If Alisha Tarran was considered one of the smartest CEOs in the fashion industry, it was for a reason.
She had brought to her role not just a phenomenal focus on identifying the right thing to be done, but also executing the right thing right.
In just five years of her leadership, the fashion group YooYoo 4 U had grown from a local American jeans company to a global firm selling diverse fashion products across twenty countries.
Among many of her skills was a deep understanding of social trends. While many other corporate leaders read news, she read between the news lines.
But only need not have the ability to read between the lines to infer what she had – that sustainability and eco-consciousness were fast -growing aspirations for their end user segments.
Alisha assigned a special team to undertake research on what the company could do to cater to this growing aspiration. After a few weeks of research, the team had brought her the breakthrough insight: YooYoo jeans needed much less water for washing. In fact, her fabric research team had estimated that their jeans needed a wash after only every tenth wearing.
“Wow,” screamed Alisha to her VP Manthan Shah, “Let’s get the word that every time our user wears our jeans instead of something else, they save buckets of water.”
The marketing and advertising teams whizzed into top gear.
“Just once in a month” screamed an ad.
“You could go on a long desert journey in YooYoo jeans, and not worry a bit about washing it,” claimed another.
Not surprisingly, water use for YooYoo jeans customers plummeted. There were even contests around the highest number of times YooYoo jeans were worn without washing – the latest record amounting to an incredible, and possibly stinking, 137.
The YooYoo Jeans team and Alisha were certainly on a high. But not every board member was impressed.
“It’s all nice to go sustainable, Alisha,” cautioned Brian Sommers, one of the largest individual shareholders, “but being nice doesn’t make money.”
One of her antagonists among the directors, Carry Graham smirked, “The money we spent on advertising this low water jeans alone could bring down our company’s profits by 30% this year.”
In fact, the consensus was that while the company’s environmental branding had increased substantially, the group might end up with much less profits mainly owing to the marketing expenses for the Low Wash concept.
It was hence a big surprise to everyone when the group posted a much higher revenue, and significantly higher profits, than the previous year.
Almost everyone was pleasantly shocked, and her distractors desperate to find how she managed this. They did not have to search hard – a review showed that, while profits from the YooYoo Jeans division had indeed gone down by about 50% compared to the previous year, profits from their fragrance division had grown 100%.
If Alisha Tarran was considered one of the smartest CEOs in the fashion industry, it was for a reason.