Rebecca Minkoff
Founders who survive their first decade hit a harder problem in the second: the brand still has their name on it, but the market has changed under them. Retail collapses, channels shift, customers age out, capital tightens. The question is no longer how to start, but how to keep the thing alive without losing the original idea.
Rebecca Minkoff is a fashion founder, author of Fearless, and convenor of the 9,000-member Female Founder Collective who speaks on building, scaling and rebuilding a consumer brand over twenty years.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Rebecca Minkoff
- Two decades of operating the same brand through three retail eras: department store, direct-to-consumer digital, and the post-pandemic rebuild. Few founder speakers have run their own brand long enough to talk credibly about all three.
- A working playbook for founder reinvention. After losing 70% of revenue in 2020, Minkoff repositioned the business; she can speak to the operational decisions that recovery actually required.
- Convening power with other women founders. Through the Female Founder Collective and the Superwomen podcast, she has interviewed and worked alongside operators like Katie Couric, Bozoma St. John and Jessica Alba, and brings that network into the room.
- A published thesis on founder behaviour. “Fearless” (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021) sets out the specific rules she used to build and rebuild the brand, giving audiences a single argument to react to rather than a career retrospective.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Co-Creative Director of Rebecca Minkoff, established 2005, distributed across 900+ stores worldwide and own retail in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Korea.
- Founder of the Female Founder Collective (2018), a network of 9,000+ women-led businesses providing education, mentorship and strategic resources.
- Author of “Fearless: The New Rules for Unlocking Creativity, Courage, and Success” (HarperCollins Leadership, 2021).
- Host of the “Superwomen with Rebecca Minkoff” podcast, with guests including Katie Couric, Bozoma St. John and Jessica Alba.
- Recipient of the Accessories Council Breakthrough Designer Award (2011).
- Active member of the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America).
Biography
The Morning After Bag was designed in 2005 by a 24-year-old who had moved to New York at 18 to work in fashion. Twenty years later, that handbag is still in production, the brand carries Rebecca Minkoff’s name across 900 stores, and the founder has had to rebuild her own company more than once to keep it there.
That second part is where she becomes useful to organisations. Minkoff has run the Rebecca Minkoff brand through the collapse of department store retail, the rise of direct-to-consumer digital, and a pandemic that erased 70% of her business in a single year. The business she now operates is structurally different from the one she founded, and she has had to make every one of those changes herself.
In 2018, she founded the Female Founder Collective, now a 9,000-member network for women-led businesses, and launched the Superwomen podcast, where she has interviewed founders and operators including Katie Couric, Bozoma St. John and Jessica Alba. In 2021 she published “Fearless” with HarperCollins Leadership, a book that sets out the specific operating rules she used to build the brand and stay in business.
The Accessories Council named her Breakthrough Designer in 2011. She is an active CFDA member. The more interesting credential, for a senior buyer, is that she has run the same name-on-the-door consumer brand for two decades, which is not a position many founders reach.
Key speaking topics
- Founder reinvention after market shock
- Building and scaling a consumer brand
- Direct-to-consumer and digital retail
- Women in entrepreneurship and access to capital
- Brand longevity over multiple retail eras
- Networks and mentorship for women founders
- Risk-taking and rule-breaking in brand building
Ideal for
- Founders, CEOs and senior commercial leaders at consumer brands navigating channel disruption or category decline.
- Heads of DTC, brand and customer for retail and consumer-goods companies rebuilding after demand shocks.
- Corporate networks and ERGs for women in leadership, particularly those focused on entrepreneurship and progression to founder roles.
- Investor, accelerator and venture-platform audiences working with women-led portfolios.
Audience outcomes
- A specific operator account of how a consumer brand survives twenty years of retail change, told by the person whose name is on the building.
- A concrete view of what founders actually do after a 70% revenue loss, beyond the post-mortem narrative.
- A picture of how networks like the Female Founder Collective change the funding and mentorship arithmetic for women-led businesses.
- The argument from “Fearless” in the founder’s own words, including which of the rules held under pressure and which did not.
Talks
A founder’s account of the operating rules behind two decades of building, scaling and rebuilding the Rebecca Minkoff brand.
Key takeaways:
- The specific decisions that allowed a single-product launch to become a global consumer brand
- How founder behaviour has to change as the business moves from launch, through scale, into reinvention
- Where conventional rules in fashion and retail had to be broken, and at what cost
A talk on the funding and infrastructure gap facing women founders, drawn from running the Female Founder Collective.
Key takeaways:
- The structural disparity in access to capital between women-owned and male-owned businesses
- How a founder network of 9,000+ businesses changes the practical economics of starting up
- What corporate partners, investors and ecosystems can do that actually moves the numbers