Stuart La Brooy Steps Down As Sephora APAC Chief Marketing Officer
Stuart La Brooy has stepped down as chief marketing officer and vice president of marketing at Sephora APAC, after four years with the beauty retailer.
- Departing role: chief marketing officer and vice president, marketing, Sephora APAC
- Tenure: four years
- Previously: senior marketing director, strategic partnerships Asia, at Diageo
- At Diageo, covered Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Tanqueray and Singleton across nine joint ventures and partnership businesses in Asia
- Earlier: more than a decade at Procter & Gamble
- Announced the departure on LinkedIn
The Job Stuart La Brooy Was Doing
Marketing a beauty retailer across Asia Pacific is not one job. Skin concerns, ingredient preferences, price ladders and the balance between physical stores and online differ sharply between markets, and the region contains both some of the world's most sophisticated beauty consumers and markets where modern beauty retail is still arriving.
A retailer also has a harder marketing problem than a brand does. It sells other people's products, so its own positioning has to be about curation, discovery and service rather than about anything it manufactures.
The Shape Of The Career
Procter & Gamble for more than a decade, then Diageo, then Sephora. That is packaged goods, then spirits, then retail, and the through-line is portfolio work.
At Diageo he ran strategic partnerships across Asia with Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Tanqueray and Singleton, spread over nine joint ventures and partnership businesses. Joint ventures are an unglamorous specialism and a genuinely difficult one, because the marketer does not control the local partner and has to get a brand executed consistently through someone else's organisation.
How He Described It
"The opportunity to lead a brand like Sephora across a fast-paced, diverse and exciting region like APAC was the role (and ride) of a lifetime."
His next role has not been announced. A regional CMO with packaged goods training, spirits partnership experience and four years of beauty retail is an unusually portable profile, and beauty is one of the few consumer categories in Asia still adding retail footprint rather than defending it.
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