Starting her career on the sales floor and eventually as a buyer at Nordstrom, Tricia Smith, global chief executive officer at Anthropologie Group, said she’s had a bit of an unconventional journey that led her to leading the global lifestyle company.
“I spent a lot of my time early on connecting with customers,” Smith said in a conversation with Jenny B. Fine, editor in chief of Beauty Inc and executive editor of Beauty at WWD, at WWD’s 2026 Women in Power event. “I was a young woman who loved fashion and I loved shopping.”
After progressing her way through different executive roles at Nordstrom, she had the realization seven to eight years ago that she wanted to learn more about the business and retail side. While most of Smith’s previous positions focused on merchandising, she left Nordstrom when the opportunity arose for her to take the helm of Anthropologie.
Citing moving from a company she spent almost 25 years at and operating within a different area from her norm as a risk, Smith said the opportunity to both lead and learn at the same time drew her in — which she sees as being the most rewarding for women.
“I absolutely love creating opportunities for women,” Smith explained. “While I didn’t see a ceiling or any limitation for being a woman in our industry, I also didn’t see a lot of women who came before me in those types of roles. I wanted to create opportunities for other women — and with my ambition and aspiration, it became clear that it was time to make a change.”
Starting her role at Anthropologie in April 2021, she took up the CEO position in the midst of the pandemic; Smith was forced to rely on her own expertise to take the lead of the organization.
“The Anthropologie culture was not that dissimilar to Nordstrom — with a lot of long-tenured people that have worked at the brand for a very long time and absolutely loved it. Then you had a lot of new people that were coming on board; some of whom had never met each other in person because they were hired during the pandemic.”
When it came to assembling her own leadership and bringing the brand to a new place, Smith also wanted to be respectful of the path the brand was already on. This meant defining its overall company values and the evolution of them, especially as they introduced the brand to a new generation.
When pulling together her leadership team, Smith said she made sure to spend time with people to understand where they’ve had the opportunity to be successful.
“We have all women leaders on our executive team that have worked together over the course of four-and-a-half years, some of which had been with the brand for quite some time. Some of them we brought on board — with very diverse backgrounds — and some have longer tenures than others.”
While it wasn’t the goal for her team to be all women, it ended up being a team of all women leading the charge for the company.
“Our chief operating officer has an automotive background, which is different in a retail industry. She thinks differently and she approaches things very differently, and I love that. It’s important as leaders of organizations to make sure that you create space for people to bring their authentic self. It’s important for a broad group of women and employees to see that you can show up differently for work. You can show up differently in a meeting and you can be as effective as somebody else; it doesn’t necessarily need to be that the culture is created around a certain way of leading — and that the people can see each other,” Smith concluded.
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