Leena Nair: Removing Chanel's Eurocentric goggles

In her 30-year stretch, Leena Nair figured out how to make Unilever an orientation-adjusted organization across its administration universally. Presently, as Chief, she's ready to bring her comprehensive perspective to the extravagance brand Chanel.

A slender figure in her hinge joint dresses, with a thick sweep of black hair and a prepared smile, Leena Nair embodies a straightforward elegance. Not like Chanel’s signature stuff–tweed suits, thick handbags, and its variety of five perfumes. The 112-year-old French luxury house supported by coconut palm Chanel named Nair as its chief government beginning in January.

A luxury business outsider, Nair, 53, came to Chanel once leading human resources (HR) at Unilever. In her role, she was chargeable for concerning 150,000 individuals across over one hundred countries and diode the variety and Inclusion agenda for its workforce. Her impact was palpable:

When Nair joined geographic region Unilever in Jamshedpur as a management novice within the early 90s, solely 2 % of its staff were women. Before she left, Unilever proclaimed it had been gender-balanced across its management globally. however, mercantilism mass-market goods are totally different from marketing luxury.

Can Chanel’s bet pay?

Nair isn’t the primary to leap from trade goods into the luxurious market. Antonio Belloni, a Procter & Gamble (P&G) veteran, was stewed by LVMH in 2001 and continues to be cluster managing director. Fabrizio Freda, another P&G executive, was picked to run Estée Lauder in 2009. Besides, she has the expertise of being a pioneer.

At Unilever, wherever she worked for thirty years, she was the primary Asian, the first feminine, and the youngest ever human resources chief. She was the first lady to figure on the plant floor at the Anglo-Dutch trade goods company and also the first to work an evening shift. Born in Kolhapur, a little city in southern Maharashtra, Nair studied natural philosophy and telecommunication engineering at Walchand School of Engineering in Sangli, an hour off from her hometown.

One day, a school academic weekday her down and said, “You’re going to build a reasonably lousy engineer. however, I feel you have got an aptitude for management. you prefer being with people,” Nair notes in an associate degree Instagram post. Therefore she registered for a Master in Business Administration in human resources at XLRI, Jamshedpur, despite her parents’ pushback—they felt time unit was a back workplace function.

Nair persisted, graduated as a gold medallist, and joined geographic region Unilever’s management coaching theme in a concert of few girls among 15,000 men. Conjointly read Ashwini Deshpande: Fixing gender parity one information set at a time “Leena brought the price no matter what she did. She was one individual who grew no matter the role she took on.

I actually have the best regard for her abilities. I have a little question she is going to flourish in her new role,” says Keki Dadiseth, former chairman at geographic region Lever and director at Unilever. Importantly, Nair has the chops to deliver on diversity—a downside that has overrun the style business at large.

In fact, once Chanel proclaimed its call to appoint Nair as chief executive officer in the Gregorian calendar month of 2021, the move was praised as a landmark for diversity within the industry. Some noted that with the $15.6 billion in sales, the unlisted fashion house was on its thanks to dropping its Eurocentric approach to fashion and adopting a lot of inclusive worldviews.

Nair, as a girl who has a tough being within the minority—at engineering college, on the plant floor, and in her time period at HUL—is best placed to attain that: On a LinkedIn post, she noted, “I have a fellow feeling for anyone who feels marginalized. I take it personally.”

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