WHEN French luxury fashion house Chanel announced business executive Leena Nair as its next global CEO in 2022, it reverberated through both corporate corridors and the fashion realm. After all, the announcement marked a historic shift for the European male-dominated ultra-luxury fashion brand, as it handed a woman of colour the helm for the first time in its 113-year history. Boasting decades of experience in human resources and company culture at multinational fast-moving consumer goods company Unilever, Nair today not only stands tall among the top executives in luxury fashion but also brings a fresh perspective and an outsider’s view into Chanel as it steps into a new era. Soon after assuming the leadership at the French couture-and-beauty icon during a period of transition after Karl Lagerfeld’s demise in 2019, Nair was charged with upholding the luxury label’s longstanding success while orchestrating a shift in structures and narratives. At the time, she had no prior experience in fashion or as a CEO, but she did have several decades of leadership experience under her belt at Unilever. Now close to two years into the role of global CEO with the Nair-effect trickling in, it is safe to say that her appointment was a daring yet smart move by Chanel. “Lift as you climb” has always been her motto. Staying true to her beliefs, soon after taking the reins, Nair increased the funding to Fondation Chanel, which supports women and girls in fulfilling their careers, to £78 million annually. Under the new leadership, the luxury brand has also put sustainability and renewable energy efforts in the spotlight to align with the principles of the climate-conscious future shopper by launching a sustainability-focused beauty range, N°1 de Chanel. Chanel has also recently announced plans to cash in on its status among ultra-rich premium shoppers by launching private invite-only boutiques. By 2025, the company is aiming to double the size of its London headquarters, with its teams moving into an 86,000 sq ft office space in Mayfair, as its business continues to draw traction among high-end spenders. Reflecting on her first year at Chanel, Nair took to LinkedIn to share her experience at what she called as “an iconic and admired company”. Her journey involved visiting 25 regional offices, 40 manufacturing locations and heritage sites, engaging with 100 points of sale, and immersing herself in every creation studio - a testament to her commitment to understanding and shaping the legacy of Chanel.
Even before joining Chanel, Nair was considered a powerful name in the corporate world, particularly in the realm of human resources and leadership, owing to her 30-year career at Unilever, where she was responsible for the 160,000-strong human capital operating across multiple regulatory and labour environments, spread over 190 countries.
Born and raised in a small Indian town in Maharashtra, Nair studied electronics and telecommunication engineering at a college a few hours away from her home town. Her father and mother are said to have played a crucial role in shaping her career though throughout her childhood and early youth, she had to manoeuvre around numerous gender stereotypes. “You’re so talented. You should have been a boy!” Growing up in India, Nair frequently battled such and more gendered stereotypes to the point that she actually stopped listening to them. As said by her in previous public interactions, her mother would often worry that her ambition would stunt her marriage prospects. In spite of the societal norms and comments, Nair went on with her engineering degree and later, completed her master’s in business administration in Human Resources from India’s renowned business school XLRI, as a gold medallist. She was among the very few women in her batch at the time. Soon after, in 1992, she joined Unilever as a management trainee where she began her corporate journey that took her to various leadership roles, starting right from the factory floor. Cutting her teeth on a series of managerial roles in employee relations and in HR, she landed her first leadership role in 2006 as general manager of HPC and Foods and head of management development, where she created a model for building capability that is now used company wide. In a testament to her prowess, within 10 months, she was promoted and as a result, she became the first woman on the Unilever South Asia leadership team. Responsible for the firm’s growth in five markets, it was here that Nair embedded performance culture as a way of life for Unilever, improving productivity levels by 33 per cent within two years and transforming employee relations into a proactive employee-centric function. Flash forward six years, Nair was promoted to another landmark role-global SVP leadership and organisation development and global head of diversity and inclusion, where she was instrumental in driving the company’s employer brand to a record high in boosting the diversity agenda.
She also spearheaded the creation of a world-class leadership centre in Singapore and was the lead on key technology innovations simplifying the firm’s core HR offerings. As she progressed in her career and took over further leadership roles in India, she also broke numerous stereotypes along the way, paving the path for a more gender balanced culture. Within one month of being made HR Director India, she extended maternity policy. She was the one to introduce the flexibility policy to work out of home in her effort to make life for women and men easier. A strong believer of gender inclusion being a business issue, Nair always believed that “to create a balance we need to change the men, the women and the culture”. Her contribution was palpable – when she joined Unilever in India as a management trainee in the early 90s, only two per cent of its employees were women. Before she left, Unilever announced it was gender-balanced across its management globally.
