Despina Georgiadis is an accomplished operations strategist with over twenty-five years of experience and a niche in change management geared towards business growth. As a leader, Despina’s motivation is in the synchronization of all components required to transform businesses to run on scalable, sustainable and profitable world-class operations.
An operations focused career started in the furniture and home goods industry where she began developing a reputation that quickly became known to key executives in the fashion industry. She spent several years working with wholesale apparel companies where she continued to build her career in global operations and corporate planning.
The craving for continued growth and challenges, brought Despina to the jewelry industry when she joined Harry Winston and remained for 14 years and developed the greater part of her career while Harry Winston advanced from a small private company to a billion dollar public corporation. Despina became a key leader and was nicknamed a “pillar of the Harry Winston growth empire” by other senior executives. She developed and executed the global operations strategy proving sound profitability is, in addition to front-end sales and purchases, an element of efficient back-end operations. She was influential with the niche to coach, motivate and manage multiple international teams striving for the same strategic vision. She is responsible for the re-engineering of the global distribution and logistics process, the retail operations methodology, the documentation of multiple policies and procedures including, the Global Trade Compliance policy and the air-tight controls related to managing the risk of the global inventory.
Despina’s nature to seek complexity in her career aspirations, drove her to relocate to San Francisco and joined a wholesale apparel company. The differentiating factor in this position was that she was a change agent with an enormous challenge to overhaul the operations, implement best-in-class practices and define the forward business strategy with the objective of increasing the market footprint and drive business growth in the global arena.
Despina’s nostalgia for New York and its lifestyle was instrumental in her decision to return from California. She was fortunate with the timing of her return as the opportunity to join her career mentor, Peter C. Schneirla, in his business, presented itself. In a new business venture within the jewelry and gemstone industry Despina has a chance to diversify her career facet further by gaining experience in the jewelry salvage business environment.
Despina is fluent in Greek and has working knowledge of French, Spanish and Italian. While she has travelled extensively both for business and pleasure, traveling to new lands and experiencing new cultures, is her passion.