# Gap CEO Richard Dixon on Brand Revitalization & Cultural Relevance

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-07-07

## Transcript

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To some extent, what happened to Gap?
We got spooked with some of the swings and ultimately became very safe and therefore not very interesting.
And so to get people interested, you have to be interesting.
Our cat's eye campaign.
I mean, we were trending number one on TikTok within 24 hours.
I mean, if we had said three years ago, do you think Gap Brand is going to be trending on TikTok, let alone trending as number one on search?
No one would ever believe that.
If we're not swinging, we're never going to hit.
That's Richard Dixon, CEO of Gap Inc., the business housing Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta.
I sat down with Richard at the Ken Lions Advertising Festival in France to understand how he's applying a playbook he used at Mattel to the challenges at Gap.
The secret, he says, is leaning into pop culture.
Richard talks about why Sidney Sweeney's viral jeans ad was surprisingly good for the industry, even though it didn't come from the Gap.
and why he tracks brand love metrics on a dashboard every day.
Plus, timely lessons around the relationship between profit and social purpose, the need to keep taking risks after failure, and more.
So let's get to it.
I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safian.
I'm here with Richard Dixon, the CEO of Gap.
Thanks for being here.
Bob, it's good to be here.
Before Gap, you were at Mattel.
when Barbie was a little tarnished and then brought her into her glory.
You went to Gap, also on a little bit of a lull.
Do you like the turnaround of taking an iconic brand to someplace else?
It seems I like that pain.
I like that pain, yeah.
Actually, it is true.
I love iconic brands that had a breakthrough and then ultimately through their lifespan had peaks and pits.
I think Barbie is a great example of that.
There are others, and certainly the Gap story is one of them as well.
Do you think about it as renovation?
Do you think about it as sort of restarting, refounding?
I think about it as revitalization.
And to the extent that you have to study a brand's history.
ultimately, what made it great to begin with?
Why was it interesting?
Why were people interested?
To find that core again?
Yeah, to find the essence, the sort of what was the breakthrough that inspired such success.
And then along the way with brands, certainly that I've been a part of, they're generational.
And so they go through trials and tribulations and a lot of, let's say, outside influences that change the brand.
But ultimately, at some point, those brands either lose their way.
or reinvent themselves to be relevant.
And in the case of what I have found interesting, it's getting involved in brands that arguably have lost their way and need to find that revitalized narrative to be relevant again.
And I think for me, my experience in doing that has a methodology, but it's really about the execution of that methodology that makes the success or doesn't.
Well, so far, the success has been strong.
You've had...
Nine quarters of positive sales, right?
Market values up to eight and a half billion dollars.
And the driver that you've pointed to connecting all this is pop culture, which is, for a lot of business people, seems kind of soft.
Yeah.
I think, you know, pop culture, it sounds simple, does hard.
Moving at the speed of culture, staying relevant, particularly for brands that have history.
is difficult.
And in the context of brands that have history, these brands started when it was TV and print and outdoor.
Being where your consumer is today means being everywhere.
That's very difficult to do.
And ultimately to stay relevant is a sport.
And that when you get it right, relevance can drive revenue.
And so when you only concentrate on numbers and deliverables, a brand could lose its way.
Because ultimately you start to make decisions that are financially based, not necessarily narrative or brand based.
And that's when you start to potentially fragment the dialogue with consumers because you're driving a commercial proposition, but not necessarily one that really drives that consumer authenticity.
That emotion.
That emotion.
I mean, brands are relationships.
Yeah.
Purely.
And it doesn't matter what category they're in, you have a relationship with a brand.
And when that brand fragments that in any way, you lose trust.
And trust is the foundation of any brand relationship.
And once that's fractured, it takes a long time to regain it.
And at some point, we lost the storytelling and became more about the stuff.
The conversation often around retail and fashion apparel brands is...
that it is about fashion, it's about style, and you sort of have to stay up with the pace of the style.
The clothing itself is what drives it.
Obviously, you wouldn't say the clothing doesn't matter, but how do those things go together?
