Marla Oates

speaker

398 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2025 last heard 26 Aug

Marla Oates’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Redefiners · From Bankruptcy to Revival: Cracking the Gen Z Code with Pacsun CEO Brieane Olson · 26 Aug 2026 podcast

Let's go back a little bit and ground ourself in the brand.

So PacSun started as a small surf shop in Southern California and expanded quite quickly through the 1990s, early 2000s, more than 1,300 stores across the U.S.

Now, you've been with PacSun for nearly 20 years and really have rode the highs and lows through to bankruptcy in 2016, which, as we understand, was a result of shifting mall traffic, rapid growth of e-commerce.

What were some of the challenges that the company was facing over the past, call it, 10 years?

And how did you and the leadership team help reinvent the company after coming out of bankruptcy?

Speaking of books, our colleague Ty Wiggins actually wrote a book called The New CEO.

And in it, he talks about how there's a lot of surprises.

I mean, you'd been at the company for 20 years and it sounds like had already uncovered, you know, many of the skeletons.

But what were, if any, surprises stepping into that role as a new CEO?

That's terrific to hear.

And look, I think you're rather unique in this regard.

You know, historically, brands were telling the consumer and really operating from kind of this top-down perspective.

So they were creating the taglines, the catchphrases, and customers were expected to follow.

But you really have kind of flipped this on its head.

Please tell us a little bit about how you flipped the model from brand telling to listening, co-creation, and how you've worked actually with Gen Z customers one-on-one.

I love that perspective.

So we've gone from kind of your team, how you shifted the strategy, you became CEO.

Let's talk a little bit about the board.

I imagine that this was probably a pretty big shift for your board as well.

How did you approach building trust and alignment so that you had the space to execute on this new vision?

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