for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, May 6-8 in Palm Springs.
For financial analysts slogging away for long hours, an escape plan becomes enticing; entrepreneurship looks like a seductive dive into uncertainty after endless scrolls of spreadsheets.
Often, these unfulfilled financiers find their ways to careers in fashion.
“If you spend a lot of time in finance, you eventually want something radically different,” said Diana Melencio, co-founder of the personal shopping service Quinn, who had worked for nine years on Wall Street at a handful of investment banking firms before starting her company. “My days had consisted of 12 to 18 hours of spreadsheets, and I wanted something … not like that. It comes from a desire to innovate, to be a part of the fashion industry, which couldn’t be more different than this sterile environment.”
Wall Street, from heavyweights like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan down to boutique firms, is a vessel for fashion startups. These former analysts-turned-founders can build financial models for new companies in their sleep and talk the same language as potential VC investors. And, after years of analytics and data sheets, left-brained people in the field are looking for creative outlets. The frustration and lack of stimulation, combined with a close proximity to the industry, leads to idea light bulbs.
More in Marketing
Meta opens its ad ecosystem to third-party AI tools
The platform is introducing Meta ads AI connectors, as part of its broader AI push to make campaign management easier.
The promise and threat of AI, as understood through the eyes of Possible
Nielsen’s Peter Naylor, Multilocal’s Fern Potter and Crossmedia’s Kamran Asghar shared their learnings and teachings coming out of the Possible conference in Miami.
‘The bridge between intuition and ROI’: The M&A race to own advertising’s last unmeasured lever
The ad industry’s hottest M&A target isn’t what you think.