AGENDA & SPEAKERS

Laurie Brookins is an award-winning journalist who covers fashion, watches and jewelry, and other luxury-focused subjects for a variety of print and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, Town & Country Travel, Robb Report, the Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the Palm Beach Daily News, while she also has produced digital content for Town & Country, Robb Report, Worth, Galerie, and THR’s Style section. Laurie is based in New York City and is currently working on her first book. 

Joelle Diderich is Paris Bureau Chief at WWD, overseeing a team of correspondents covering luxury goods, retail and beauty. Joelle began her career as a financial journalist, joining Reuters in London in 1994. During the following 10 years, she lived and worked in Madrid, São Paulo, Brasília and Paris covering everything from general elections and forest fires to the 1999 Brazilian currency crisis. She fulfilled her long-held ambition to become a fashion journalist in 2000, when she started covering Paris Fashion Week for Reuters. She joined WWD in Paris as senior business news editor in 2010 and became Paris bureau chief in 2017. Reporting on companies ranging from H&M to Hermès, she enjoys breaking news, writing in-depth profiles of designers and CEOs, and branching out into the paper's culture pages

Sara Spruch-Feiner is a lifelong New Yorker and writer. She is a Senior Reporter at Glossy, where she spearheads Glossy Pop, a vertical about the intersection of beauty, fashion, and culture. She also writes the Glossy Pop Newsletter, which goes out on Fridays. She has contributed to publications including New York Magazine, The Zoe Report, Byrdie, Women’s Health, Coveteur, Shape—and many more. She is a graduate of Kenyon College where she earned her B.A. in English Literature (with a double minor in Women’s Studies and Art History) and a 2009 recipient of the New York Women in Communications, Inc. scholarship. She is equally passionate about women’s rights, really great serums, television, and the power of writing about them all.

Michael Jaïs has been the CEO and Co-Founder of Launchmetrics since its establishment in 2016 following the merger of Augure (which he co-founded in 2002) and Fashion GPS. Throughout his career, he has held several management positions at leading firms such as Thomson Multimedia and Accenture, as well as other founder roles with companies including ETL leader, Leonard's Logic, which was successfully sold to a subsidiary of OpenText. He holds a Master's degree from Sciences Po Paris in Economics and Finance, where he now serves as a part-time adjunct Marketing professor for their Master's program. 

Alison is the Chief Marketing Officer at Launchmetrics. She joined Fashion GPS in 2013 as the Global Director of Brand Development. Previously she held roles at companies such as IMG Fashion and Net-A-PORTER managing Marketing & PR. She has also spent time guest lecturing at Parsons, The New School, Condé Nast College and Il Sole 24Ore's Business School. Alison holds a Bachelor's degree in Advertising & Communications from the University of Central Florida and a Masters from SDA Bocconi's School of Management.

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