COO @
OVERCOAT
Kazuha has deep expertise advising the luxury retail and beauty industry and improving the business process of small to big enterprises. Being COO at OVERCOAT, a genderless ready-to-wear fashion brand based in New York, she leverages her experiences in brand strategy for the company founder / fashion designer. Her duties include finance, marketing, operations, and digital transformation of the brand. When she interned at OVERCOAT during her MBA program at Columbia Business School, she introduced e-commerce and organized pop-up events, achieving business transformation from the traditional wholesale model into a more direct-to-consumer one in 2020. She continues to execute each business strategy for the company’s sustainable business growth, after fundraising from investors. She supervises the small organization across functional areas to maximize profit and revenue, using relevant skills which directly relate to her past working experience. She has helped various Japanese manufacturers and retailers who tried to expand their business internationally. She gained consulting and IT skills early in her career at ABeam Consulting, integrated financial data of all global subsidiaries for her clients along with ERP system implementation. Then she worked for JINS, an eyewear brand, where she developed a manufacturing and logistics supply chain scheme from China, Japan to the U.S. She visualized item production and delivery status for all departments concerned. Prior to OVERCOAT, she worked for Shiseido to shape how a large and traditional Japanese company could make the most of its strength in a competitive global market. She led a global S&OP project to enhance supply agility from factories in Japan and to improve demand accuracy in affiliates located in Greater China and Hong Kong. In 2019, she moved to New York, engaging in post-M&A integration of several cosmetic brands for the Shiseido group. She has a Bachelor of Global Political Economy from Waseda University, an MBA from the Columbia Business School.