‘Don’t take no for an answer’: Jennifer Wong’s remarkable rise from Aritzia salesperson to CEO

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Talent is not always obvious. For instance, Aritzia Inc. founder Brian Hill rejected Jennifer Wong’s application when she initially applied for a job at the women’s apparel company to be a style adviser — that is, a salesperson — 35 years ago.

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The Jennifer Wong of the 1980s was looking for a part-time gig at what was then a relatively new, but almost instantly hip, Vancouver-based boutique clothing store, to replace the part-time gig she had quit at a Marvellous Mmmuffins outlet. She “couldn’t hack” the muffin gig, she said, and preferred the idea of working with clothes over hawking baked goods.

She has a vivid memory of walking through the doors of the Aritzia in Oakridge Centre. This was going to be it, her big moment, and Hill was behind the desk. She handed him her resumé. He looked it over and asked her about the muffins. Wong, nervous as “hell,” must have answered, although she can’t remember what she said, before Hill politely informed her that he wasn’t “hiring.”

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But Wong didn’t take rejection in stride. She outright rejected it, and drove directly to another Aritzia outlet on Robson Street and handed in her resumé there. This time around, she did get the job, and 35 years later she still has a company job, only today she is the chief executive.

“I don’t know what got into me, but I had something in me that said, ‘Don’t take no for an answer,’” she said.

The notion of sticking with the same company for 35 years sounds almost quaint, particularly in the startup age, when millennials seem to flit from job to job, like, every six seconds, in search of the next great thing, or at least their first decent paycheque.

Wong, though, has not jumped ship; she’s climbed the ladder instead, tacking on increasing responsibilities at every rung. Which is why it wasn’t a shock that Hill named Wong, president and chief operating officer at the time, his successor when he announced in May that he would be stepping down as CEO of his baby.

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The 52-year-old Vancouver native wasn’t always destined to be the one, not in the beginning, when Hill took a pass on her as a kid, but she became the obvious choice in time.

“I don’t think there was any question on the ‘who,’” Hill said. “I would argue that Jen is the most qualified fashion company executive in North America; she understands finance, logistics, fashion, retail, e-commerce, I.T., computerization — she has done it all.”

I would argue that Jen is the most qualified fashion company executive in North America

Brian Hill

And the results have been telling: That instantly hip Vancouver boutique is today a multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded fashion giant, with 68 stores in Canada and another 33 in the United States, a rapidly expanding e-commerce arm and $857 million in net revenues during fiscal 2021, despite all the bumps of being a bricks-and-mortar outfit during a pandemic.

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Put it this way: Jennifer Lopez loves Aritzia. Meghan Markle digs the threads, too, as do legions of social-media influencers, plus heaps of teens and 20-somethings (just ask around) who can afford, or not, to shell out $98 for, say, a pair of shorts.

But if Wong’s loyalty counts as somewhat of a throwback, her private life is in the vanguard of a progressive parenting revolution. Her husband, Brian, knew upon meeting Wong that she was just as crazy about work as she was about having a family, and when the couple started having kids a little more than a decade ago — a boy followed by another two years later — he assumed the role of the stay-at-home dad, so mom could keep bringing home the bacon.

“I have been doing this since right out of high school, so when he met me, he knew I was very career-focused, very driven,” Wong said.

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Her weekday family time tends to be mornings, which start for her at 5 a.m., three-quarters of an hour before the alarm actually goes off. A self-reported terrible sleeper, Wong’s waking impulse is to grab her smartphone and get texting, emailing and scrolling through her news feed. This is followed by a morning walk, a fleeting window of decompression time she occupies by listening to either a podcast or the sounds of the world around her.

After the bliss, it is back to busyness, from the moment she steps back through her front door until the moment she gets to the office. And if that sounds like a hellacious morning routine to you, it certainly isn’t for Wong.

She loves her job, and she doesn’t come off as someone who just says that, either, even when the trade-offs, such as missing her eldest son’s band concert (he is a trombonist) to do an interview on a rainy Monday morning in Vancouver, occasionally stink.

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“When I am not at work, I am with my family,” she said. “My husband takes care of me.”

Work hard, parent hard on weekends, is the Wong formula. It can be a delicate mix at times, but she is accustomed to challenges, a reality that extends to the enterprise she runs.

Take the past 24-plus months. If it wasn’t a pandemic temporarily shuttering boutiques during lockdowns, it’s snarled supply chains, runaway inflation, increasing freight rates and ballooning construction costs on the company’s new, $60-million, 550,000-square-foot distribution centre in Toronto. (That’s roughly the equivalent of 10 football fields).

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Aritzia isn’t raising prices for now, Wong said, and the company also isn’t seeing any softening in demand for those pricey shorts, among other items, despite all the doom and gloom about a potential recession.

Instead, Wong and Aritzia are going full steam ahead, thinking of the future. The master plan is to get “famous” in the U.S. before expanding internationally. Alas, the same can no longer be said for Marvellous Mmmuffins, a Canadian mall staple of yesteryear, which closed its final two standalone locations in 2020. It is a random fact Wong shares, a nifty tidbit, considering she exited the baked goods industry after three weeks some 35 years ago.

Fortunately, her next job has proved enduring, so much so that when she casts her eyes to the future, she can’t foresee a potential retirement date.

“I will stay here as long as they will have me, as long as I am effective, and as long as I am producing results,” she said.

So far, so good.

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