Kayleigh Fazan
Automation is absorbing the parts of a job that are easy to specify. It leaves behind judgement and the ability to make another person feel properly dealt with. Most organisations treat those as personality traits, so nobody is accountable for developing them.
Kayleigh Fazan trains organisations in the human behaviours automation cannot replicate, after twenty years in retail operations and training work for PVH, ASICS, Rituals and B&Q.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kayleigh Fazan
- Her training population is store teams and frontline managers at PVH, ASICS, Rituals, Hunkemöller, B&Q and Skechers. TIRA’s field trainers work in store, alongside the people who serve the customer.
- Unscripted resolves into four behaviours a person can practise: Awareness, Connection, Confidence and Contribution. TIRA delivers the same material as Leadership Coaching Days, so a keynote can be the front end of a programme with the same teams.
- She argues the people case in commercial language. TIRA’s client programmes are built and tracked around conversion, average transaction value, membership acquisition and retention.
- She has lived the disruption her keynote addresses. Twenty years of career built from a £3.25-an-hour shop floor job, redundancy in 2020, and The International Retail Academy founded the same year.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Managing Director of The International Retail Academy, a retail training and consulting firm working with Rituals, ASICS, Hunkemöller, Skechers, B&Q, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap and Crocs.
- Two decades in retail operations before founding TIRA, from Concession Manager at Debenhams at 19 to Area Manager and Head of Franchise across Europe and the Middle East.
- Hosted the closing session of the 10th Global DIY-Summit in Rome, and shared a Retail Week Live fireside in London with André Pedersen, COO of Intersport Nordics, on focusing store teams on what matters most. Also billed at the Retail Technology Show, House of Retail, and the SingularityU South Africa Summit, which ran online in 2021.
- Contributor to Retail Jeweller and Bizcommunity, and guest on the Shiny Happy People podcast.
- Co-author of Women Who Inspire, contributing the chapter “Embracing Discomfort”, and writing her first solo book.
- Profiled by CIO Business World in its 2025 feature “The 10 Most Iconic Women Leaders Revamping the Future”.
Biography
The International Retail Academy exists because retailers spend heavily on systems and thinly on the people using them. Kayleigh Fazan founded it in 2020, mid-pandemic, after twenty years running stores, areas and franchise operations across Europe and the Middle East.
The method is deliberately bottom-up. TIRA’s field trainers work in store alongside store leaders, moving them from supervising tasks to coaching behaviour. Programmes are tracked in conversion, average transaction value, membership acquisition and retention.
Her argument is that being hard to replace is trainable. The signature keynote, Unscripted: How to Thrive When Everything Else Gets Automated, breaks that into four behaviours a person can be coached in. The stages have been mostly retail and franchise: the closing session of the 10th Global DIY-Summit in Rome, and a Retail Week Live fireside in London on focusing store teams on what matters most. Her keynote on The Retail Revolution went out online, to the SingularityU South Africa Summit in 2021.
She started at 16 on a New Look shop floor in Barrow-in-Furness, earning £3.25 an hour, and was running a Debenhams concession by 19. Redundancy in 2020 ended the international career she had built. Her speaking fees part-fund her work supporting children living in poverty, a commitment she traces to having lived in a hostel as a child.
Key speaking topics
- Human capability in an automating workplace
- Frontline behaviour and customer experience
- Service culture and its commercial results
- Leadership of store and frontline teams
- Confidence and presence at work
- Employee retention in high-turnover roles
- Retail transformation from the shop floor up
Ideal for
- CHROs and L&D directors accountable for capability in large frontline workforces
- Chief Customer Officers, retail directors and heads of store operations
- Conference programmers in retail, franchise and consumer-facing sectors looking for a main stage or closing session
- Brand and franchise leadership teams at offsites, kick-off meetings and sales conferences
Audience outcomes
- Four behaviours they can practise the next morning: Awareness, Connection, Confidence and Contribution
- An answer to what their own role becomes once the specifiable parts of it are automated
- The case for why the person in front of the customer is the brand, and what that changes about how teams are managed
- Managers able to describe the difference between supervising tasks and coaching behaviour
Talks
Gives an audience four trainable behaviours that hold their value as automation absorbs the specifiable parts of a job.
Key takeaways:
- Awareness and Connection as trainable skills: reading a room, and building trust with a stranger in seconds
- Confidence as performance without a script, and what keeps it steady under pressure
- Contribution defined as mattering to another human being
Argues that conversion and loyalty are produced by frontline behaviour before they are produced by technology.
Key takeaways:
- Why the team member is the brand in the customer’s experience of it
- Where technology investment stalls without team buy-in
- What store leaders have to change in their own behaviour first
Practical tools for presence and confidence when presenting, built on the FLY model, First Lead Yourself, and delivered to corporate teams including PVH’s OMNI hub.
Key takeaways:
- The FLY model and what leading yourself means before you lead a room
- Managing your own state ahead of a presentation
- What presence consists of in practice, separate from personality
People and technology building physical retail spaces worth showing up for, first delivered at the SingularityU South Africa Summit.
Key takeaways:
- The store as a stage, and what an experiential format demands of staff
- Why an omnichannel strategy on its own no longer meets customer expectation
- Emotional intelligence as a hiring and leadership criterion in retail