KHC is an advisory services firm that brings talent, strategy, vision, and culture together to create world class brands.

ABOUT US
“Leadership is everything. Without vision and creativity, innovation cannot take place - and without innovation, it is almost impossible to meet the demands of consumers, which are increasing and changing every day.”
— Karen Harvey

KHC is an international advisory services firm with deep multi-industry expertise and an extraordinary network. With offices in New York, London and Paris, we partner with leading companies in their search for world-class talent, modern organization design and brand development strategies that serve today’s complex business needs. Our approach dismantles the divides between disciplines and industries, supporting leaders in new ways of working, thinking and remaining relevant for the future. Founded and led by entrepreneur Karen Harvey, known for her ability to see around corners and predict industry trends, our advisory services work has become equally important to our renowned practice, placing top talent.

OFFERINGS

Executive Search

As industry experts, our role is to support innovation and growth​​ by bringing the most dynamic leaders to our client companies. Our impact through placing CEOs, CBOs, exceptional brand leaders, digital talent and creative directors, has increased our client’s profitability, shareholder value, brand health and relevance. Above all, we place exceptional people that develop strong cultures and empower talent, resulting in higher performance and retention. We consistently excel when engaged in long term, highly strategic relationships that curate dynamic and transformational senior leadership teams. Many of our clients have worked with us for over 15 years, building key creative and business leadership teams. Given the different stages of a brand’s development, we are collaborative partners with client leadership in assessing the short, mid and longer term needs of an organization’s strategy and structure, using the lens of talent and the requirements for creating fewer siloes and cross-functional teams. In many of these instances, we begin this work as Phase One Advisory Services. This approach, which takes place over a 6 week period, enables CEOs to explore their short and long-term strategies in the context of a variety of strategic talent options before launching an exhaustive search. Critical to Phase One work is access to our expansive network and experience in working with a broad range of companies and industry sectors. This stage provides clients further clarity on the organization and talent required to drive their strategic agenda. Our international presence, with expert teams equally focused on executive and creative leadership, has allowed us to play an important role in building some of the world’s most exciting and profitable brands. All of our search assignments are conducted on a retained, exclusive basis.

Advisory Services

Global Brands

Emerging Companies

As industry experts, we are able to bring the past and the future together to help examine, select and implement the most effective business or organizational model to help take your company into the future. The evolving dynamics across multiple industries require teams, structures and operations that are less siloed, steeped in consumer centricity and operate on highly digital, direct-to-consumer platforms. Additionally, brands must have a real reason to exist and they must stand for something that is authentic and important to their communities. These two pillars are critical to future-proofing brands, and require bringing on board the right new technologies, innovative approaches to engaging consumers, exceptional creative ideas and products, and new supply chains that do less harm to the planet and are more respectful of their workers. As many startup companies have rapidly become bigger players, and will continue to disrupt as long as they have the right leaders and resources, it is important that established brands of scale put leadership teams and strategies in place, to continue to succeed in future generations. Our Advisory Services provide a comprehensive approach to these new imperatives, leveraging our eco-system and experience, while providing access to some of the largest technology companies that are changing the way we work, and the startups that are innovating and solving problems quickly. These projects are taken on a limited basis and are designed around the unique needs of the brand or business.

Curated Programming

Organizational transformation can only take place when individual and group mindsets shift, and storytelling is a powerful tool for creating change. The most effective leaders are those who are highly skilled at taking teams on a journey of their vision for innovation. Great storytelling is also the key to effective presentation and to breaking down the barriers that prevent innovation. Without question, the creative leaders who are passionate about sharing their work, are more likely to get their best ideas, product designs and brand vision across the line with key colleagues. While Storytelling is an art, it can also be taught. It’s important to understand that there is no one right way to tell a story, but there is a method for defining the right style for each individual. Our Storytelling Workshops are developed on a selective and customized basis, for innovation-driven companies that recognize that engaging multiple teams in big ideas are the pathway to their ability to make the biggest global impact on their brands, businesses and consumers.

Strategic Collaborations

SELECT CLIENTS

66º North

adidas

Aritzia

Calvin Klein

Chrome Hearts

Coach

2013 — Placed Stuart Vevers as Creative Director at Coach. We believed it had a life cycle that wasn’t done. So we found Stuart Vevers, whose background was Louis Vuitton and Mulberry. He had a vision about how to inject fashion into the brand and take this story of Americana into a new generation. He’s done an incredible job.

David Yurman

Delta Air Lines

Esprit

Frame

Kate Spade

lululemon

Rachel Comey

Ralph Lauren

Selfridges

Theory

Tom Dixon

Tom Ford

Tommy Hilfiger

YNAP

Defining the future

New ways of working for a new generation of brands.

EXPLORE THE FUTURE

In 2012, we recognized a rapidly evolving world where fashion and retail leaders needed a bridge to the technology sector, to mitigate their disparate approaches and improve their ability to innovate together. In the process of education, immersion and determining how we could play a role, we reshaped our business. We expanded our network with new talent, exceptional leaders and powerful ideas that when applied with a strategic lens, could reinvent traditional business. This then led to the launch of our industry leading platforms, Fashion Tech Forum and INDX. Today, FTF creates a space for visionaries, innovators and those driving the conversation across industries and culture. INDX connects emerging creatives with progressive brands for employment opportunities and knowledge sharing partnerships.

