This profile is part of the Wellth 30, a curated recognition of the leaders building enduring brands, communities, and culture.
Vanessa Wallace, Chief Marketing Officer, GLD
Vanessa Wallace spent 19 years at Nike, moving through football, basketball and Jordan before launching the Jordan women’s business in North America.
Then came Savage X Fenty, where she became chief marketing officer for Rihanna’s lingerie brand. Now she’s doing the same at GLD, the Miami jewelry company whose cultural footprint stretches across sport, music and fashion.
The category has historically skewed male. Wallace’s first priority is therefore familiar territory: build a serious women’s strategy rather than treating women as an afterthought within a broader business.
It’s a throughline in her career. Whether the product is sneakers, lingerie or jewelry, Wallace has repeatedly entered categories with established assumptions about who the customer is and then asked whether those assumptions still make sense.
Before all of that, she played Division I basketball at Texas and earned a place in two halls of fame.
She knows something about playing the long game.
