Director, Retail & Channel Marketing • David Yurman • 2025

Wholesale Exclusives

Building a Commercial Operating System for Wholesale Growth

A commercial transformation that redefined how David Yurman translated national campaigns into retailer-specific growth.

Wholesale Exclusives was a commercial operating framework that aligned brand strategy, retailer partnerships, and co-op investment to generate +$12.4M in incremental sales while improving investment efficiency and enterprise alignment.

KEY RESULTS + METRICS:

+$12.4M

INCREMENTAL SALES

3x

TRAFFIC TO SITE GROWTH

16%

CO-OP BUDGET FLEXIBILITY CREATED

Commercial Formula: Brand Strategy + Retail Partnerships + Content Strategy + Co-Op Investment + Paid Media + Traffic Recovery + Customer Acquisition = Incremental Revenue

The challenge

National brand campaigns weren't translating consistently across wholesale partners.

1

Department stores controlled much of the brand's creative experience of the brand.

2

Co-op investments lacked flexibility to support emerging commercial opportunities.

3

The Catalyst

Signal

A 37% decline in SEO traffic at one of our largest wholesale partners exposed a broader structural issue for recovery and made the challenges we faced within Wholesale Marketing even more immediate.

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Insight

Rather than only focusing on just the traffic problem, I recognized a wider opportunity to redesign how national campaigns were distributed across wholesale partners to help offset this deficit.

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Context

While David Yurman's national campaigns generated demand, wholesale partners retained significant control over how products were represented across their own digital ecosystems—often using their own creative instead of ours.

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Solution

I designed Wholesale Exclusives not as a creative program, but as a commercial incentive system that encouraged wholesale partners to adopt David Yurman's national campaign assets across their digital marketing ecosystem and shifted co-op investment behind adoption, which in turn generated incremental sales.

The Stakeholders

The success of Wholesale Exclusives depended not only the idea itself but also on aligning across 7 executive stakeholders around a shared commercial vision.

Internal Alignment

Built the plan, secured the buy-in and refined the approach together

Developed creative concepts and assets
Aligned on strategy, messaging and priorities
Assessed feasability, workflows, budget and resourcing
Aligned on product selection & commercial priorities

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Executive & Sales Pitch

United leadership around the value, investment and execution plan

Secured executive sponsorship and strategic approval
Aligned on go-to-market strategy, campaign allocation, co-op investment and sales priorities

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Retail Partner Pitch

Tailored each proposal to highlight the value proposition specific to each account

Collaborated with key accounts to customize opportunities and activate the plan

Secured approval and executed the plan delivering measurable commercial impact

COMMERCIAL OPERATING FRAMEWORK

The idea: Wholesale Exclusives

WHAT IT IS

A commercial operating framework that aligns brand strategy to retailer partnerships and investment to drive incremental sales growth.

THE OPERATING WORKFLOW

NATIONAL BRAND CAMPAIGN

National brand strategy establishes campaign priorities, creative direction, and commercial objectives for the season.

STEP 1

Partnered with Brand, Sales, and Retail leadership to translate national campaigns into account-specific commercial strategies aligned to retailer co-op investments, store priorities, and business objectives.

STEP 2

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WHOLESALE EXCLUSIVES
(OUR DIFFERENTIATOR)

STEP 3

Co-developed retailer activation strategies that prioritized exclusive assets across owned and paid channels—unlocking premium organic placements while creating opportunities to amplify reach through retailer-funded co-op media.

STEP 4

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Developed retailer-exclusive campaign assets that created differentiated value for wholesale partners while strengthening brand consistency across the channel.

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WHAT IT ACHIEVED

Create differentiated value for wholesale partners so adopting David Yurman's national campaign creative became the preferred commercial decision—not a brand requirement.

RETAILER ACTIVATION ACROSS CHANNELS

Exclusive creative was activated across each retailer's marketing ecosystem from owned to paid media to deliver a premium and consistent brand experience.

STEP 5

EMAIL

PAID MEDIA

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WEBSITE

SOCIAL

IN-STORE

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MEASUREMENT & OPTIMIZATION

Established a measurement framework to evaluate commercial performance and access to data allowing for optimization of investment decisions, and ability to continously refine future activations.

STEP 6

EXAMPLE RESULT

Achieved 6% CTR, 2x category benchmark
3x traffic to site through paid social.
FY 2025 sales +$2.6M digital sales to LY, +9% to LY. +$12.4M omni comp sales to LY, +11% to LY.

ESTABLISHING A COMMERCIAL ECOSYSTEM

Where brand co-op investment combined with retailer amplification of exclusive campaigns, expanded qualified reach, accelerated traffic recovery while also generating traffic growth, creating a repeatable cycle of incremental sales growth that benefited both brand and retailers.

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Organizational Outcomes

Strengthened negotiation leverage across wholesale partners

01

Increased retailer adoption of David Yurman’s national creative

02

Scaled from one pilot to four strategic retailers

03

Created reusable commercial planning framework

04

Became enterprise operating model for wholesale campaign distribution

05

What made this scalable?

Repeatable governance framework | Shared commercial planning process | Incentive model that aligned retailer and brand objectives

FOUNDATIONAL LEARNINGS

Leadership Principles

Principles that now shape how I approach commercial transformation and organizational leadership.

The fastest path to alignment begins with understanding competing priorities.

Before proposing a solution, I worked to understand the objectives of Brand, Creative, Merchandising, Sales, and Retail Partners. By designing the operating model around those priorities, stakeholders became advocates rather than approvers—creating shared ownership that accelerated executive alignment, retailer adoption, and execution.

Lead Through Listening

Clarity accelerates better decisions.

By creating a repeatable commercial framework, teams gained shared visibility into campaign priorities, investment opportunities, and activation strategies—reducing ambiguity and enabling faster, more aligned execution.

Increase Clarity

Produce Measurable Outcomes

Design Systems

The best solutions change how organizations work and not simply what they produce.

Wholesale Exclusives wasn't a campaign. It was an operating system that aligned strategy, partnerships, investment, and execution into a repeatable commercial capability.

Effective strategy is measured by business outcomes, not activity.

Beyond incremental sales, Wholesale Exclusives strengthened retailer partnerships, expanded access to marketing performance data, and established a measurable framework for continuous commercial improvement.

Lasting transformation begins by aligning incentives; not enforcing compliance.

Wholesale Exclusives succeeded because every stakeholder clearly understood how they benefited. Brand gained greater creative consistency, Sales gained stronger commercial tools, and Wholesale Partners received differentiated assets that enhanced their customer experience.

Align Incentives

Build systems that scale beyond a single initiative.

Wholesale Exclusives evolved from a one-time solution into a repeatable commercial operating model that could be adapted across partners, seasons, and future campaigns without compromising brand equity.

Create Reusable Processes

KEY TAKEAWAY: