Starbucks hires first-of-its-kind role heading up fashion and beauty collabs
Starbucks has poached a senior manager from E.l.f. Cosmetics as part of its ongoing quest to re-energize the Starbucks brand through cultural collaborations.
Neiv Toledano has joined Starbucks as its senior marketing manager of fashion and beauty. While Starbucks has always had employees who have worked on collaborations, including in the fashion and beauty spaces, this is a first-of-its-kind dedicated role and a signal that Starbucks is placing a bigger premium on these types of partnerships.
At E.l.f., Toledano worked on collaborations with buzzy brands like Stanley and Liquid Death. In a LinkedIn post, Toledano said she’ll be “combining my greatest passions to drive culture, fandom, and buzzworthy moments” for the Starbucks brand.
Toledano’s role sits on the Brand Activation team, which is led by Candice Beck, Starbucks’s vp of brand engagement, partnership marketing and experiences. Beck joined Starbucks seven months ago from Yahoo’s Creative Lab and, before that, was director of social and influencer at Chipotle.
Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, who took on the top job in September 2024, has said that getting back into culture with an “overhauled approach to marketing” is one of his top priorities as he executes his “Back to Starbucks” turnaround plan. And to do so, Starbucks is leaning more into cultural moments across industries like music and sports, not just fashion and beauty. Comparable store sales in North America were flat during the most recent fiscal quarter, though it’s an improvement from the 6% decline Starbucks reported the year prior.
Engagement with fashion and beauty has long been part of the Starbucks DNA, to some degree. At the most basic level, the coffee brand someone carries is an element of “social signaling,” similar to the shoes they wear or the handbag they carry, according to Eunice Shin, founder and CEO of global brand and growth strategy consultancy Elume Group.
And Starbucks, as the largest coffee chain in the U.S., has long had its pick, in terms of who it can collaborate with. In 2019, Starbucks collaborated with Diane von Furstenberg for a line of limited-edition merchandise for its Asia stores. In 2023, the company teamed up with fashion designer Brandon Blackwell on a line of sling bottle bags.
But its partnerships have picked up in scope and scale in recent months. Starbucks showed up at New York Fashion Week by partnering with Zac Posen to design a custom couture gown inspired by its logo. The company also hosted and sponsored other events, like a Fashion Week kickoff dinner hosted by the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The NYFW activations were orchestrated by executive consultant Ana Andjelic, WWD reported.
In May, Starbucks partnered with the fashion brand Farm Rio on a line of limited-edition merch across Brazil, Latin America and the Caribbean. Starbucks has also signed on to be the official coffee partner of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games and Team USA, and hosted global listening parties for Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” at select coffeehouses.
Allison Collins, co-founder and managing director of Consumer Collective, said that the collaborations that do well “generate buzz, on top of generating stuff that people want.” She liked the Blackwood collaboration, for example, because “it was cute and a product that actually makes sense.”
The challenge, she said, is that some of the best collaborations are unexpected — “but in today’s moment, nothing is really unexpected.” As collaborations have become a more popular marketing tactic, beverage brands have teamed up with diaper brands, deodorant lines have partnered with coffee companies, and seemingly every food and beverage company has its own lip balm, Shin noted.
How successful future collaborations are in helping Starbucks once again become a bigger part of culture depends on the type of customer it is going after, consultants say. Young women who are interested in fashion and beauty “own so much cultural influence in what is considered cool,” Shin said, and it would make sense for Starbucks to try to go after this demographic with more collaborations. Shin noted that her 16-year-old daughter and her friends went crazy for Starbucks’s recent collaboration with the pajama brand Roller Rabbit and were scouring their local Starbucks trying to find the limited-edition cups they wanted.
And there’s a big benefit to simply trying to do more with the fashion industry, Collins said. “[Starbucks] is meant to be an elevated coffee brand, and fashion inherently has a level of elevation that’s just built in.”