Candan leads a team that oversees and executes all operations, inventory, and finance across North America, Canada and the EU for Anthropologie, AnthroLiving, Terrain, and Anthropologie Weddings.
Before joining Anthropologie, Candan served as the Chief Supply Chain Officer at Away in New York and Senior Vice President of Operations Excellence at Lululemon in Vancouver. She began her career in the Automotive industry then spent 10 years in Consulting serving clients in retail and consumer products at industry leaders Deloitte and IBM.
Inherent in the name of the industry – the importance of the consumer. Brands get great because consumers love them – and we love them right back! Keeping the consumer at the forefront of every decision is key. My most important learning has been to always keep the consumer, what they want and how they experience our brand at the forefront of my mind and my team’s mind.
Supply chains are global, they’re complex and there are lots of layers and partners. When you layer unexpected events into those supply chains you get volatility that is challenging to manage. Everyone wants to be as lean as possible with their inventory, everyone wants to make product decisions as close to the consumer’s time of purchase as possible – so we design timelines with minimized buffers. When something goes wrong, which is an inevitability, it can have a big impact. None of this is breaking news, but over time our supply chains have grown more complex, there are fewer vertically-integrated producers in the world, so we’re all dependent on upstream partners more than ever before in history. To serve our consumers in the best way possible, we need a very sophisticated understanding of those supply chains and all of the things that impact them – weather, politics, supply and demand in other industries that are competing for shared resources like transportation.
Respond to customers quickly. Listen to customers and react quickly by giving them the products they want and delivering them the way they want them. Agility gives brands the ability to respond to and weather changes in demand and in supply.
Success is a subjective and nuanced concept – it’s not about title or compensation, it’s about what you need to be happy. I really like what I do and I admire the people I work with. I have amazing kids and a very cool husband. I feel blessed and fortunate every day. That’s what I define as success. So the secret to that is figuring out what makes you happy, finding work that energizes you, and surrounding yourself with people you admire and that you love.
My mother. She is amazing. She’s so accomplished and intelligent and capable. She can literally do anything. Her and my dad raised us, had careers that they loved, had a loving partnership, made us feel loved every day, and in the midst of all that, my mom made time to take care of herself. She is a very impressive woman and set a tremendous example for me and my sisters.
My family. And peanut butter.
The speed at which AI is advancing is so inspiring. The thing I am most excited about, as I watch us adopt more AI tools across our organization, is the opportunity for AI to support sustainability initiatives. For example, the ability it gives us to make fewer samples, transport them less, test products before we introduce them to customers, etc., frees us up from so much inflexibility and waste.
