SALLY COATES
I’ve spent most of my life in and around retail – building, transforming and growing businesses from the inside.
Today I work as a CEO, founder and director, applying years of experience across buying, planning, marketing, design and eCommerce to help businesses grow in ways that are profitable and sustainable for the people they impact.
I care less about glossy headlines and more about what’s actually happening underneath:
Who’s carrying the load? What’s blocking progress? What’s the real cost – financially and personally – of the way a business is being run?
That curiosity started early.
When I was 12, my mum took me shopping for the Christmas outfit – the one outfit I’d wear on repeat to every pre-Christmas event. I had a clear idea of what I wanted. Store after store, nothing. Endless racks of “almost” but not quite. Exhausted and empty-handed at the end of the day, I turned to her and asked:
“Who chooses what goes into these stores?”
“A fashion buyer,” she said.
“Well, that’s what I’m going to do. I must be able to do a better job than this.”
Standing in the middle of a store that hadn’t thought about a girl like me, I decided I wanted to influence retail – to challenge the sea of sameness, bring excitement and give customers what they wanted (and what they didn’t yet know they wanted).
I followed through. I started in a junior role in a buying office and worked my way up through large and specialty retailers, leading buying, planning, marketing, design and digital teams. I’ve led brand repositioning, strategy resets, restructures and turnarounds. Today, I’m a CEO in fashion accessories and sit on boards as a director.
Along the way, I’ve learned that:
growth built on burnout and heroics is fragile
“busy” often hides a lack of clarity and courage
many women like myself, are holding far more than anyone realises – at work and at home
These days, my mind and time tends to circle three themes:
Business reality & growth – what’s really going on inside founder-led and complex businesses, and what it takes to move from messy and reactive to focused and effective
Personal passages – the quieter, in-between stages of changing how you live and work when, on paper, your life already looks “successful”
Promises & experiments – practical ways of keeping promises to yourself and testing different ways of living and working (often on a trail, a bike or in a pool)
For the record, the most demanding role I’ve ever had wasn’t in a boardroom. It was teaching tap dancing to two-year-olds when I was 17 – the ultimate test of patience, repetition and finding humour in chaos.
If you’re interested in honest conversations about business, change and what it actually costs to hold everything together, you’re in the right place.
