Georgina believes the best brands, like the best organisations, are built on how they make people feel. It is a conviction that was formed early: a childhood spent in and around the entertainment and media worlds, across film, performance and production, gave her a first education in storytelling and audience long before she ever managed a brand.
Twenty years later, having led marketing for some of the most recognisable names in luxury across three continents, that early instinct has become a working philosophy: emotional connection is not the soft edge of commercial strategy, it is the engine of it. She is known as a builder: of brands, of structure, and above all of teams. Colleagues describe her as a high-energy change agent who brings clarity, pace and ambition, and who invests personally in the growth of the people around her. Her approach is honest and pragmatic; strategy that can actually be executed, standards that stretch people without breaking them, and a belief that a leader’s real legacy is the capability that remains after they have moved on.
Georgina’s career spans agency and in-house, entertainment and luxury, and markets across Europe, Asia and the Americas. She began in London’s fashion press offices; first at Gucci and then Yves Saint Laurent within the Kering group, before joining The Communications Store as an Account Director, leading PR and communications across twelve international brands including Versace, ZEGNA, Tom Ford and Missoni. In 2014 she moved to Singapore with the Ermenegildo Zegna Group and grew to the Head of Marketing & Communications for Asia Pacific, responsible for brand building across eleven markets and serving on the regional executive committee. In 2020 she relocated to New York as Vice President of Marketing & Communications for the Americas, where she was part of the leadership team that took the Zegna Group public on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2021, and was an active member of the company’s US Diversity, Equity & Inclusion committee.
Georgina is a brand and marketing leader with twenty years in luxury brand building and retail, spanning Europe, Asia and the Americas. Most recently Global CMO of Versace, leading marketing, communications, creative services, digital and customer journey worldwide. An organisation of more than seventy people and combined budgets in the hundreds of millions. Over three and a half years she led the repositioning of the house for a new generation of luxury consumer: rebuilding the marketing organisation, introducing a data-driven customer journey and VIC programming, and shaping culture-first brand platforms, reigniting the intrigue of the customer, while serving on the executive committee through the sale of the company (twice) and two changes of Creative Director (this is no mean feat in the fashion universe!). She completed the role in 2026.
Today, Georgina is an active board member, is building a start-up, and advises organisations and leadership teams navigating transformation. Supporting them on brand and market positioning, marketing effectiveness, customer strategy, and the leadership and team development that change depends on. Her counsel is deliberately grounded: close to the real work, honest about trade-offs, and focused on building internal capability rather than dependency.
She is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University, an alumna of Harvard Business School’s Leadership Edge programme, and a Fellow of McKinsey’s CMO-to-CEO programme with The Marketing Academy. She is a regular voice on the future of luxury, brand building and leading through change; recent engagements include the Forbes CMO Summit, Salesforce’s Agentforce, and Quilt AI’s annual conference in New York. Her recurring themes: real-time relevancy as the new marketing discipline, adaptability (‘AQ’) as the defining leadership trait of the decade, and emotional connection as the buy-or-bounce threshold for modern brands.
That emotion is universal, but the way people express it is deeply local. I’ve built brands in London, Singapore, Tokyo, New York and Milan, and the single biggest lesson is that connection starts with context.
Before you have an opinion about people, you have to understand the world they’re living in; their culture, their pressures, the moment of life they’re in. Get that right and the rest becomes simpler. In my opinion, people everywhere want the same fundamental thing, which is to feel seen.
The other lesson is that none of us buy, or follow, for purely rational reasons. We like to believe decisions are made on logic, but they’re made on feeling and justified with logic afterwards.
That’s as true of a team as it is of a customer. So the question I ask constantly, whether I’m briefing a campaign or leading a reorganisation, is the same: how do we want people to feel?
If you can answer that honestly, you know what to build. And I’d add one thing I learned the hard way: connection can’t be rushed. You can set the pace on strategy, but trust moves at the speed of people, not of plans.
It’s gone from something I chased to something I stopped needing. At Versace I sat on the executive committee through the sale of the company, twice, and two changes of Creative Director. In fashion terms, that’s about as much weather as one house can take in three and a half years. What it taught me is that change isn’t an event you manage and then return to “business as usual”. Change is the usual. The sooner a leadership team accepts that, the calmer and better it performs.
You can ask any boss I've ever had and they will always tell you that I could use a little more self-assurance. "Back yourself Georgina, go for it Georgina, I trust you, use your instincts. This is something I've been hearing my whole career.
So I’ve traded certainty for clarity. I try to be certain about very few things: my values, my standards, the direction of travel and hold everything else lightly.
We used to talk about IQ, then leadership discovered EQ; I think the defining trait of this decade is AQ, the adaptability quota. The leaders I rate most aren’t the ones with the answers. They’re the ones who can say “I don’t know yet” without losing the room, and who keep people feeling secure while the ground moves. I'm very lucky in that regard, I've had some phenomenal leaders of late.
That security doesn’t come from pretending to be certain. It comes from being honest. You can never be certain, but a healthy combination of experience, insight, data and critical thinking (which I often try to frame as impact mapping’before taking a decision) is the only way I muddle through.
Also - I think it's also a female thing. We think… a lot. Too much? I don't think so, but it’s a natural trait which our masculine colleagues sometimes lack. So I've found clarity in trying to slow down and join the dots before attempting any change. Having the courage to take the step and be ok with it if it doesn’t work and it's not always the highway, it can be a bumpy old country-side-road. That's the muscle that requires the most mental-gymnastics for me.
