Meet Katherine Melchior Ray

We recently connected with Katherine Melchior Ray and have shared our conversation below.

Katherine, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I am the American-born daughter of a German Jewish refugee who fled Hitler at age 15.
Only years later did I realize how deeply I had internalized a fear of rejection—how survival shaped the way I approached hardship, identity, and success.

When I lost my job running women’s footwear at Nike headquarters—a dream role that blended my background as a college varsity volleyball player and former model—it felt like my entire world was crumbling. I wasn’t just losing a title; I was losing a piece of myself. I was also the family’s primary breadwinner, and the weight of that responsibility was crushing. I was willing to do anything—work in a coffee shop or shelve books at the local library. I thought of my grandparents, who left behind a life with servants in Germany to start over in America with nothing, where my grandmother became the maid. That memory grounded and pushed me.

I leaned into grit, resourcefulness, and sheer determination. I called everyone I knew. I knocked on doors, explored every opportunity—and explored myself. With two small children at home, I realized I wanted something different. I wanted flexibility.

That realization led me to launch the first of several consulting firms. I began serving international clients from my home—working with European teams in the mornings and Asian clients in the evenings, so I could be present for my kids. That eventually led to full-time work with Nordstrom, a client that became an employer.

So when I lost my job again—this time in a foreign country, where the company not only paid my salary but covered our visa and my children’s school tuition—it was devastating in a different way. But I had tools I didn’t have the first time. I had new skills. I had experience. I had perspective. The fall still hurt—but I knew how to get back up.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

With over 25 years of experience in global marketing and leadership, I help businesses grow internationally through consulting, writing, speaking, and teaching at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. I specialize in consumer brands, having built businesses across three continents and five industries: fashion, luxury, hospitality, beauty, and wellness. Fluent in Japanese and French, I served as CMO of Shiseido (Tokyo) and Babbel (Berlin), after senior roles at Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Nike, and Hyatt in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

I did all this while married and raising two children, who not only learned new languages, but empathy and resilience.

My passion is helping businesses, brands, and people grow. I teach people how to leverage cultural intelligence to connect deeply with their teams and customers to build brand value. International growth requires leaders to think globally but lead with empathy. In today’s interconnected yet culturally distinct world, cultural intelligence is no longer a soft skill—it’s a strategic one.

I explain these ideas in my new book: “Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures” (Kogan Page, June 2025), co-authored with Nataly Kelly. The book explores how top global brands—Puma, Nestlé, Natura, Coca-Cola, Nike, Louis Vuitton, Shiseido, Starwood and more—expand internationally by adapting to cultural nuances while staying true to their brand values. It’s packed with real-world case studies, frameworks, and actionable strategies for marketers, executives, entrepreneurs, and explorers navigating international growth.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Careers, today, are not linear, but circular. Follow your passions while developing transferable skills. Don’t worry how they fit together. Having worked across multiple industries, I leverage ideas from earlier roles at other companies from different countries. Certain skills transfer across roles, jobs and industries and your network is an asset— treat it with care.

The top 3 qualities that are most impactful in building a meaningful career are:
1. Get curious. Explore new ideas, ask questions, learn new things.
2. Embrace failure. Getting things wrong teaches how to get them right while building resilience.
3. Nurture relationships. With all the technological innovation, we remain humans who respond to care. As Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

This reflection occurred during Covid, and my life today reflects those new priorities.

We were living in Europe when Covid hit. After working from home in the Berlin winter, we relocated to Nice in the South of France, where we had lived 15 years prior when I was working there for Nordstrom. We traded snowy streets for warm skies and a view of the Mediterranean.

After losing our jobs and attending three online funerals in April, I thought about the things I really wanted to do before I die.

I wanted to try living in Nice, France from Jan-June and from July-December in Portland, Oregon, our US base. I had been dreaming about that for retirement—escaping the long, rainy Winter and Spring months of the Pacific Northwest and the hot, crowded Summer months in Nice.

The second goal was to write a book sharing the learnings of my dynamic, global career across brands and borders.

We weren’t ready to retire. But it made no sense to ship our apartment belongings all the way back to the US West Coast only to send them back in ten years. For the first time in our lives, we prioritized lifestyle first, work second. We rented an apartment in France, brought our furniture from Germany, and gave ourselves two years to find jobs to support this arrangement.

It worked. My husband works remotely for a MedTech start up in NY. I started consulting and writing my book; that Fall, Berkeley Haas asked me to teach and I agreed, only in the Fall. It’s now been five years and we’re not only happy, but fulfilled.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.katherinemelchiorray.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katherinemelchiorray/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinemelchiorray/