e One striking trend among this year’s new CEOs is their willingness to say what their predecessors wouldn’t.  Julia Goddard effectively reset stakeholder expectations and permitted herself to rebuild Harvey Nichols from the ground up. She gave a remarkably blunt appraisal of the retailer’s current status. “A lot of people say to me that they haven’t been here for five or 10 years,” she said in a newspaper interview. “That’s the reality.”  Customers getting their nails done, she continued, didn’t extend their stay to shop because there was nothing else for them in store, while its departments were so dysfunctional they were “operating in the opposite way”. The public, she concluded with a flourish, had simply “forgotten about Harvey Nichols”. The former EMEA president of Alexander McQueen has set to work on a new three-year turnaround plan. Already confirmed is a major overhaul of its Knightsbridge flagship, a new ‘runway’ concept showcasing on-trend labels and the signing of 50 new fashion brands. She’s also taken no prisoners with its top executive team, reinstating the position of creative director and filling it with former British Vogue fashion editor, Kate Phelan. Meanwhile, Hillary Super at Victoria’s Secret is using a similar approach, though aimed at cultural transformation rather than operational decay. Her effort to redefine “sexy” – shifting from hyper-sexualised imagery to confidence and comfort – is a declaration that the brand must own its missteps to regain cultural legitimacy. Sales improvements since her arrival suggest that honesty resonates more deeply than old playbooks. Pandora’s incoming CEO, Berta de Pablos-Barbier, represents yet another version of transparency: acknowledging that modern retail leadership is no longer purely financial. Her rise from chief marketing officer to CEO illustrates a broader industry acceptance that storytelling, authenticity and emotional intelligence are not “soft skills” . The end of the visionary CEO era? Vision was the currency of the 2010s: digital revolutions, experiential flagships, creative overhauls and rapid global expansions. But in 2025, that archetype is quietly disappearing. In its place stands a very different kind of leader: pragmatic, operationally fluent, and far more concerned with restoring fundamentals than rewriting them. Target’s next CEO, Michael Fiddelke, did not rise to prominence by projecting grand visions or attempting to redefine the big-box retail model. Instead, his influence was forged through operational mastery: engineering more than US$2 billion in efficiencies, reshaping Target’s supply chain backbone and introducing organisation-wide acceleration programs designed to eliminate friction. His leadership is the blueprint for retail’s new orthodoxy: incremental, disciplined and grounded in measurable outcomes.  Meanwhile, Ulta Beauty’s Kecia Steelman is being evaluated on a similarly rigorous scale. After the retailer’s first dip in market share in years, Steelman stepped into the CEO role with a mandate to rebuild its structural coherence.  Her decision to streamline core business segments, launch a curated digital marketplace and revitalise international ambitions speaks to a leadership style defined by sequencing and operational clarity rather than sweeping reinvention.  The veteran retail executive promised that Ulta Beauty’s fiscal 2025 would mark a “pivotal year” for the company as it makes “purposeful investments to fuel our future growth and move quickly to optimise our business.” By April, Steelman had raised Ulta Beauty’s full-year revenue guidance from $4 billion to just under $12 billion. In October, Steelman and the team launched a new invitation-only digital marketplace that will allow the brand to expand its e-commerce presence, which had previously brought in less than 20 per cent of total sales.  Changing of the Guards first appeared in Inside Retail Asia’s November issue. For the full picture and deeper insights into all 10 appointments featured in the report, please read the complete global report here. Further reading: Changing of the Guards: Why 2025 is retail’s defining leadership moment.