We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lauren Yerkes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lauren below.
Lauren, 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?
As a leader I have learned over the years the importance of resilience. You never know what the day will bring you so I have always approached each day in every part of my life, personally and professionally, with a new day of opportunities. In my professional career I found that being resilient came with the job, whether it was a valued employee leaving the organization, a global pandemic or a shift in the business, it was important for me to take each shift as it came and not get hyper focused on things that either weren’t happening yet or weren’t ‘that day’s fire.’ Personally, after a breast cancer diagnosis at the age of 37, I really had to apply my resiliency skills and truly embrace each day that came my way. From battling chemotherapy side effects to surgeries, it was important for me to stay focused on the goal – being cancer free and being able to live my life with my husband and family. As difficult as a cancer diagnosis is, I knew that my life was going to be different but I was alive and that was all I wanted in the end.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
This past July I left my 16+ year career at REVOLVE to take some time for myself. After an IPO, a global pandemic and going through breast cancer over a 4 year period I knew I needed to put some focus on myself again. I started as an Intern at REVOLVE when I was 24 and built an amazing career that I am so proud and honored that it has been part of my journey. From building team structures to building a business, I never imagined I would walk away with the title of Chief Merchandising Officer. Now that I am no longer at REVOLVE, I have been volunteering in the breast cancer community and building my consultancy business. Seven Sunsets Consulting is my new business that I am proud of, it is leveraging my creativity skills as a merchant, my leadership skills that make me extremely proud and my business acumen that I have gained over a 16+ year career. I have found in the 3 months that I have left REVOLVE that what I loved most about my job, especially in the early days of my career was working with small brands, a small team and the ability to make an impact and see the results quickly, so I am excited to work with small businesses in this way again and hopefully help them to grow, to find opportunities and make things as efficient as possible.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Being a leader requires nimbleness. You must be nimble in how you approach things because the business can shift quickly and you have to be able to adjust and adapt to whatever gets thrown your way. I felt this personally as I was going through my treatments as well, each day (and sometimes each minute) were different, so you just had to move through each day and adjust as things came to you. 2. Honesty and empathy are extremely valuable to not only yourself but to your employees as well. If you aren’t honest with yourself or your employees then most likely you’ll be stuck with high turnover, low productivity and employees that won’t work hard and if you don’t have empathy for what people are going through, personally and professionally, you are going to have disgruntled employees that don’t see you as a real person.
3. Communication is key. Sometimes I found that overly communicating was more productive than keeping things vague or short. It opened up the teams to more dialogue to get us thinking and expanding beyond what I could think about, which was hugely valuable as new processes were rolled out – especially when it was a task that wasn’t part of my day to day.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
As a consultant, I love working with small brands and businesses to help them. My background is in buying and merchandising and over my 16 year career, I have been a key player in brand partnerships, email and web marketing and identifying opportunities. I am a huge advocate for people and helping them to develop, building culture within an organization and guiding CEO’s to identify their teams strengths was always something I truly enjoyed at REVOLVE and honestly can say that it is just now who I am as a person and what comes with working with me. Although my background is in fashion, I am a consumer first and know that if presented a problem or opportunity, I can find a way to discuss and brainstorm on other topics and opportunities to consider all the while focusing on the problem or opportunity at hand. I am eager to meet new people and can be found at sevensunsetsconsulting@gmail.com or you can follow me on Instagram @lauren_yerkes and @sevensunsetsconsulting
Contact Info:
- Instagram: sevensunsetsconsulting; lauren_yerkes
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-yerkes-5a120425/
