The Lead Summit Day 1 Recap

AI came up in almost every room today. It was not the real subject. The real subject was identity: whether a brand knows what it stands for clearly enough to use new tools in ways that actually reinforce it, rather than erode it.

“Forever Products” and the Discipline of Not Chasing Trends

Carrie Gross, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Dr. Dennis Gross Skincare, put it plainly in the session on building anti-trend brands: “All of our products are forever products. We don’t chase trends. We are science-backed.”

That is not a marketing position. Dr. Dennis Gross does not launch unless there is a genuine breakthrough and clinical proof, and every new product is tested alongside the full existing regimen before it goes to market. “We don’t launch unless there’s a real breakthrough. It has to have clinical proof.” The brand’s standing promise – never throw your skin off balance – functions as a product development constraint, not a tagline.

Her advice on trend-chasing: “The consumer sees it. They’re smart, they’re on their phones researching and walking into Sephora, and it becomes insulting almost when everything looks the same. Knowing who you are and staying true to it is tough. It’s not easy, but it’s essential. You can’t be everything to everybody.”

Tanya Golešić , CEO of Mackage , covered the same ground from a growth angle. Moving from a hero outerwear product to a seasonless lifestyle brand requires holding two customer relationships simultaneously – logo and no-logo, key item and core collection -without letting either dilute the other. “You have to be very disciplined.” On profitability as the discipline that makes all of it possible: “It’s not sexy, but it’s the name of the game, because that’s how you get investment to continue to grow, to scale, and to open stores, and to do marketing campaigns.”

Legacy Brands: The Asset Is Trust, Not Nostalgia

Kiera Ganann , SVP and Head of Merchandising at The Children’s Place, defined the brand’s identity without hesitation: “We are a trusted quality value solution for young families.” Six months into the role, her read on transformation was equally unadorned: “I think we transform every day, but there is an intentional approach that can happen cross-functionally, coming through leadership.”

On what legacy brands consistently get wrong: “I think brands assume that younger generations are only digital. That is a misconception that drives a lot of decisions corporately.” Moderator Richard Kestenbaum pointed to data showing consumers in their twenties and teenagers actively want more physical shopping. The Children’s Place is opening new store formats weekly and working to reduce in-store inventory density — the transformation is operational, not cosmetic.

On metrics: “The answers are all out there. It’s just how you use the data that every one of us has access to. If we listened better to our consumers, I think everyone would be more successful.”

AI Is Only as Good as the Culture It Runs Through

Patrick Walsh , COO of KnitWell Group, led with a number: at Ann Taylor , only 35 out of every 100 in-store transactions involve an associate selling a product to a customer. The other 65 are online pickups, e-commerce returns, and ship-from-store. “You have to organize yourself around the way the store today is being used by customers.”

Knitwell’s response has been to separate operating and selling labor models within stores, and to build two internal metrics — cost to serve and productivity per labor hour — that capture the full omnichannel workload. “We’ve been able to describe where we have payroll opportunities and where we need to make investments.”

The Talbots AI clienteling pilot is the concrete example. Talbots has written more than five million individual handwritten thank-you notes to customers over the past decade, which Walsh described as “core to who that Talbots business is.” Knitwell built a proprietary tool called the Concierge, then embedded an AI assistant into it specifically for Talbots. In a recent pre-event outreach cycle, the AI reached 92% of a 750,000-person contact list — the team had previously managed 250,000 to 300,000 contacts manually. Traffic and appointment rates rose.

The incentives warning was the session’s most practical moment. Walsh’s wife and daughter were recently offered 25% off in exchange for booking an appointment — a corporate program that had been incorrectly translated into store behavior. “The corporate organization has a false sort of sense of what’s actually happening out there, and that’s because the teams are incentivized to do things that are not natural to the consumer in that moment.” His prescription: one brand, one use case, one engaged team. Get the incentives right before you scale.

The AI Operating Models session — Mimi Ruiz , VP of Ecommerce at Columbia Sportswear Company ; David Cost , CDO at Rainbow Apparel Co ; and Serge M. , VP of Technology at Tommy John — worked through the organizational side of the same problem.

Cost’s spreadsheet analogy: “I kind of think of where we are today with AI as to where we were with spreadsheets 30 or 40 years ago. People adopted it, got good at it, wanted to share it, and it broke. It’s a great prototype, but at some point you need to bring it to the enterprise.” On what has and has not worked at Rainbow: “Every attempt we’ve had to lose people – all of them have failed. Every time we try to build a robot to replace a person, we get some little productivity improvement, but it’s not enough. When we build something that augments people, gives people capability beyond what they have today – those have all worked.”

Ruiz’s framing from Columbia: “AI isn’t the strategy. It stems back to our brand strategy. Columbia’s overarching brand strategy is unlocking the doors for everyone – introducing new generations over a very long time period. One in five consumers will use AI to make recommended brand choices. Folks under 44, seven or eight out of ten, will use an LLM as part of their shopping journey. If I am to shepherd a new generation and continue to build Columbia’s trajectory, I have to show up there.”

Cost also surfaced a vendor measurement trap worth flagging. A customer service AI vendor claimed 40% ticket resolution without human intervention. When Rainbow measured actual agent hours and cases handled, rather than tickets closed in the vendor’s own system, the numbers were flat. “If I showed you the data before and after, you wouldn’t know that any automation was going on.” Define your own success metrics before the vendor defines them for you.

Physical Experiences Are Content Infrastructure

The day’s final mainstage session brought together Kat Kim Choroco of Vince , Dina Fierro of K18 Hair , and Lisa Zlotnick of SHEIN on live activations.

Fierro: “At K18, we treat all of our events as content engines.” The brand runs a professional crew alongside a native social team for real-time capture, then plans content in three waves — pre-event, live, and a bank of assets deployed across the following weeks. For the BlondLink tour, K18 mapped cities where blondes over-index nationally, cross-referenced with hard water data, identified key salon partners in those markets, and ran gorilla out-of-home and social casting calls weeks before each date. On measurement: “We actually see a very strong correlation between EMV and top-line growth.” And on time spent as a metric: “We’re very lucky if someone spends three seconds with a piece of brand content on social media. So when someone spends three hours with you in a salon, it is infinitely more meaningful.”

Zlotnick’s team surveyed 18,000 SHEIN customers before designing the Festival House activation and found that almost 70% were buying festival outfits three to four weeks in advance, wearing two to three outfits per day, with firm price limits: no more than $25 per apparel item, $10 per accessory. “We learned very quickly that this was a considered purchase. It was no longer an impulse buy.” A gifting suite for press and influencers was followed by a four-day retail pop-up on Melrose; the content generated there traveled to Coachella and Stagecoach weeks later. “Insights before ideas – they will tell you everything about not only what they’re buying, but the why behind it.”

Katherine Kim Choroco of Vince described a model built entirely in-house. The Future Perfect gallery event in Los Angeles last November was organized as a narrative walk-through at the former Goldwyn family home: design studio vignettes, the creative director’s inspiration objects, and finished product in a single space. A subsequent Bloomingdale’s activation was chapter two of the same story – versatility and layering rather than the atelier origins. “I was sitting next to two clients, and they would literally stop, turn, and watch the models, and write down every single piece of item that they wanted.”

All three agreed on one structural point. “I know a lot of brands that say sometimes the social component is brought in last just simply to amplify,” Zlotnick said. “Bring them to the table at the very beginning.”