’ll improve AI search results, and it’ll help forecasting and, subsequently, stock ordering - both real-world revenue impacts.”
Internal promotion may remain the ambition, but it is rarely the reality. External CEO appointments in the S&P 500 accounted for nearly a third of hires last year, while in the MidCap 400 it was over 40%. Daria comments: “Internal promotion may well remain the ambition, but it’s rarely the reality, so boards arrive at hiring decisions by default rather than strategy. This makes getting external appointments right, and onboarding them properly, incredibly important.
“What separates the strongest CEOs is behavioural rather than technical. The best take the business at face value, spend real time understanding how it functions, and put themselves in the shoes of its people before changing anything. Identifying the winners already in situ - the people who have been overlooked or under-backed - and showing them what they’re capable of, is a rare skill and worth considerably more than restructure. You can be the most decorated executive on paper, but you’ll seldom meet one who doesn’t name low ego and a willingness to learn as their defining competencies.”
Future CEOs are emerging from hands-on roles at the heart of the business. They are not skipping general management; they are claiming it.
Two recent appointments illustrate the point. Briony Garbett has just been named CEO at Nadine Merabi, having moved through brand and customer roles, including CMO positions and a customer director role, before becoming managing director at Karen Millen. Zoe Matthews, newly appointed managing director for retail at N Brown, has spent 30 years in buying and product, including leading fashion and home product at John Lewis. One route came through brand, the other through product, and both arrived at full commercial ownership.
“The market has stopped treating product and marketing as functions that need a commercial chaperone,” Daria explains. “You cannot separate product from retail, and therefore cannot separate the balance sheet from the customer. The strongest candidates now are the ones who can cover both elements.”
Fashion is one of the few sectors where serious capital is committed six to twelve months before you know whether the customer wants the product. That is a central risk in the business, and margin is won or lost there before anything reaches a store.
“CEOs who have learned their trade in marketing, digital, finance - any practical element of the business - have spent real time in the buying and planning rooms, and that experience can’t be bought. Plenty of initially-strong candidates don’t make it through because they can read a P&L but not an OTB.
“In investor-backed businesses, the key skill for CEOs is being able to make a product case in financial language. CEOs can’t ask for faith - they need to demonstrate that their case works. Good decisions made early in a CEO role help you earn the room, building up the credibility you’ll need for longer-dated decisions.”
If we had to pick one stand-out quality for fashion CEOs, it would be the ability to take in information you did not want to hear and act on it fast. Everything else follows. It sounds soft, but it is not.
Daria says: “The CEO is rarely the person with the most context - the founder holds the brand instinct, the buying team knows what’s actually selling, and the social team can see the customer shifting months before it reaches a board pack. Those people tell you the truth once. If you flinch, they stop, and you end up running the business on a delay.”
It is also the honest answer on AI. Nobody in fashion knows exactly where this lands. “The CEOs I’d back are the ones willing to be taught by someone 25 years younger. Confidence without curiosity is useless in this market. Track record gets you the job but being genuinely coachable at that level is what keeps it.”
.png)
.png)