Look, the essence of any consumer product business is the product.
So you've got to have a product proposition that connects to consumers.
In our case, fit, fabrication, value, style.
Getting the product right is no joke.
And that wasn't the first thing when you came in where you said like, oh, that's what I have to fix first?
There's no first because really it's an orchestra.
You know, it's everything from the product to the marketing, to the staff, to the people.
To the stores, right?
Everything.
The sites, the sounds, everything.
The shipping, the logistics.
When you have thousands of stores, it's really a complex conversation internally to get right.
And so we laid out a very set agenda with strategic priorities that focus the company, by the way, 80,000 people around the company, around our strategic objectives.
And the first one was fundamentally, we have to just run a better business.
We need financial and operational rigor.
We need to understand how much we've got and to be more effective and efficient about it.
And then run as a retailer a smart open to buy, smart bets.
chasing some things, managing the business in a way that really kind of is agile, but discipline.
And then it is about the cultural relevance.
Telling the story about the product, about the brand, connects people to that story.
And storytellers need to be, you know, great.
great brand narrators.
I mean, that is what, when you find a good brand, it's a good story.
And granted, the deliverable is actually the product because you could drive traffic, you could drive interest.
And if you get there, it doesn't fit.
It's too expensive.
I don't like it.
You don't have the conversion.
The magic happens when you have great product and great storytelling and great execution.
And not everything is going to go right all the time.
But once you start that practice, you can create that flywheel.
For you, you sort of knew that maybe the product wasn't going to be your personal sweet spot that you would bring people in.
I'm not a clothing designer, no.
But I think probably what I realized early on, particularly with scaled businesses, it's a team sport.
Sure, there's vision and there's leaders that have the conviction to move things along.
But you can't do it alone.
And so you need to bring in...
and surround yourself with the best talent that are better than you at exactly what you need them to do.
And so I think of myself more as a conductor bringing in the musicians and creating an orchestra that plays together.
At the beginning of an orchestra, you have when the symphony is tuning up, right?
And there's no harmony.
But then the conductor starts and everybody starts to play together.
And it's a magical moment.
I would say as a metaphor, when I got to Gap Inc.
There was a lot of tuning up.
Really, good musicians not necessarily playing together.
And so orchestrating that, bringing in right musicians to play with each other and bringing it into a more harmonious state, I think, is the role that I play as the leader.
Well, and you have a feel for pop culture too, I think.
And that emphasis, which is not something that...
at least the gap just before was leaning into.
For sure.
Look, I think there's a taste level.
I mean, we're in a business that nobody needs us.
We have to create want.
You create demand.
And to some extent, it is a taste level business.
Fashion is entertainment.
It's storytelling.
It's feel.
It's fabric.
It's fit.
What we do builds confidence.
You look in the mirror, you feel good.
You're out in the world.
If we can do that for you, for our customers.
That's essentially the sort of secret sauce that's not such a secret.
So I would argue that I have certainly a taste level that can be appreciated.
But also I would think of myself probably more as an architect of branding.
There's edits that need to be made.
You used to walk into one of our stores, and arguably there are some stores you still walk into in our portfolio, where the message is not coming across as clear.
And we edited a lot of stuff out of our assortment.
And all of a sudden, you start to see the storytelling.
What do the merchants really believe in?
What do we want our consumers to really believe in that we want them to share in that experience?
A denim shop, a khaki shop, a fleece shop.
These are things that speak to consumers without somebody necessarily taking them through it.
And I think that is, to some extent, the road that we're on right now.
I noticed that you hired a chief entertainment officer, which is not a title you see at, certainly at most retailers.
Is Gap a pop culture brand the way Barbie is?
Like, are we going to see a Gap movie?
I mean, how?
You never know.
You never know?
Yeah.
I think, look, first off, fashion is entertainment.
It is.
I mean, whether you're looking on the runways, look at sports today, the tunnel.
What are they wearing in the tunnel?
Fashion is entertainment.
Once you sort of embrace that, you have to sort of embrace it to the extent that you need to start to think about storytelling and what are forms of entertainment.
