There’s a New Head at Amazon Fashion
The Amazon Fashion machine has a new leader — Jenny Freshwater, who has been with the e-commerce company since 2010 and is taking on the title of vice president of fashion and fitness.
That puts a new hand on the wheel at what Wells Fargo has estimated is a $67 billion apparel and footwear business in the U.S. alone, including third-party sales.
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Freshwater was most recently vice president of traffic and marketing technology, which the company said made her “responsible for building global, cross-channel and traffic-driving marketing capabilities, including via social media, creator growth and global shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
Before that, she held leadership roles in Amazon’s operations unit and served as vice president of forecasting.
Freshwater takes over the business from Muge Erdirik Dogan, who led Amazon’s fashion business since February 2021.
Erdirik Dogan left to become the chief technology officer at Nike Inc., according to a report on Bloomberg, citing a memo to Nike employees from chief executive officer John Donahoe.
In February, Nike’s global chief digital information officer Ratnakar Lavu — then the company’s top technology official — left the company. Nike and Erdirik Dogan did not immediately respond to queries.
Erdirik Dogan brought an interesting pedigree to the fashion industry having received a PhD from Carnegie Mellon in optimizing supply chains in chemical plants.
That helped her oversee a sprawling fashion business that includes apparel, shoes, sports, outdoors, exercise equipment, luxury fashion and jewelry as well as the Shopbop and Zappos subsidiaries.
She successfully brought big fashion brands on board, including Coach, which has crowed over the technology, presentation and audience offered on the site and includes a “View in 3D” feature.
Erdirik Dogan also led Amazon Luxury stores venture, which has not attracted fashion’s megawatt high-end luxury brands, but it has made some inroads, for instance with an exclusive bridal collection with Rodarte.
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