Christiane Pendarvis, Challenges and Responsibilities in Retail Merchandising

 

Christiane Pendarvis

SPEAKERS

Christiane Pendarvis, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to the 92 Report. I’m your host. Will Bachman, and if you visit 92 report.com that’s 92 report.com you’ll be able to see the full transcript of this episode and show notes. Also sign up for the newsletter for this show. I’m so happy today to be here today with Christiane Pendarvis. Christiane, welcome to the show.

 

Christiane Pendarvis  00:26

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really thrilled to be here.

 

Will Bachman  00:30

So Christiane, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Christiane Pendarvis  00:36

Wow. My journey since graduating all those many eons ago. I think the one thing I will say as an overarching theme around my journey is around feeling blessed and thankful for the life that I’ve had, the experiences that I’ve had, and also very much feeling like my journey has been about a journey of self acceptance and self validation in a very positive way. It hasn’t always been easy or full of triumphs and successes, but I feel very confident the person who I am today, and I recognize that so much of who I am is now the byproduct of all those highs and lows over the course of my journey. So just to kick off and start, when I graduated, I went back to South Carolina, which is where I’m originally from. I didn’t have, you know, sort of my my full time job. Post graduation, I wasn’t going to graduate school, so it took me about six months or so to land a full time position. And one of the things I think, that I feel the most fortunate about in my journey is found finding my career passion relatively early. I didn’t know it exactly at the time, so I did have to do a detour to come back to it, but it was, it’s turned out to be something that I’ve been doing for you know, close to how many years have we been out of school now, almost 35 years out of school now. So I started working in retail and Retail Merchandising for Neiman Marcus department stores in their buyer training program. And I have, for the most part, essentially been in the retail industry in some form or fashion almost ever since I started, you know, working for a high end luxury department store, that I was not making enough money that I could actually be a consumer of that high end department store, but it set me on this path of intersection of business and running a business with fashion and apparel, which was always a personal love of mine, and really being able to kind of grow and develop as a business person, which is ultimately, you know, led to The role that I sit in today over the course of my career, I did go back to business school and get an MBA. I did a brief stint at Procter and Gamble when I came out of business school and their brand management arena, and that’s actually where it crystallized for me that, oh no, no, consumer packaged goods is great, learned a tremendous amount. You know, worked for one of the best companies in that arena, but it’s not retail, and retail really is in my blood. And so after a couple years at P and G, I went back into the retail sector, and have essentially been there ever since. Over the course of that career, I have moved all over the country. I went from business school and well, I went from Dallas, which is where Neiman’s was, to business school in North Carolina, to Cincinnati for Proctor and Gamble. And then as I started back on my journey back to retail, to San Francisco to work at Gap Inc, back to Dallas to work at Radio Shack, to Columbus, Ohio to work for Victoria Secret, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to work for American Eagle, back to San Francisco to work for gap, to New York City to work for a company, and then to LA, which is where I’m based now. So so much of my journey of living in different places, meeting different people, building different friend networks, you know, being exposed to different mentalities across the country is all really tied, kind of to my career and professional journey, and which is why that’s it’s such an important anchor of who I’ve come, who I’ve become, and the person that I am today. Over the course of those years, I also met my husband. Actually met him relatively early, maybe a couple years after I came out of college. We did not start dating until. Until six or seven years later. So it was a long little span. There we were in the same friend circle group when I was in Dallas. But the chemistry, you know, the attraction, took a back seat at that time to just building a friendship and camaraderie that and then ultimately led to us dating and dating long distance for a period of time before we got married. But so much of I think for me, the self acceptance part, as I mentioned earlier, is very much about coming into my own as a professional, having impact and seeing not just the impact on the businesses and the brands that I manage, but really on the people and the teams that I oversaw or that I interacted with, and that For me, has led to this viewpoint around my desire today as a senior executive within a company is very much anchored on impact and exposure and showcasing for other women who look like me what the possibilities are for them, which is again, why Part of me feels so incredibly blessed to have gone through all those moves, all those cities, all those different companies, all those different experiences, being able to impact and exposure to a wide group of different people, and building myself into the executive that I am today, that I’m in a position where I can really be a very positive role model for women who don’t look who don’t see a lot of themselves in senior leadership positions. So that’s where I feel really blessed and being able to understand where my superpower is and how I kind of add value and and can generate broader purpose. So long winded answer about my journey since graduating, a lot of moves, a lot of different companies, but also a lot of fun along the way.