I grew up in the luxury industry so creativity and taste has been table stakes since I can remember. Taste, however, like luxury is subjective and takes many forms.
I try to identify it as excellence in execution. If something is done well, then you can lean on curation and a bit of natural instinct.
Curation, however, carries an enormous role, and it’s growing. We’re entering a moment where intelligence is abundant; everyone suddenly has access to PhD-level information and infinite content. When everything is available, the value shifts to what you choose. Curation, sensibility, the human touch. That’s taste, and it can’t be automated, because taste is judgment with a point of view.
In leadership it shows up in a couple of ways. First as editing - taste is mostly the discipline of no. Knowing what not to make, what not to say, which opportunities to walk past.
From what I've seen, the brands and leaders that lose their way rarely lack ideas; they lack the courage to cut. Second, and less discussed, is taste in how you operate - the standard you hold in a meeting, how feedback lands, how you treat people when things go wrong. People experience your leadership the way customers experience a brand, through a thousand small touchpoints. Taste is what makes them coherent.
I've also been lucky enough to learn from some of the industry's most creative talents. This has shaped my view on the amount of space that creativity has to hold to create something that people desire. A marketeers job today, is to choose which fire to put the oil on.
I’m not sure it qualifies as a secret, because it’s not glamorous, at all. I try to stay as close as I can to the real work, and I care, personally, about the growth of the people doing it.
In my view, strategy is only ever as good as the team that has to carry it, so I’ve learned to spend as much energy building capability as building plans. The proudest moments of my career aren’t campaigns; they’re watching people I’ve worked with go on to do things they didn’t believe they were ready for. If there’s a second ingredient, it’s honest energy. I bring pace and ambition and I've worked to pair it with listening. Ambition sets the bar; care is what gets people over it.
I have a few. Firstly, mother. She's a woman of fortitude, resilience, work ethic and great taste! My sister and I grew up to learn what it is to balance kindness, warmth and at times balancing three jobs, two young children, almost single handedly. My sister, who wins the gold for most medals on a school blazer! She is a wonderful mother, a trail blazing athlete, extremely academic and as a corporate litigation lawyer, she got the smart genes, while i was prancing around on a stage!
If I need to pick someone known, I have a couple to pick from - Donatella Versace. I had the privilege of seeing up close what it means to carry a legacy that is both a global brand and a family story. To protect something you love while having the courage to let it evolve, in public, under relentless scrutiny, for decades.
And of course, Michelle Obama gets my vote. That combination of loyalty and ambition is much rarer than it looks. And beyond the public person that she is, the lesson I take is about the balance of resilience with warmth: to never let the weight of it harden you. That’s the kind of strength I admire most, the kind that stays generous, even through times that require strength.
In fact - that would be a great dinner party guest-list, i may just do that!
Meditation - or anything meditative. For some it's a run, or a swim. Although I've never been much of a runner (too much prancing!) For me of late, a strong peloton class or a flying reformer pilates session is my vice. Through the winter months, here in Milan, my husband and I will find ourselves in the mountains with our two dogs as often as we can and when I lived in New York - a long walk down the westside highway with a podcast by myself. Or a hike upstate somewhere (always with the dogs - they love to hike!)
It’s where my best thinking happens and where my nervous system resets. It’s become more than a habit; it’s the lens for my current state of mind and a large part of what helps me disconnect. In fact, I've joined a dear friend and a small group of us are currently building a business which aims to help people do just that! Our generation is redefining adulthood through movement - run clubs in place of nightclubs, effort as identity and I understand it completely, because it’s how I try to live. Take away the phone, the calendar, even the coffee. But not a moment to reset, however the day tries to take shape.
People are starting to catch on that the overstimulated world we live in is not sustainable. The attention economy is giving way to the emotional economy and reconnecting with what’s real, the human side. A quieter nervous system and an environment that serves you with a community that inspires you to learn and grow… Somewhere between the analogue calm of 1980 and the content chaos of the last ten years. It’s also why I’m so proud of the business I’m building with my business partner, Alex. Amateur (amateur_hq on Instagram) is a multi-brand sportswear platform redefining what retail looks like in the sports space. You only have to look at the culture around endurance sport: record marathon sign-ups, people turning to run clubs in place of nightclubs. The amateur scene is developing its own codes, its own taste levels, its own status systems. It’s no longer about taking part, but how you take part and what your effort says about you. Yet retail, as an environment and an experience, hasn’t caught up with the health and wellness boom and we intend to fix that. Consumers of every age and nationality are looking for a 360 shift in how they experience brands: in person, with their friends, in an environment where they feel safe and connected to a real culture. Our hypothesis is simple - we’re building a home for brands, products and customers in the endurance space.
In parallel, I’m excited to have been appointed to the board of NeuroHaus as a NED and strategy advisor, an Oxford University Innovation backed company, helping brands create environments in harmony with the nervous system, through cultural strategy, psychology and spatial design.
For me, the two belong to the same belief: the next decade of brand building is about how spaces and experiences make people feel.
That one is easy. Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map. I can’t live without it! I reference it every time I change country, market or strategy. If you understand people and their context, you can be pragmatic, empathetic and future-facing at the same time. And my current summer read: Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. Many, many, of the bigger questions are answered there.
