The global jewelry market is moving from $365.9B in 2024 toward $580.7B in 2033 at 5-8% CAGR, with North America compounding at 8.4%. Claire's revenue is down 15-20% YoY inside that growing market. That is not market failure; that is execution failure, and the most expensive piece of the execution failure is not a system, it is the space between systems. Stores that cannot see online inventory. E-commerce that cannot read POS history. Loyalty that cannot follow a customer across channels. The CTO mandate is to close those gaps and turn fragmentation into a unified, customer-centric platform.

I have spent thirty years closing exactly that kind of gap. As an enterprise digital-transformation leader, I have unified fragmented technology stacks, modernized legacy platforms, and built data-driven operations across healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and hospitality. At Kaufman Hall, the information architecture I designed reduced annual IT spending by $1.2M while consolidating systems for 5,000+ users. At HIMSS, I led a multi-system modernization that improved knowledge-worker capacity by 28%. At University of Chicago Medicine, I executed a five-server-farm SharePoint migration with zero downtime in a healthcare-critical environment.

What that experience translates to for Claire's:

• Omnichannel platform unification. I have repeatedly replaced fragmented enterprise stacks with single-source-of-truth architectures that let merchandising, store operations, and digital teams work from the same data. Healthcare's complexity is a credible proxy for retail's; both reward ruthless prioritization, governance, and operational discipline.
• Cybersecurity, compliance, and resilience. Most recently, I led a 60-day ransomware recovery for a confidential client - containment through threat-actor negotiation through full re-architecture. PCI, SOC 2, and disaster-recovery thinking is part of how I design, not a bolt-on.
• AI where it changes margin. I currently lead an AI Adoption Program that embeds context engineering and measurable KPIs into a software-engineering organization. For Claire's, AI matters most in inventory, demand forecasting, and assortment - where it directly affects cash, turns, and markdowns.

I would lead Claire's technology with three commitments: retire Salesforce in favor of a HubSpot-centered revenue spine that lands every transaction in Azure; reach four concrete proof points by Day 90 (Salesforce gone, omnichannel dashboards live, decision-making AI generating real buying recommendations, the 18-month plan on track); and run a $105-165M envelope against $500-800M of annualized recovery at a 60-70% probability of disciplined execution. I would welcome the chance to walk through how I would sequence the first 18 months.

Respectfully,