 

Will Bachman  07:13

So I love specifics. So give us an example or two of impact on people, and you can sanitize it. We don’t need the person’s name, but maybe you can give us a bit of a story about, you know, someone that you’ve been working with, and how you were able to, you know, to impact that professional.

 

Christiane Pendarvis  07:38

Yeah, absolutely. So there have been, I’d say, a couple of different people. My role in my most recent role in New York, I was working for a direct to consumer retailer, a Plus Size Apparel retailer, multi brand company, heritage catalog company. So they are one of the few people who still send out, you know, millions of catalogs a year. But as times have obviously changed, most people, even when they get a catalog, go online to the brand’s website or go search for them on Amazon, and that’s ultimately where they transact. So working for this big company I was overseeing, direct to consumer so all the websites, as well as the Amazon, a third party marketplace business, built a team. There were some people on the team when I came on board and took over the role that hadn’t really had coaching, training and development, and there was an opportunity to also bring in new talent. So I ended up bringing in a couple of bringing in one person and inheriting one person to oversee two of the biggest brands within the portfolio of brands, and I’d say for both of them, I really worked very hard on understanding who they were, where they were in the career, what their opportunities were, what were their superpowers, and providing them each with opportunities to really shine. So the case of the one person that I inherited, she had a great background in terms of really driving business and business performance from a more strategic point of view, but she had not really been afforded the opportunity to do that, and so I placed her on the biggest of the brands and the portfolio, and really charged her to think holistically about the impact that she could have in the business and what were some very specific strategies that she wanted to institute, and supported her through that entire process. So she had to get alignment cross functionally, and so spent time coaching her all sort of the things that you would think a good manager would do. Another example was another woman that I brought into the company, who I put on the second biggest brand i. And she had really a deep, deep expertise on E commerce, website performance, how you really drive performance on the site, how you create great user experiences, what’s the process for working cross functionally to really improve technology on the site? And so again, I really had her lead into that to build processes with her team around those two different areas. So I left that company in January of 2020, just prior to the pandemic. I still, to this day, very close contact with both of those two people. They have both actually since left the company as well, serve as references for them, serve as mentors for them when they’re going through and looking at job opportunities, when there’s opportunities at work, or when they are having challenges with different managers or cross functionally. How do they manage things? I continue just to be a great resource for both of them, and also been focused on getting them broader exposure outside of their individual enterprises, to industry networks or organizations that can just support them in the course of their career. So I try very much in my approach, in guiding and developing people to think about what is it the company needs? Obviously, that’s my charge as a leader within a business. But then what is it also that the individual needs, and where can you find the synergies of capitalizing on what they need, leveraging their strengths to really drive business performance, but in a way that escalates their learning, their growth, their development, their confidence level?

 

Will Bachman  11:42

I You were the CO president and chief merchant at savage X Fenty lingerie by Rehana. Tell us a little bit about what is the role of a chief merchant at a lingerie company. How do you go about doing that. How do you decide, like, what are the designs for the next season? Just tell us a little bit about what it’s like to actually do that role. Yeah,

 

Christiane Pendarvis  12:07

absolutely, it was a great role. So my in my career trajectory, I spent most of my career in merchandising roles. And the easiest way of explaining a merchandising role is is essentially like a buying role. If you’re a buyer for a company, you’re going out to market, and you’re looking at all the vendors and designers, and you’re picking product that you want to sell in the store. You determine what pricing, how much inventory you want to buy of that product, how you’re going to market it in other companies, like most of the ones that I’ve worked in, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Victoria’s Secret, they sell their own brand at merchandise, so they’re not going out and buying from designers and so all that product gets developed in house, the merchant still plays the same role as the buyer. So they’re deciding who’s the consumer that you’re going to go after. What does the assortment and offering need to look like? What price should it be at? So they’re doing kind of the same work, but the biggest terminology differences as opposed to buying product from somebody else’s line. You’re developing it in house with a team of designers and production people that are really responsible for then getting the merchandise produced. You work still to determine how much inventory you want to buy of different items, etc. So most of my career have been spent in merchandising roles of increasing responsibility with these big specialty retailers in the US. When I got to savage X Fenty, I took on the role chief merchant, slash Chief Product Officer. So in addition to the merchandising team, I was overseeing all the functions that work on product and so create the product. That means the designers that literally sketch, that are working with fabric suppliers to pick out fabrics and raw materials. That means working with the technical designers. These are the people who are literally making patterns to send to an overseas factory to say, hey, here’s exactly the shape of this flip as an example to production teams, those are the teams that literally work with the factories to plan out production, to the people that do inventory management. So I oversaw all of those functions in this role at savage X Fenty, and it was a role that I had spent a lot of time in intimate apparel, so I knew that category really intimately. No pun intended there. But also have worked for the plus size apparel company that I was telling you about, and savage X Fenty was very much size inclusive brands and company. So an understanding of plus size was a benefit. And. Shannon the lingerie market and savage XFINITY, at the time was direct to consumer only, and I, again, had been managing e commerce and direct to consumer. So that’s how I landed in that role. And that role is one where you are working on a variety of different things at all times. The product development cycle will probably surprise a lot of people in apparel, particularly in intimate apparel, it is a very long lead time. So you start working on product that you plan to have available for sale anywhere from a year to a year and three months in advance of when it’s going to be available. So you’re starting to work, say, on a holiday assortment. They’ve started now working on holiday for 2025 already, because it just takes that long to develop product. And so at any one point in time, you’re working on four or five seasons at a time, because they’re just at different stages of development. On holiday 2025 they’re probably working on concepts. Which is, what trends are they interested in? What colors are trending, what fabrics you’re very much looking high level at things. Another season, you’re looking at samples that have been developed from sketches that designers have done. Another season you’re landing and picking exactly what’s going to be in the line and determining how much inventory you’re bringing in. Another season, you’re looking at samples that are coming in off the production line to make sure they’re meeting your standards like so every single season is sort of at a different stage of development, which means you’re constantly just juggling the development of all of that different product at the same time that you’re trying to run the business. So the inventory that’s in this that’s available right now. How is that performing? What adjustments are you having to make to make sure you’re you’re meeting your financial goals and objectives? So it was an area that I love, because it was so dynamic, and again, no one day was the same and very much a role. That’s all about being inspired, but then also being tactical and figuring out how to solve problems.

 

Will Bachman  17:17

You mentioned that there’s been no highs and lows along the way. Tell us some about the real high points for you. Some of the peaks were things that you look back and that you’re proudest of,

 

Christiane Pendarvis  17:29

probably the work I did at savages, some of the work that I’m the proudest of. The business started in May of 2018 so I came in maybe about 18 months after the business had started, so still very early in stage of development, just prior to the pandemic, which was a entire interesting situation to start. You know, two months before you went into lockdown for two years, and the business had been doing well, but it was still relatively small in size. The pandemic in 2020 ended up being a rocket ship year for that business. So we trip. We tripled the size of the business in one year in 2020 and I think the pandemic ended up being a surprise blessing for that business, big for a couple of different reasons. It was intimate apparel and loungewear, so people were stuck at home. There was product that they were still buying because they were stuck at home. It was direct to consumer. The stores were closed, so people didn’t have a lot of choices on where to go shop, and as a direct to consumer business, it was very much reliant on social media to drive and attract new customers, and everybody was at home on their phones, on Instagram and Facebook. And so it was this trifecta of things that led to tremendous growth in that business. And then 2021 we almost doubled the business from the year of prior number. So you can imagine it was like a rocket ship, kind of a growth in that business. When I started, I think the total employee base was maybe 7580 people or so when I left three and a half years later, it was 225 people. So we had, you know, almost tripled the size of the employee base as well. And that was just an incredible a success financially, but just also growth as a leader and an executive. What it takes to run a team of 75 to 80 people looks very different than what it takes to manage a team of 225 people. And actually, that number is understated, because that’s just corporate employees. Over the time that I was at Savage, we also started opening retail stores, and the retail organization was under me, so when I left, I think there were six or seven retail stores and so hundreds of additional employees kind of on the. Retail side of the team, so I was just really, really proud of that work. It wasn’t always easy at all, trying to manage the supply chain challenges of the pandemic and not knowing what product was going to make it out of China or not, and trying to find a container to put product in. And it was, there was a lot of difficulty, but in terms of the overall impact, not just on the business, but Savage is a brand that has had such cultural relevancy was also something that was really, really proud of. And my kids, I have children. I have 10 year old twin daughters, identical twin daughters. You know, my mom’s cool factor did increase a bit by saying that I was working with Rihanna.

 

Will Bachman  20:45

By the way, speaking of Rihanna, what role does a celebrity? Does react? Did Rihanna play in I mean, is she looking at each design and improving it, or just giving broad, general direction? What was that interaction?

 

Christiane Pendarvis  20:58

Yeah. I mean, I can’t say that her role and the role she played was typical of all celebrities. But you know, Savage was her business. That’s her brand, and everything that the company put out that was consumer facing. So whether that was merchandise, that was marketing campaigns like Rihanna had her hands and all of that. So my team, the product creation team. We would meet with her call it every other month ish or so, to go through merchandise. So it might be again. Here’s our concept for one season at the same time, then we’re showing her samples for another season. And she looked at everything on model, you know, she would make sure the fit was right. It was hitting people in the right places, like she was very, very proactively involved in that business, and wanted to make sure that anything that was distributed with her name on it really met her standards. And same thing on the marketing side. So I can’t say that that’s always how things operate with celebrities. It wasn’t a licensing deal where she just put her name on something and collected a check. That’s not That’s not the situation with savage. That’s also not the situation that I currently have in my current role, I’m co president of pattern beauty, which is Tracy Ellis Ross’s hair care brand, and she and I are truly co presidents, we co lead this business together. She pounded the pavement a long time before she started this brand got told no a ton, like a lot of founders, and so I think even for her, there’s just greater significance and involvement in the business on a day to day basis.

 

Will Bachman  22:41

Tell me about some misconceptions that people have when they hear that you were involved with savage as well as with Victoria’s Secret. People might think one thing, but what? What are some misconceptions that people have about about that but that industry,

 

Christiane Pendarvis  23:01

some misconceptions. That’s a great question. It’s not all glamorous, is what I would say. I think a lot of people think, not just in a in intimate apparel, but in apparel. In general, people go to fashion shows or put on fashion shows, and it’s glamorous, and you fly around the country and you go on or around the world, even you go on inspiration shopping trips and and there’s some of that that’s involved in it, but at the core, you’re running a business, and it says hyper competitive industry, the apparel industry is it’s an industry that has its challenges from a sustainability standpoint, and is trying to figure out how to continue to grow at the same time do that responsibly, at least some companies are and so I think that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions, is it’s a lot of tough, challenging, hard work, and it’s really business oriented. The best people and the best retailers are run well, like any other businesses running. You’re talking about businesses that are, you know, in the case of Victoria’s Secret, five, six, $7 billion revenue businesses, you know, I’ve run businesses as big as a billion dollars in revenue. So when you’re talking about businesses of that size and scale, it’s not glamor and just all fun. And picking product that you think is pretty that you like, you’ve got to really be strategic about it. You’ve got to think about your consumer and what’s going to appeal to them. You got to think about how you’re positioning things in the marketplace, you got to figure out how you’re really going to be competitive. So I think people sometimes underestimate when they think about going into business, they think, Oh, I’m going to go work on Wall Street, right? I’m going to be an investment banker. I’m going to do M A work or but retail is a great place to be if you’re a business. This oriented and don’t want to be a banker,

 

Will Bachman  25:05

you’ve been a merchandiser for over two decades. I’m sure there’s been some cases where you selected a product that you thought was fantastic fit for the market and just didn’t move at all. Other cases probably where you picked one and ordered a certain amount, and it just blew through that and you couldn’t resupply. What have you What do you know now about merchandising that you didn’t know 20 years ago? What have you learned about kind of sensing the market, understanding the consumer you know, not necessarily following your own taste, but what that consumer segment wants to tell us, what you’ve learned about being a merchandiser,

 

Christiane Pendarvis  25:47

I’ve learned that you will always get it wrong for the most part. Right there, there. You’re never generally spot exactly on right to your point, you’ve either way underestimated demand behind a product, and so it sells out and you don’t have enough inventory, are you way overestimated demand? And so you have excess inventory, you need to figure out what you’re going to do with it. So generally, you’re never just spot on, like I ordered, the exact right amount for the exact amount of sales that we’re going to generate behind an idea. So I think if you accept that as the truth, then it makes it much easier to sort of be a merchant. And I’ve also learned, and some of this has been driven by, I think, the advent of technology, and what’s happening from supply chains is it’s okay that I’m not going to get it right, the idea of having this merchant that can just pick it that just knows and is going to be able to set trend and spot it. And it’s sort of this innate ability in them that’s not reality, that’s not reality anymore. And so the best way to drive business is to test and learn. Right? If there’s an idea that’s a new idea that you think is going to be great. Don’t put the farm on it, you know, put a little bit out there and see what happens from a demand perspective. Build your infrastructure such that you can chase back into it very quickly. So like you, whether it’s you’ve got blank raw material available that you can color and then produce really quickly. Whatever the mechanism is, I think the best merchants today recognize, yes, that some of it’s about intuition, some of it’s about consumer understanding. More of it about is about building an infrastructure so that you can test and learn and then pivot and react really quickly. That’s how you’re able to be ultimately successful kind of in this business today, which is very different than when I first started in the industry, there was this idea of Merchant King, and either you had that ability or you didn’t, and the merchant kings were the people that you would follow, and they just had their their finger on the pulse And on trend and all of those things, and there’s less of that mentality today in the industry, because that’s probably always been a myth, and it’s even more so a myth now with the advent of social media, where information sharing just happens at a rapid speed, so what feels like a trend can spread incredibly quickly and then be gone in like two seconds. So you got to be able to respond to what’s happening in the marketplace, as opposed to being able to predict what’s going to happen, like six, 912, months from now.

 

Will Bachman  28:38

How do you stay in tune with the market, do you go to a lot of, you know, cutting edge, independent retailers? Do you spend a lot of time on Instagrams? Or how do you keep that pulse of what, what’s hot?

 

Christiane Pendarvis  28:53

I hire the right people. That’s my quick, short answer. Now, I do try to stay in tune. But, you know, I’m a mother of like relatively young kids that there are only 10 and there are so many hours in the day, and so I also recognize that, as much as I hate to admit it, we are sort of past the prime of being finger on the pulse, you know, being in tune with what’s happening from a trend perspective. And so I alleviated the burden of feeling like I needed to know all of those things that I needed to know, what music festival is trending and across the country, or who the latest hip hop group was, or what the latest tick tock trend like I just said, That’s not me. I’m never going to be able to do that. You know, my team laughs when on a Monday, we’ll be on a zoom call and talking about, everybody’s talking about, do you see that all over social? Do you see that all over social? And I like, Yeah, that wasn’t in my Tiktok feed. So I need one of you guys to help train the algorithm so I can see all those things. So that’s not what I see. And Tiktok. And so for me, I very much just think about who are the right people that need to know that in the right roles that that matters to I have, again, as I’ve advanced in my career, and again, coming back to this idea of self acceptance and being proud of who I am, I recognize that’s just not me. So why am I going to, you know, contort myself to try to fit into that when I know there’s value. Let me just make sure I have the right people in the right roles where it is important for them to know all of those things. I now know today that I don’t have to know everything. I just need to know that I have people somewhere on this team that know each one of those different parts, but it doesn’t have to actually reside in my brain, and that creates a situation where a leader doesn’t become a bottleneck within the company right, where you can really push Accountability Responsibility down, where you can empower people, and that Just makes people be more satisfied in what they’re doing and more loyal to the company. So, yeah, so I don’t keep up. Is my my short answer, I tried to scroll here and there. So I’m not completely out of the loop, but I definitely do not keep up. The thing I probably keep up more so with is product. Because, you know, part of the reason why I ended up in this industry to begin with is because I just always love fashion, so I spend time out in stores. I do like to see what’s happening there. I spend time trying new beauty products, like I enjoyed that piece of it, but culturally, I’m not the person that you’re going to call to find out what all the latest and greatest trends

 

Will Bachman  31:40

are. Then I found that a counterintuitive answer, and I love that, that you are, you know, I’ve relieved yourself of that burden. Tell us a little bit. Since you are relying on the talent, what have you learned about talent selection? Um, of identifying the people who will have the you know, the judgment and you know and be current. So what have you learned about selecting those people

 

Christiane Pendarvis  32:07

there? There probably is no other job that more important for a CEO or a president than making sure there’s clarity around talent and culture and fit. So that probably the biggest thing, I think, that I’ve learned is people can have functional skills and be capable of technically doing a job, but they still not be the right person for that job within your organization. And so I probe and I encourage and have built infrastructures to make sure our teams are probing on both of those things, right? Do you have the technical skills, the functional skills? If you’re an engineer working on a Shopify platform? Do you know how to do that? Like, do you know how to work in their in their user interface, all of those things you have to check that’s, that’s table stakes. That has to happen. But just because you can do that doesn’t mean you need to do that within my company. And so the cultural fit, which is about how you want to operate as an organization, your ways of working, your values, your guiding principles, the purpose or mission behind your organization, all of those things are equally are in some cases, even more important, because that’s where disconnects happen. Like, as an example, since I left big corporate America, one of the things I love about the environments that I’m in is I’m building there are infrastructures aren’t always there, processes aren’t always there, tools aren’t always there. The approach to hiring may not be well documented, but I know coming into an organization that that’s the work that I’m there to do, and I embrace that. Some people who’ve been in big organizations are so uncomfortable in those big organizations are expecting for some of this infrastructure to exist, and so when they come in, they’re like, well, we don’t have a learning and development program. And you know, my response will be, you’re right, can you build that for us? Right? That’s what gets me excited. That’s why I like being in this environment. But for other people, it is. It’s just a huge negative, like, oh, this doesn’t exist. I need this to exist. So culture is such an important component of hiring for people. And I tell people all the time, I try to be super transparent around what is the reality of a particular role. So I might like a person and say, I think you’d be great, but I want you to go in eyes wide open, so if there is an issue that needs to be fixed, I don’t gloss that over for people, let them know this is something you’re going to have to come in and tackle. It’s going to be a problem. I don’t ever want there to be buyer’s remorse on either side, right? I don’t want. Them to feel like, oh, the company sold me a bill of goods, and this is what I was expecting, and vice versa, you know? So I try to be really transparent in the hiring process, because it can save you a lot of time. I’ve been in places where people sell a rosier picture than really exist, and ultimately people leave, and then you’ve got to spend resources going back through that process and hiring the right talent all over again, and that is just inefficient and ineffective for you know, all parties involved.

