Vanessa Wallace has spent her career selling to the customer most brands still describe as an emerging one. She is now chief marketing officer of GLD, the jewelry brand founded in 2015 by Christian Johnston while he was playing college basketball at Duquesne University, and she is direct about where her reading of that customer comes from.
“As a Black woman, a person of color, I think about it in how we think through who we serve,” Wallace said.
That is a method rather than a credential. Wallace says GLD’s demographic is Black and brown, and that culture is often influenced by Black and brown creatives, musicians and athletes. Plenty of brands say the second half of that. Very few build a shelf plan on the first.
The shelf plan is the news. GLD began direct-to-consumer and started wholesale last year. It is now in nearly 200 Lids locations, expects to be in about 40 Foot Locker stores by the holidays, launched at Selfridges in the United Kingdom this summer, and has extended its NFL license from North America into the United Kingdom and Mexico. “One of the things that we’re pretty proud of is that GLD started as a D2C brand,” Wallace said.
“Understanding who our consumer is, and as they’re getting their fits together, we can complete that fit,” she said. That is the argument for sitting next to a fitted cap instead of waiting to be searched for.
Her own record is why the reading carries weight. Wallace was chief marketing officer of Savage X Fenty and spent nearly two decades at Nike, six of those years leading North America marketing for Jordan Brand, and she played basketball at the University of Texas. One rule came with her. “There was a saying around Nike: ‘Always listen to the voice of the athlete,'” she said.
At GLD, that voice starts early. “We have athletes who buy their first chain when they’re in high school,” Wallace said. The brand’s collaboration with New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers launched this football season, with Nabers designing pieces alongside Johnston, and Wallace treats the choice of a partner as a test rather than a transaction. “It goes down to authenticity, right?”
She is also watching the ground move. Gen Z shoppers, she says, believe people more than brands and are more value-based, which is why GLD is preparing an affiliate program ahead of the holidays and leaning on TikTok Shop. “It is social commerce that’s kind of driving the market at this point,” she said.
The spring collection is golf, which she puts as arithmetic rather than aspiration: “Knowing that there are more people of color playing golf than ever before.”