She was also part of Unilever’s efforts in advancing various social commitments, including one to pay living wages to all workers across the supply chain by 2030. Relocating to London in 2016, she took the global HR reins as chief human resources officer (CHRO) of Unilever and ran with it, becoming Unilever’s “first female, first Asian, youngest ever” chief human-resources officer. With overall responsibility, as CHRO, she continued to drive growth at all levels. Due to her consistent efforts, Unilever is considered one of the world’s most socially conscious companies, scoring a best-in-class rating on S&P Global Rating’s ESG Evaluation in 2019. It is also one of the world’s most diverse companies; in large part thanks to the leadership of Nair, who relentlessly drove the diversity and inclusion agenda for the company’s workforce. She created numerous projects, many of which pioneered the future of global work. She spearheaded the Unilever ‘discover your purpose’ workshops, catering to 6,000 employees to date, pioneered the four-day week pilot programme currently being explored in New Zealand, instigated the U-Work programme, which unites the flexibility of contract work with the security and benefits of an in-house role and initiated U-Renew, a paid learning sabbatical programme to help workers upskill, currently under test. Throughout her career at Unilever, Nair made sure to come up with programmes designed to help women who have fallen off the career ladder rejoin the workforce. Sharing why diversity is personal to her, she said in a LinkedIn post in May 2018: “I joined Unilever’s management training scheme more than 25 years ago as one of the few women among 15,000 men.
At the time, women made up only two per cent of our employee base (of course, HUL has improved and changed exponentially since then!) Before that, I had qualified as an engineer, as one of a handful of women in my engineering college with thousands of men. I was the first woman to do sales at HUL, the first to visit a factory. Being in the minority was the norm.” Nair added: “All my life it has been a great privilege to break some of the taboos and glass ceilings surrounding gender. I feel especially honoured in steering Unilever to a more balanced future. As a woman who has experienced being in the minority, I have empathy for anyone who feels marginalised. I take it personally.”
Nair is a member of the Board of the Leverhulme Trust, a charitable organisation focused on supporting education and research. She previously served as a non-executive director at BT plc and the UK Government’s Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy department. Through her decades-long stint at Unilever and now at Chanel, Nair has built a global reputation for progressive human-centred leadership, delivering significant business impact. She is a woman of many firsts. As well as being the first female, first Asian and youngest ever CHRO at Unilever, she was the first woman in nearly all roles she held at the consumer goods giant over three decades – including the first female manager to opt for a factory stint, the first to work a night shift, and the first woman on Unilever’s Management Committee in 90 years. As she famously said: “I’ve been the first at every job I’ve done. The first woman, the first brown person, the first Asian, the first Indian— but I don’t want to be the last”.
Nair has not done with trailblazing. Her current new role secured her two further firsts – the first luxury brand CEO of Indian origin and the first from an HR background. In a recent CEO summit, Nair revealed how throughout her various roles, being the first woman and the first brown person in a role comes as both a privilege as well as a burden. “You’re always brushed away, your views are never heard at first... it’s always the same pattern,” Nair said. “You must first grasp the rules so you can defy them… Whenever someone claims something cannot be done, I ask, ‘says who?’ I was repeatedly told that Asians could never become CEOs. I responded, ‘really? says who?’,” she said. Nair has numerous awards and recognition to her name, not just for her leadership and contributions to the field of HR but also for the leadership she brings to any top table that she leads or is a member. While considered an outsider in the field of luxury fashion, Nair’s appointment as Global CEO of the storied French fashion house was seen as a master stroke by Chanel to drive diversity in an industry that has been otherwise often criticised for its distinct lack thereof. She is leaning on the lessons from her people-centric career to lead Chanel into the future as the post-pandemic luxury boom ends. A believer in “collective problem solving”, Nair welcomes insights from diverse perspectives, saying “the days of the superhero leader with all the answers is way behind us”. Sharing her vision for Chanel recently at a public event, Nair outlined her three pillars for its future- “positive impact, relentless protection of human creation, creators and relationships in the world of Artificial Intelligence and thirdly, to shape what’s coming next.” She advises young women to be straightforward and to be unafraid in trying and expressing their ambition. She counts Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo and Nigel Higgins, the chairman of Barclays bank, among her mentors. Nair is widely admired for her people-centric approach to leadership. A new CEO with a remarkable track-record, and Chanel being an iconic fashion brand – an industry often in the spotlight for fuelling bias and discrimination on the basis of an individual’s physical appearance – it will be interesting to see how the newly appointed people-focused CEO brings the lens of inclusion, equity and diversity to both Chanel’s business as well as employee segments.