 

Will Bachman  35:33

At the beginning of our conversation, you talked about feeling blessed and having come to a stage of self acceptance. I’d love to hear what about your journey and where you’ve landed would surprise the 22 year old Christian.

 

Christiane Pendarvis  35:52

Oh, my God. I don’t know if I ever would have said I was going to be the CEO of a company. I just was never in my mind at at all. And I think this idea of being comfortable not knowing and just verbalizing to people, this is something that I don’t know, reaching out for help and assistance. I think, as you know, Harvard students, there was this air of I had to have it all together. I had to come off a certain way and and, you know, expose, have exposure in a certain way, and you wouldn’t want to do anything that would sort of diminish someone’s perspective around you. And I accept, now today, that that’s a false narrative. There’s something that I don’t know, then I just say I don’t know and teach me about that. That doesn’t hold weight or value over my self worth or my ability to do this job. What’s worse is for me to not say that I don’t know and then get the knowledge and lack the knowledge that’s needed. That’s significantly worse. So I think that’s probably one of the things that would have surprised have surprised me. My level of openness around if I don’t know or if I don’t understand something, or if I feel like I need support, or I feel like I need help, I reach out very, very broadly to people, because that ultimately is going to ensure that I’m going to be much more successful. And again, I just it was never in my mind of, oh, this is what I want to do 20 years from now. So I’ve developed this long term plan for me. My career journey has been much more so about exploration and curiosity. And so if there was an opportunity that was curious about, that I wanted to learn about, this seemed interesting, then I take it now in in retrospect, it looks like it tells a really beautiful story, but it has led to the doors that have opened that I couldn’t have predicted would have opened for me.

 

Will Bachman  37:55

Tell us about any courses or professors or activities that you’re involved in at Harvard that continue to resonate with you, that have shaped you somehow.

 

Christiane Pendarvis  38:07

Gosh, that, yeah, there were a lot, I’d say probably more on the activities side. There are a couple of things that really sort of stand out to me. This is going to sound really sort of bizarre, but I was a cheerleader at Harvard for the football team, and then started the basketball cheerleaders because the football team cheerleaders didn’t cheer for the basketball team, and so started a basketball cheerleaders group. I think maybe my sophomore year. I can’t exactly remember, you know, things all sort of run together. And one of the things that why that one struck me as something that was so impactful, is it just gave me broader exposure across the university, like they were a bunch of different sort of kind of oddball people that came together. You’re like, you’re a cheerleader, you’re going to cheer for Harvard. That seems kind of counterintuitive for what a Harvard student would do. So I’ve met some really interesting people and pulled people from kind of different circles within the community together. All came together for for cheerleading, which is just fascinating. And, you know, big sports fan, so I love being able to support our sports team as well. So Harvard cheerleading is a big one that stands out for me. I think the other ones, I was a member of Coumba, and I have a decent singing voice. I don’t have a solo singing voice, so Kumba was perfect as a just everybody’s welcome. It’s, you know, at that time, I don’t know if it still is today, not audition, but the camaraderie that we just built within Coumba is amazing. I mean, still to this day, they’re Coumba songs that I still know and can sing, and just it, just it was an important organization, the musicality, the heritage piece, the. Performances that we would do, the artistry. It was a center of my kind of social circle and network. All of my room, my upperclassmen roommates, we were all in Kumba together. It’s just a really positive experience. We went on a tour one year to the South for spring break on a Coumba tour. Coumba has now gotten so professional, I think they do tours and they released albums, and we weren’t quite that professional back then. So going on that tour was a really big deal for us. And I was treasurer the organization that helped in the process of raising money to be able to fund that tour. There was an upperclassman woman. We actually ended up selling Christmas cards, and so there was an upperclassman woman who did these original Christmas card designs that we sold to help raise money. So being able to showcase her art, I mean, it was just the creativity around that was really amazing, and the camaraderie of that organization, those are probably two of the biggest ones that sort of stand out for me. The thing I find so interesting I will say about my experience and our class, I will say is there’s an incredibly tight network now, even all these years later. And in some respects, some of my friendships are much deeper now than they were then. And I’m not talking about the people that like were your best friends. These were people that were maybe more acquaintances and you were kind of tangentially associated with over the years, I have just developed much deeper friendships with with people. Some of that, I think, comes from we’ve all grown and matured. We share an experience at Harvard that’s unlike others, and so there’s this bonding and connecting mechanism. But some of it, I think, just goes to the quality of the people, quite frankly, that were in our class, that there’s a tremendous amount of respect, admiration, and sometimes awe, for what people are doing that’s just created this bond and the shared experience. So I’ve got multiple different either WhatsApp groups or text threads with people from school and literally posting them every day, people, somebody’s posting in them every day. And I think that’s just a testament to the experience that we had and the people collectively within our class, those kinds of bonds still exist. You know, some almost 35 years later,

