Her Story
About Camille
I have been in my field for over 10 years, and in this specific role for 3 years as of October. Prior to my current position at Ashley Furniture, I worked at Bob's Discount Furniture as a store manager and operational leader from 2018 to 2024. Before that, I was a regional leader, store manager, and multi-store operating manager at Living Spaces from 2011 to 2018. Today, I am a transformational leader with 20 years of experience in leadership. In my current role, I act as a consultant underneath Ashley Furniture across 13 to 14 different store owners, helping them run and scale their Ashley businesses. Many of these owners have diverse portfolios - they own banks, hotels, wineries, and other businesses, and they buy into the Ashley brand to grow their portfolio. I help them curate their business from start to finish. A typical day for me involves scheduling visits in advance - I'm already booked out through July. I fly in on a Monday, hold executive meetings with leadership teams on Tuesday or Wednesday, visit their locations to ensure compliance with Ashley's standards, and go through everything from guest experience to back office operations. I handle all of the West Coast from Hawaii to Montana, traveling every single week. I work with multi-millionaires in a $1.8 billion company, and I'm most proud of the relationships I've been able to curate and the increases I've achieved - we're up about 3% based on my ability to tailor my communication and meet the needs of the licensees and their communities.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Camille
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think a lot of it came from my mother. She's an educated woman, very proud, very much so intentional about her goals and dreams, and she is a woman that stays laser-focused no matter what it is. I think I pulled a lot of that strength from watching her as a leader in her community and also professionally. And then I would say just being adaptable. You have to be able to adapt and pivot when you're moving, especially through retail. Adaptable, culturable, and yeah, just stay focused and driven.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I actually met with John C. Maxwell, and one of the best pieces of advice he gave me is you can't be so hung up on what your team's not doing or what other people aren't doing that you think should be done. You can't be hung up on that, because the reality is they may have reached a capacity cap. Their capacity is capped off at the ceiling, where you may be filling or your capacity limit is way beyond that. So, how do you show up in that space? Think of ways of how you can show up in those situations. Do you need to move people off that bus to get the right people on that bus? Especially from my position, if their capacity is only up to here, I can't expect them to go for the moon if it's only at the ceiling. So now you need to reassess. Basically, meeting people where they are and then meeting the needs of that, but then also learning that if the capacity is only so much and they're not willing to learn, then you need to pivot. You need to get someone else that's going to be able to do the job.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
The biggest advice I would give is stay ready. Well, I guess that comes from Drake - stay ready so you don't have to get ready. But, more importantly, understand your why, understand who you are as a woman, and advocate for yourself.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Getting traffic, sales traffic, is down across the board nationwide, and that goes for not just Ashley - it's a situation that many brick-and-mortar retailers are facing. So, I think the biggest challenge in my industry and across the board is how do we get that excitement back into the stores? People are, you know, the way of the future is online, right? We're not going to be able to fight that, but how do we get more engagement in our communities where they want to come into the store? You have destination locations which are huge attractions, so you think of like Disney - they're getting an experience when they come into, say, Disneyland. So, how do you take that and memorialize that into little bitty parts of different industries? So I would say that's probably one of the largest challenges that I'm facing right now.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The most important values to me are honesty, integrity, and transparency. Those are the hot three for me.
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