Bijou Abiola – Director of Consumer Insights L’Oreal Luxe. Bijou is a proven innovator with over 10 years of driving growth in customer-centric businesses through creative strategies and compelling storytelling. Developing omni channel businesses for brands like Dior, Chanel, Bobbi Brown, Ralph Lauren and DVF, her collective experience across multiple retail categories produced a differentiation strategy that delivered over $220M in sales for a major department store in the U.S. In her current role, she partners with business leaders within L’Oréal’s Luxe division to convert data-driven insights into actionable customer acquisition and retention strategies.

Maria Grachvogel - Designer. Obsessed with the idea that clothing can transform your body, your mood and your confidence Maria experiments with innovative cutting always keeping the woman who wears the clothing front of mind. She is personally committed to preserving the craft of luxury fashion and is working with a technology partner to reimagine the future of fashion. One could easily describe Maria is a fashion architect instinctively interested in materials, shape, form and flow. Today we talk to Maria not only about her clothes but about embracing change in a changing world…

Helen Brocklebank – CEO Walpole. Helen is the CEO of Walpole the official sector body for UK luxury. Founded in 1992 as a not-for-profit organisation, it counts more than 250 British brands in its membership and is recognised as the voice of British luxury. Walpole’s purpose is to promote, protect and develop a sector worth £48 billion to the UK economy and the jewel in the crown of UK business. Helen is prolific in her support for all things British and all things luxury. In addition to supporting and promoting some of the most internationally recognisable British brands she is also a champion for education and the role of women in the board room.

Alison Lloyd - designer - Ally Capellino. Ally started Ally Capellino in 1979 at the time when British Fashion was probably at its most edgy and ground-breaking. She was also one of the first British designers to break Japan. Famous for her understated style, she moved from clothing to bags almost 40 years ago continuing to design practical, long lasting pieces that are as discreet as they are functional and durable. Ally is and has always been a visionary and still one of the few successful women in fashion leading her own business

Effie Kanyua - Director of PR & Comms - Hearst UK. Effie has a wealth of PR and communication experience having worked at some of the world’s leading agencies including: Shine, Weber Shandwick, Splendid Communications and M&C Saatchi on accounts for global brands in all sectors from drinks to tech including Diageo and Samsung.

Jessica Helfand. Jessica is internationally acclaimed in her area of work as a designer, writer, and educator. She received both her BA in graphic design and architectural theory in 1982 and her MFA in graphic design in 1989 from Yale University. With William Drenttel, she co-founded The Winterhouse Institute and with Michael Bierut, Design Observer. She has written for many national publications, including The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Aperture and The New Republic. She is the author of numerous books on design and cultural criticism, including Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998), Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002). Her critically acclaimed Scrapbooks: An American History (Yale University Press, 2008) was named that year’s best visual book by the New York Times. Her most recent publications include Design: The Invention of Desire (2016), Culture is not Always Popular: Fifteen Years of Design Observer and Fac

Lydia Slater. Lydia is the Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar UK, overseeing it’s print, digital and experiential offering. She has expanded the Bazaar at Work programme and launched the Bazaar Summit, an annual conference that champions the career woman, bringing together Bazaar’s high-net worth readership with women leaders from around the world; an initiative that has become a pillar of the brand.

Catherine Scorey Jobling. Catherine is the Chief Operating Officer at Allsaints where she has overall responsibility for all product, men and women. There are many entrepreneurial women in the world of fashion, but very few make it to the highest level of management. Fewer still have contributed so much to the success of a British brand in the competitive world of the international fashion industry.

Father Andrew More O’Connor is a Roman Catholic Diocesan priest ordained by the Archdiocese of New York in 1996 and is currently the pastor at Saint Mary Grand on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In addition to his service of the Archdiocese, he is a visual artist and feels that church and art must go together like subject and verb, more so now because the paradigms of the sacred shift along with our lives. Andrew is also a designer and founder of Good of Conscience a non profit clothing company.  Christopher J. Berry is Professor Emeritus (Political Theory) and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow. He works at the interface between politics, history and philosophy and has written many books and papers, on Luxury and especially on aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment.  On a wider front he has an interest in what he calls 'the philosophical anthropology of politics' (what it is about being human that appears to call forth a response that is labelled political).

Kevin Bethune – An accomplished designer and innovator, Kevin started his career as a mechanical engineer working in the world of nuclear power plants. He then turned to work in a different kind of engineering, that is design engineering. Although quite different fields the thinking is much the same. Be innovative and come up with solutions to complex problems. Since then Kevin has designed some of the most iconic Nike sneakers. Not being fulfilled designing footwear, he moved on to pursue a career in design innovation, creative thinking and 'unlocking human potential through the creation of empathic and holistic experiences.'

