![]() “After doing seven or eight meetings that first day, it quickly became very clear to me that it was going to be an educational process, as opposed to a pitching process. “Some of them didn’t even know what an influencer is,”she says. And that can be a challenge, both personally (“My parents didn’t even understand what I did for a living,” she says) and professionally, as when she was out with her fellow executives trying to persuade investors to get behind Revolve and its marketing strategy. The day-to-day of Gerona’s role-of identifying, partnering with, and helping grow influencers-is something that didn’t exist a decade or two ago. It makes things less intimidating when I’m in a room full of men.” “I think that spirit and that gratefulness stretches a long way. ‘Am I good enough? Do I deserve to be here?’ That was the first personal hurdle: reassuring myself that I’m good at my job.” Then there’s the fact that she’s representing her female-majority team, and that she’s carrying the opportunity given to her by her parents, who moved the family from the Philippines to Los Angeles when Gerona was seven. ![]() It can be a constant exercise of reminding oneself that you’re in the room for a reason, she says: “We tend to underestimate ourselves a lot as women, and especially as women of color. She hardly ever saw someone who looked like her in these meetings-at the beginning of her career, as a young entrepreneur, and even as recently as at Revolve’s IPO road show. Gerona is often a double minority: a woman and a person of color. “We obviously have a male CEO and CFO, and I thought it was really important for me to be present.” Gerona says she feels “honored” to join them in these rooms not only to “represent the brand marketing team, what that brand stands for, and why we’re pioneers in what we do in the influencer marketing world,” but also to create visibility for women in these positions within the industry, something that’s still lacking. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. But I think it’s important to start with yourself, and if you know that you’re able to do it, it’s so much easier to convince others that it’s going to happen.” “It does get super discouraging, especially after I had to shut down my first business. It gave her “this entrepreneur mentality of really working hard, putting in the time, seeing that project shine through, and also not giving up,” she says. One thing that helped her navigate this new line of work was the hard lessons learned from having her own business-starting it, failing, starting over with little money. It was a huge risk for them, but I like to think that it ultimately paid off.” ![]() I had no idea-I still feel sometimes I have no idea what I’m doing!-but I said yes. Then another door opened: “Michael and Mike took another chance and said, ‘We want to take a stab at smaller projects on the blogger side with Revolve.’” They’d seen her do some influencer marketing with Lovers and Friends and brought her on to implement it on a larger scale at Revolve. Revolve purchased it in 2015, at which point all the brands went in-house. Lovers and Friends became Alliance Apparel, an umbrella company for a handful of different indie brands. All Rights Reserved.Gerona with Michael Mente at Revolve's annual Coachella event, Revolve Festival, in 2019 Christian Vierig All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2019 and/or its affiliates. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc.2019. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes.
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