In our case, it's music, it's art, it's film, it's events.
These are experts and we need the expertise to actually drive those with authenticity.
So of course you need a chief entertainment officer.
Of course you need talent that really can take you into those places.
To have it to authentically Align with you.
100%.
Look at the conversation that we're having around Gap today.
It's about music.
It's about fashion.
It's about our content.
It's about our media mix model.
That's the story we're telling.
But then when you get to our stores or you get that product, you feel like, oh, this is now my best friend again.
And so for us, we have to keep that narrative and storytelling continuously going.
And that is the speed of culture.
that today is price of entry for a brand.
Unlike some CEOs, Richard acknowledges that his expertise is more about brand orchestration than about the company's core product.
So how might AI muddy those orchestration waters?
And how can leaders stay motivated to keep taking risks after failure?
We'll talk about that and more after the break.
Stay with us.
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It's not just that companies become too big to fail and we bail them out, although that's happening.
It's not just they become too big to jail, but they become too big to care.
These companies, they eliminated the competition.
They and their advisors, you know, the economists who said monopolies are good and efficient, they're today just absolved of all responsibility.
Shopping really hard doesn't solve monopolies.
We warned them at the time, they did it anyway.
The enchitogenic policy environment is what created this.
To hear why the internet keeps getting worse, check out episode 1280 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.
Before the break, Gap's Richard Dixon talked about how he's leaning into pop culture to turn around the company.
Now Richard explains why he's tracking brand love metrics at his desk every day and why striking out should never deter a leader from swinging again and again.
Let's dive back in.
You know, some CEOs get obsessed with watching the stock price all the time, even though few like to admit it.
But you said you look at a different metric hourly.
I don't know if this is right, a dashboard called brand love.
I do.
Where'd you get that from?
It sounds a bit distracting, though, like looking that often.
I mean, you know, it sounds like when I got lost in my TikTok feed.
It's like, what?
It can be.
It can be.
But I find, first of all, retail is detail.
And you're in it every hour.
We have a flash that we could look at and say, how are we doing?
And when we're doing well, you should ask, why are we doing so well?
And when we're not doing well, you say, why are we not doing well?
And so these are sales numbers?
Well, there's sales metrics.
I have a dashboard in my office that has graphs and sales metrics.
And then there's another dashboard that measures.
brand love, brand search, attributes that we're measuring with our consumers in the context of receptivity to our narratives, to our media mix model.
And you're tracking this every day.
We're tracking it every day, all the time.
And it's not distracting, it's guiding?
I believe it's the information that you need to drive the business.
And if you're not curious about the work and what's working or what's not working, this is not a business for you.
It really isn't.
And you see it that fast when something new, which is new in the way, I guess, both the speed of culture and the speed of business work.
Absolutely.
I mean, you can see it as soon as it hits the marketplace.
I mean, even some of our, you know, Gap work, our cat's eye campaign, we were trending number one on TikTok within 24 hours.
I mean, if we had said three years ago, do you think Gap brand is going to be trending on TikTok, let alone trending as number one on search?
No one would ever believe that.
But in the context of the data that we could receive, with that data, we can then add multiple ways of sharing more storytelling, expanding that concept, being motivated by the insights that we're gathering on a daily basis, which moves the organization forward.
We see that with what sells also.
You see when a product sells, you see when it doesn't.
When it doesn't, it's not going to get better.
I mean, a product that doesn't sell, move it through the system.
Yes, it's a markdown.
And it is what it is.
But that's the business of the business.
I mean, you know that that's going to happen.
Of course it's going to happen.
With all of these things.
With brand campaigns, with products, right?
100%.
If we're not swinging, we're never going to hit.
There's going to be misses.
But the objective is to have more hits than misses.
And ultimately, not necessarily reward the misses, but acknowledge that we swung and missed.
So what do we learn from that?
Why didn't it work?
element of dialogue is a really important part of the conversation in our company.
And I think what leaders today need to embrace is the ability to feel comfortably uncomfortable.
You've got to take shots on goal.
You've got to take swings in order to move the business forward.
And the biggest risk of it all is not taking risk.
Every day you're getting information that this is going well and you're getting information that this is going badly.
And like, how do you know what the balance is in it's going through that?
Or do you just decide I'm going to be optimistic and emphasize the things that are going well?
I'm a consummate optimist and I love the challenge.
We got bad news or something didn't work.
It's process of editing.
That didn't work.
We got to figure out what does work.
You don't let it get you down.
You let it inspire the next sort of breakthrough.
Sometimes you're ahead of the game.
Sometimes we might have been too far ahead.
And it was a good idea, strategically well-intended, flawed in terms of timing, or strategically well-intended and flawed execution.
And in some cases, some dialogue, and there's a lot of companies that have this, well, we tried that.
We tried that.
We tried that.
And it's not that it wasn't the right try, but...
For whatever reason, the execution or the timing was off.
Try again.
Try again.
And when you do hit it, that team player and that cultural spark can drive incredible momentum into a business.
Well, on the flip side, when people are saying, we tried that, we tried that, you stop trying anything.
Exactly right.
And that's when the business really, it's deer in a headlight.
You don't try anything.
And you become incredibly safe.
And arguably that is to some extent what happened to Gap and our brands.
You know, we got spooked with some of the swings and ultimately became very safe and therefore not very interesting.
And so to get people interested, you have to be interesting.
And that is ultimately, I think, becoming what is more...
connecting our consumers back to our brands is we're interesting.
And so even like the Sydney Sweeney stuff that was a little controversial, like that's okay.
It's great.
It's great.
Well, I think it's great for the industry.
You know, I mean, we're, we're, we're in an industry.
Obviously we want to be the winners in the industry.
But when the industry is driving creativity, it should inspire better competition.
You know, when you look left and you look right and you go, well, that's pretty good.
And they're out there doing that.
You go like, okay, like, let's go.
And so I think we're inspiring better work in the industry.
And I think the industry is doing better work on their own.
And I think it moves us as an industry forward.
And obviously, you know, our goals and ambitions are B2B.
to be the best of the best, but we've got a long way to go before we can claim that.
You announced new sustainability goals this year, along with a partnership called Get Blue with MattDamon's water.org.
Talk around sustainability has kind of been on the wane.
It has not been a hot topic lately.
Why do this now?
Sustainability is one dynamic of what we'll call purpose in the context of Gap Inc.'s brands.
We've always been purposeful.
And arguably, the more profit we drive, the more purposeful we can be in.
And purpose and profit have an interesting integration.
And throughout our history, we've always been a thoughtful citizen, if you will, not only of the communities that we live in, but the world and the consumers that we serve.
Our origin story, as you may know, started with one store in San Francisco called The Generation Gap.
And our founder, Doris Fisher, crossed out generation and it became the gap.
But the original intent was to bridge the generation gap.
And that's a very purposeful statement unto itself.
And so as our company has evolved with Old Navy and Banana Republic and Athleta and all the things that we've done over time, we've evolved that narrative into bridging gaps to create a better world.
And one of the gaps that we take a lot of pride in bridging is the sustainability efforts to bridge the climate gap.
Within that, it gets very complicated very quickly.
And so we've chosen water as the leading initiative that we can have real impact for.
And to be blunt, we can't do what we do without water.
I mean, you know, to make denim and denim washes and to feed cotton, cotton's a thirsty plant, we need water.
So we use a lot of water and water is a scarce commodity.
And so it's a responsibility that we have.
to recognize that and do what we can to recycle, reuse, replenish water, and get access to clean water in places where we manufacture our product.
And so, yes, it sounds like a nice to-do, but it's an essential to-do.
50% of our GDP is nature.
We're partners with nature.
So it is a strategic objective for us.
So I can't have a conversation with the CEO today and not ask about AI.
How do you think about it for your business?
How disruptive?
I mean, it's certainly having an impact in culture.
It is an essential part of our lives today.
Like it or don't like it, learn to love it.
Because it's going to be here.
It is here and it is here to stay.