Margaret is the Sales Director for Harris Tweed Hebrides and has over 20-years experience working in textile manufacturing, retail, rural economic development, and community sustainability. As a proud Hebridean and a native Gaelic speaker, she has spent her life surrounded by the Harris Tweed Hebrides® industry which forms the backbone of the fragile island economy in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. She is now part of the team at Harris Tweed Hebrides leading the next exciting stage in the lifecycle of Scotland’s most famous handwoven woollen textile.

Sacha is 3rd generation Rose leading Derek Rose, a leisurewear company specialized in Feel-good Living. Sacha joined in 2003 and has transformed the business into one of the UKs leading leisurewear companies. It is refreshing to speak with someone who is so open about business, his passion for technology and how his business is about more than just making money.

Theodore Diehl, horologist at Richard Mille. Theo has had a varied and exciting career. He was originally conservatory trained as a harpsichordist and Early music specialist and worked many years as an A&R manager and producer. In the 1990’s, he made a change to watch journalism, and worked with all the major watch magazines and newspapers including the Financial Times (UK). It was during this time that he met Richard Mille. He joined Richard’s fledgling company as one of the first three people to work there. Theo is the company spokesman, horologist and historian.

Sonya Walger is an actor and author, she stared on Broadway in the original production of Frost/Nixon, and she has been in way too many films and TV series to name all of them. Here are a few, Lost, Sleeper Cell, CSI: NY, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. , FlashForward. Parenthood and most recently For all Mankind where she plays an astronaut, Molly Cobb, the first woman on the moon.

Christopher Lutterodt-Quarcoo (CL-Q) is a creative entrepreneur, awarding-winning director of 'Hertz' (BFI Future Film Festival: Best Documentary currently on BFI Player) and writer. Operating on the axis of design, politics & film he is the director of THE ADV_™ an immersive forum, developing; empathy, insight and foresight through weaponised empathy. Christopher is also the founder of the research archive Unmaterialised™, which uses design to investigate political influences on global narratives, beliefs & systems.

In this, the final episode of season two we meet Kyre Chenven one half of the duo who set up Pretziada a creative practice on the southwest corner of Sardinia. Kyre and her partner, Ivano Atzori, work with artisans on resuscitating local craft.  Together they work symbiotically as cultural translators: writing and photographing the particularities of the island, reproposing new designs of classic pieces, producing original designs of international creatives and assisting the artisans to shape their future trajectory. They promote the heritage of a territory through words, photography and a collection of design objects made with local artisans.

Theo started designing jewellery in the 1970s and opened his first studio on Fulham Road in 1980. For over 40 years he has been designing and making his own original, beautiful jewellery and silverware by hand in his workshop and studio in London’s Fulham Road. His attention to detail is what sets him apart from other jewellers. This and his acute understanding of craftsmanship and materials. We chat about the design process, Ozzy Osbourne and the swinging 70s

Stephen started his career during the late 1970s. He has become one of the most acclaimed milliners making millinery seem modern and compelling in materials that are often radical in design and range from refined to whimsical. He is always at the forefront of fashion where his hats routinely grace the most celebrated magazine covers, enliven window displays of the world's most stylish stores and frame the faces of everyone from Boy George to Lady Gaga. He works from his studio in London and with some of the biggest design houses in the world. His collaborations include Thom Browne and Christian Dior. Join us for a chat about life, inspiration and a love affair with hats.

As a child Raffaella spent a lot of time watching her father preparing the embroidery, organizing all the materials for the embroiderers, making technical artworks and checking the finished work for some of the biggest fashion houses in the world. She was well prepared for the world of fashion despite this not being her initial career choice. She, however decided to join her father at the family company in 1996 and took over as MD in 2020. Her collaborations include Giorgio Armani, Etro, Versace, Valentino and Dolce Gabbana. Inspired by her father’s love of embroidery she continues to innovate in a world defined by craftsmanship.

Join Lydia Slater – Editor in Chief Harpers Bazaar, Catherine Scorey – Chief Operating Officer at All Saints and John Varvatos, Bijou Abiola – Director of Strategy and Consumer Insights at L’Oreal Luxe and the designer Maria Grachvogel for this, the first of two Special Issues of the Visionary Women Live podcasts recorded at the IPOL Conference. We discuss vision, women in business and communicating luxury.