EXPLORE THE FUTURE
THE KAREN HARVEY COMPANIES
FTF
DISCOVERING THE FUTURE
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP PLATFORM
Fashion Tech Forum is a platform for discovery, inspiration and education for leaders of fashion, luxury, technology and innovation.
INDX
CREATING THE FUTURE
CREATIVE TALENT COMMUNITY
INDX is a platform and community connecting fashion's top emerging creative talent with forward-thinking brands.
Karen Harvey
Karen Harvey is the CEO and Founder of Karen Harvey Consulting Group - KHC, Fashion Tech Forum and INDX. Karen has spent her career working with global brands across luxury, retail, fashion, hospitality, technology and innovation-driven companies. Her ability to work in both traditional and non-traditional ways has earned her firm international recognition for bringing some of the industry’s most successful CEOs and creative leaders to the most powerful global brands in Fashion and Retail. In 2013, Karen was one of the first to identify a global and seismic shift, where she could see that technology companies would be revolutionizing fashion and retail, and she felt that a forum was needed, where leaders from both technology and fashion could work through their differences and find common ground to form the companies and partnerships of the future. She felt that the void created by the disparity between these two sectors created the need for a new conversation, so that these leaders could find new ways to work together, in order to create partnerships and new companies that would serve the consumers of the future. In that spirit, Karen founded Fashion Tech Forum for these leaders to both share their vision and the challenges created by this new reality. From a talent perspective, as Karen considered these dynamics, she realized that the traditional skill sets required for leaders to compete would change radically, creating an identity crisis for fashion and retail. Inspired by these major shifts and the broad need to discover new talent and emerging technologies, Karen has pivoted her companies and devoted her executive search practice and advisory services to identifying the next generation of leaders, while supporting the most powerful brands in bridging the gap between luxury, retail and emerging technologies. 

Today, Karen runs the Karen Harvey Companies, an ecosystem of brands, where through the lens of talent and thought leadership, we are able to serve our clients in building their brands in the most relevant ways, so that they can continue to inspire and engage consumers across all platforms. Some of the company’s clients include: Tapestry, lululemon, Tory Burch, Techstyle, Versace, FarFetch, Everlane, Tommy Hilfiger, Olivela, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. The firm’s other division, Advisory Services, engages with global brands and entrepreneurial ventures equally, as founders of new technologies seek to engage with retail and fashion companies, and global brands looking to amplify their ability to transform their to direct-to-consumer models. Karen is a graduate of the OPM program of Harvard Business School. She is also the Founder of The Blue Project, a mentorship program for disadvantaged women.
Karen Harvey is the CEO and Founder of Karen Harvey Consulting Group - KHC, Fashion Tech Forum and INDX. Karen has spent her career working with global brands across luxury, retail, fashion, hospitality, technology and innovation-driven companies. Her ability to work in both traditional and…
Lauren Dyer

Lauren is a Partner at KHC, where she leads the Creative Search practice. Lauren focuses on placing high-level design and creative leaders within our client companies. With nineteen years of creative search experience, she is deeply committed to connecting the very best talent with world-class fashion, luxury, retail and innovation-driven brands.


Lauren joined KHC in 2012 after relocating to New York from London, where she had been working for Denza, an international fashion recruitment and consultancy firm. Lauren earned her BA with Honors in Fashion Marketing from Northumbria University in the UK, which provided her with a deep-rooted understanding of the fashion design process and a solid platform upon which to build her consulting career, specializing in design and creative search.

Lauren is a Partner at KHC, where she leads the Creative Search practice. Lauren focuses on placing high-level design and creative leaders within our client companies. With nineteen years of creative search experience, she is deeply committed to connecting the very best talent with world-class…
OUR TEAM
Jenna Blaha
Jenna Blaha is Global Managing Director of Executive Search and the Director of the Media and Collaborations division of KHC and Fashion Tech Forum. Jenna joined KHC in October 2021 as Vice President of search, collaborations, editorial and partnerships. A journalist and culture expert, before joining KHC, she was the Technology and Fashion Senior Editor and Strategic Projects Director at Elle (US) magazine, and a core part of the team brought in to refresh the brand through creative, talent, and editorial content. Prior to that she was the founding Technology Editor at Marie Claire, where she authored a monthly column on technology trends and the future of fashion, beauty, retail and culture-at-large. Blaha also founded Danger Productions, a talent management and consulting company specializing in emerging design talent and creator culture.
Jenna Blaha is Global Managing Director of Executive Search and the Director of the Media and Collaborations division of KHC and Fashion Tech Forum. Jenna joined KHC in October 2021 as Vice President of search, collaborations, editorial and partnerships. A journalist and culture expert, before…
Maia Wojcik
Maia is a Partner at Karen Harvey Consulting Group. She also launched Fashion Tech Forum, a thought leadership platform, and INDX, a digital community connecting top creative talent with brands and opportunities, globally, alongside CEO Karen Harvey.

Over the course of her career, Maia has been a champion and advisor for creative talent in fashion, with a more recent focus on supporting emerging brands and businesses in the fashion technology space. She is particularly passionate about innovations in sustainability, including localized and customized production, negative-waste material development and bio-fabrication.

Prior to launching FTF and INDX, Maia was the Vice President and Global Talent Scout at KHC, where she oversaw all creative search projects and partnered directly with client companies to support their creative evolution and business growth. In this role, Maia placed top creative leaders at iconic global brands including Kate Spade, Coach, Michael Kors, Tiffany & Co., Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, A.L.C. and Edun.
Maia is a Partner at Karen Harvey Consulting Group. She also launched Fashion Tech Forum, a thought leadership platform, and INDX, a digital community connecting top creative talent with brands and opportunities, globally, alongside CEO Karen Harvey. Over the course of her career, Maia has…