And if we don't embrace it and acknowledge...
it as a valuable tool, then I think you're going to be, particularly for businesses, left behind.
We're going to move to a place where the entire business is based on it.
It's an operating platform.
It doesn't just enable things.
It actually is the platform for which everything is going to sit on.
And we are evolving in that direction.
I mean, we're making tremendous strides and making significant investments in technology, of which a lot of it is AI-based.
It is, in fact, impacting our business in a positive way.
Everything from consumer insights to design and development to the speed which we can sort of digest information.
And so I find it an incredibly exciting chapter.
It's a bit daunting.
But once you sort of jump in that pool and swim around and get a little bit warmer in it, I think it's the practice that we all need to do.
Right now, it's more sort of behind the scenes as a system, but I actually think it's going to get more and more consumer facing.
Does that mean that there are going to be fewer humans working in your store or like...
I don't think so.
First of all, I don't think we think like that, but I do think that the experience from digital to physical and physical to digital will become more seamless.
And in the context of us knowing you and knowing your style and knowing who you are and knowing what you bought and potentially making suggestions.
You have to reinforce that trust element for your brand for me to share all that with you too, right?
100%.
Yeah.
And then again, that goes back to the fundamentals of brand.
even in the time that passes, it's all about trust.
The retail experience, I mean, it's so varied now, right?
Like what will a gap store look like in 2030?
Do you know yet?
Or, you know, for me, I think we are constantly making progress, not necessarily perfection.
It's nice to imagine perfection, but every day in retail is another aha moment of something we could have done better.
And so I think we're constantly evolving.
I mean, even in our remodels right now, we've done remodels for Gap, remodels for Banana, remodels for Old Navy.
We see progress, but not perfection.
And so every remodel- And the whole way you have to think about it is different.
It's like, you're not going to remodel once, you're going to keep remodeling.
Every time.
And so you have to think about, by the way, store design in the context of when does it need to get refreshed again.
Because it's expensive to do all that too, right?
It certainly is.
And these are all the things that you need to consider.
But the reality of stores, I think, is going to become even more important as consumers are looking for human experiences, for places where we can connect, where you can actually feel the product, try it on, listen to the music, hear the sounds, get the service, have community.
I believe that is going to become more and more important.
And if you look at Gen Z and even Alpha, there's a return to a bit of analog.
versus digital.
And I don't mean it literally, but I do recognize that, you know, putting down your phone, having a human experience, what's happening in sports today is incredible.
You see these places where humans and people are gathering and it creates emotional connection and unity.
And I think retail could be a really important part of that process.
What do you feel like is at stake for Gap right now?
I think the recognition that we are an iconic American brand that shapes culture.
And I think we have arguably woken up.
And I think we're a brand where people never didn't like us.
They just wondered what happened.
You know, what happened to Gap?
I used to go, I used to love it, and then something happened and we sort of disappeared for a while.
And so I think now we're back and we're back on the cultural conversation.
And now it's a question of what do we do with it?
And I think truly, when you think about the word gap, it is the space between us.
And so what better space today to bring people together than in the gap between us?
And we take that seriously.
And I think you're going to see over time that cultural connection and that conversation get stronger and more powerful as we get into more of our flywheel.
Well, our world certainly needs more closing of those gaps, bridging of those gaps.
No doubt.
Thanks for doing this today.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's been fun.
There can sometimes be something shallow and sweaty about a company hungering for relevance, trying too hard, latching onto every viral meme.
What differentiates a successful reinvention is genuine curiosity about culture.
And as Richard notes, a willingness to take swings that don't land in the quest for greater knowledge and better understanding.
The deer in the headlights phenomenon that Richard describes, fear of taking inaction because actions have gone badly in the past, it's an understandable reaction to uncertain times, but it's not effective or inspiring.
I followed Gap for a long time, and yet it never occurred to me that the brand could stand for bridging gaps in our world.
It's an appealing aspiration and the kind of relevant storytelling that fits this moment.
So what story are you telling?
And how might it benefit from some new twists?
If it's good enough for Barbie and Gap, it might be good enough for you too.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.
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