 

Will Bachman  42:27

talked about Kumba and being kind of this central point with the heritage and the musicality and the community and the social network. Have you had anything like that in your life, since graduation, have you found that like source of community and heritage and musicalities, singing group, or any other kind of kind of group?

 

Christiane Pendarvis  42:49

No Coumba has been my last musical endeavor. So I did it in high school. I sang in choir in high school, and then Coumba, but it’s not something that I’ve done since there have been other places, I think, where I found the bond, the significance, the social network and the impact connection to sort of heritage hasn’t involved musicality. One of the organizations that actually I’m involved with today is sort of a professional but then also social networking group. It’s called the women of color retail Alliance. And I was kind of boots on the ground of helping spin this organization up, which at the time we didn’t even really know was going to be an organization right after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 a friend of mine who had also been in the retail industry for a long time, she and I were just talking about, we needed a safe space where we could come together and dialog and share and talk about our experiences. And we said, Okay, well, let’s put something out there on Zoom. We’ll do a zoom virtual meetup. And like, 125 people showed up on this one random zoom call. And we were like, wait a minute, what’s happening here? And we talked about it as we should all know each other. There are a lot of women in color across different functions and retail organizations, but you feel isolated because you’re one of, like, one or two within your own organization. And so from that, we’re now officially, you know, a, 501, c3, we have our board of directors. We’re bringing on an advisory board. We’re launching a membership program like it’s blossomed into this thing that I think neither one of us probably could have ever imagined it would have become. And we spend time, you know, just finding that cultural connection and honoring our heritages and our shared experiences, or sometimes different experiences, because not just for women of African descent, it’s all women of color, but it’s a safe space for us to talk about our experiences within these different corporations, as well as then provide a platform for the. Growth, training, development, exposure, networking. So it really, a really warm place in my heart. I brought in a couple of people to the board that I’ve known, and I’ve seen them rise to the occasion and how they’re moving the agenda forward. So it’s made me really, really proud. I have just have a lot of warmth for that organization, and I’m excited to see, like, five years from now, God willing, where I can be retired from work and on the sidelines of like, seeing the impact of this organization is going to have

 

Will Bachman  45:35

wonderful Christian for listeners that want to follow you find out what you’re doing. Where are the best places online to to follow you?

 

Christiane Pendarvis  45:48

Definitely on LinkedIn is the best place. It is the one social network that I actually am more religious about. So I would say don’t bother looking for me on Facebook or Instagram. You might get a post like every other month or so on there, but, but LinkedIn is probably the best place to follow me and see what’s going on

 

Will Bachman  46:07

with me. Amazing. And we’ll, we’ll include that link in the show notes. Christian, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining today.

 

Christiane Pendarvis  46:16

Thanks Will for having me. Appreciate it. You.