Ivanka Trump
speaker
1,538 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard 10 Jun
Ivanka Trump’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.
Appearances
And it's oftentimes not the architecture, the engineers, it's in Elon's case, probably the line worker who sees things more clearly. So I think making sure it's not just that you're asking good questions, you're asking the right people those same good questions.
It's super difficult to deconstruct that as well once it's in place, right? It's circumventing layers and asking questions, probing questions of people on the ground level is a huge challenge to the authority of the hierarchy. And there's tremendous amount of resistance to it.
So it's how do you grow something in the case of a company in terms of a culture that can scale but doesn't lose its connection to sort of real and meaningful feedback. It's not easy. Yeah.
Not only do they not want that, but the one person who comes in and does that puts a massive target on their back and is ultimately seen as a threat. I mean, nobody really gets fired for maintaining the status quo, even if things go poorly. It's the way it was always done. Yeah.
And really have that first principles type of orientation, especially in those large bureaucratic contexts.
I always loved fashion as a form of self-expression, as a means to communicate either a truth or an illusion, depending on what kind of mood you were in, but this like sort of second body, if you will. So I loved fashion and look, I mean, my mother was a big part of the reason I did, but I never thought I would go into fashion. In fact, I was graduating from Wharton.
It was the day of my graduation and Anna Winter calls me up and offered me a job at Vogue, which is a dream in so many ways, but I was so focused. I wanted to go into real estate and I wanted to build buildings and I told her that. So I really thought that that was going to be the path I was taking. And then
very organically fashion, it was part of my life, but it came into my life in a more professional capacity by talking with my first of many different partners that I had in the fashion space about, he actually had shown me a building to buy. His family had some real estate holdings and And I passed on the real estate deal, but we forged a friendship.
And we started talking about how in the space that he was in, Fine Jewelry, there was this lack of product and brands that were positioned for self-purchasing females. So everything was about, you know, the man buying the Christmas gift, the man buying the engagement ring. The stores felt like that. They were all tailored towards the male aesthetic. The marketing felt like that.
And what about the woman who had a salary and was really excited to buy herself a great pair of earrings or had just received a great bonus and was going to use it to treat herself? So we thought there was a void in the marketplace. Yeah. And that was the first category I launched, Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry. And we just caught lightning in a bottle.
It was really quickly after that, I met my partner who had founded Nine West Shoes, really capable partner. And we launched a shoe collection, which took off and did enormously well. And then a clothing collection and handbags and sunglasses and fragrance. So we caught a moment and... And we found a positioning for this self-purchasing, multidimensional woman.
And we made dressing for work aspirational. At the time we launched, if you wanted to buy something for an office context, the brands that existed were the opposite of exciting. Nobody was taking pictures of what they were wearing to work and and posting it online with some of these classic legacy brands.
Really, it felt very much like it was designed by a team of men for what a woman would want to wear to the office. So we started creating this clothing that was feminine, that was beautiful, that was versatile, that would take a woman from...
the boardroom, to an after-school soccer game, to a date night with a boyfriend, to a walk in the park with her husband, like all the different ways women live their lives and creating a wardrobe for that woman who works at every aspect of their life, not just sort of the siloed professional part. And it was really compelling. We started creating great brand content and
We had incredible contributors like Adam Grant, who was blogging for us at the time and creating aspirational content for working women. It was actually kind of a funny story, but I now had probably close to 11 different product categories, and we were growing like wildfire.
And I started to think about what would be a compelling way to sort of create interesting content for the people who are buying these products. these different categories. And we came up with a website called Women Who Work. And I went to a marketing agency, one of the fancy firms in New York. And I said, we want to create a brand campaign around this multidimensional woman who works.
And what do you think? Can you help us? And they come back and they say, you know, we don't like the word work. We think it should be women who do. And I just start laughing because I'm like, women who do.
And the fact that they couldn't conceive of it being sort of exciting and aspirational and interesting to sort of lean into working at all aspects of our lives was just fascinating to me, but showed that that was part of the problem. And I think that's why ultimately, I mean, when... The business grew to be hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
We were distributed at all the best retailers across the country from Neiman Marcus to Saks to Bloomingdale's and beyond. And I think it really resonated with people in an amazing way. And probably not dissimilar to how I... I have this incredible experience every time somebody comes up to me and tells me that they were married in a space that I had painstakingly designed.
I have that experience now with my fashion company. The number of women who will come up tell me that they loved my shoes or they loved the handbags. And I've had women show me their engagement rings. They got engaged with us. And it's really rewarding. It's really beautiful.
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