JoJo Maman Bébé, Refy and Oka CEOs on the leadership lesson most teams miss

Leading a retail or eCommerce business right now means absorbing pressure from every direction at once: shrinking margins, AI anxiety, macro headwinds nobody controls, and a customer who changes faster than any strategy document can keep up.

At Pulse eCommerce Summit ’26, that reality brought together three leaders: Mo White, Interim CEO at Refy, Aalish Yorke-Long, CCO at Oka, and Mark Wright, CEO at JoJo Maman Bébé. Between them they cover beauty, luxury homeware and kidswear, and none of them arrived by a straight route.

None of these three CEOs took the obvious path

Yorke-Long moved through buyer, head of eCommerce, general manager and managing director roles across homeware, fashion, sportswear and beauty before reaching Oka. White started as a fashion editor before moving into eCommerce around 2007, learning to bridge tech, brand and buying teams with no established playbook. Wright went from the M&S shop floor to Jack Wills to Fat Face’s boardroom as COO, then to his first CEO role at JoJo Maman Bébé after Fat Face was acquired.

All three named the same asset that carried them: agility. Yorke-Long’s word for it was diversity, moving fluidly between categories and functions rather than climbing one ladder. She also flagged a gap she still sees on boards today: many senior leaders are still missing basic digital literacy.

Every panellist named a pressure they can’t control

The tensions varied by category but shared a root cause. Wright pointed to demographics working against kidswear: falling birth rates, falling fertility rates, and the resale platform Vinted eating into first-purchase demand. JoJo Maman Bébé’s answer has been to lean into being the UK’s first kids’ B Corp brand, betting that durability and gifting quality matter more once resale becomes normal.

Yorke-Long described a different pull, between brand ambition and commercial reality. She likes expensive photo shoots and premium storytelling, but is equally responsible for shareholder value, and said the tension between promotional pressure from shareholders and a marketing team that wants to protect product quality has forced her teams to get sharper at balancing both. White’s pressure was AI itself. Time at DeepMind gave her early exposure to the technology, and she is now watching it accelerate both genuine capability and, in her view, social bias, at the same time.

Founder-led brands are built in the founder’s image

Asked how Refy protects its identity while scaling commercially, White offered a working method rather than a slogan. Founder-led brands like Net-a-Porter, Glossier or Refy carry the authenticity of the people who built them, and the job is to map founder attributes against business attributes, find where they overlap, and grow from that overlap rather than dilute it.

A five-word phone note carried Wright through Covid

Wright’s most concrete leadership lesson came from a single weekend in March 2020. Sitting on a bench mid-run, after Fat Face’s first potential Covid case, he typed five words into his phone that he still returns to: be human, lead, listen, energy, time. The last one stuck with him longest. “Time is the interesting one,” he said. “We talk about not having enough cash, but time is the quality that’s probably the most precious.”

Hiring for balance beats hiring for stars

On building teams, Yorke-Long shared her view. “A team full of quarterbacks isn’t going to win the Super Bowl,” she said, arguing that clearly defined roles matter more than stacking a team with individual talent. White’s hiring method leans on a 15-minute chemistry test to meet more candidates, paired with a deliberate check on equity: she asks every interviewee to walk through their path from school to university to first job, precisely because that path is far harder for some candidates than others.

What this means for marketing leaders

Every leadership lesson on this stage eventually came back to fundamentals: know your context before your KPIs, know your team’s roles before their talent, know your founder’s identity before your growth targets. Yorke-Long’s closing point summed up the panel’s real thread. Margin, not top-line growth, is the metric that decides whether a retail business survives, and too many teams still can’t read the P&L that tells them so.