Storytelling as brand architecture.
Sade Strehlke is a brand, editorial, and commerce executive with fifteen years building culturally relevant brands and the commerce experiences that scale them, across luxury, lifestyle, beauty, and mass retail.
She is the founder and CEO of ROUX, an AI-powered shopping, styling, and resale platform, and most recently led integrated brand marketing, creative, CRM, and site content for Walmart Home, a $6.7 billion business. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of POPSUGAR.
From a newsroom to a $6.7 billion business.
Her career spans venture-stage media to the world's largest retailer, giving her rare fluency in how brands are built, protected, and grown at every scale.
At Walmart, she launched the company's first-ever print Home Catalog, architected a brand-collaboration model adopted as the enterprise standard, led creative and the site strategy for the $1.5B Mainstays Kids launch, and partnered with Emerging Tech on AI-powered commerce experiences, one of which won the 2026 MUSE Design Award Gold. Her campaigns drove +353% GMV growth on 2.5 billion homepage impressions.
As Editor-in-Chief of POPSUGAR, she led a 100-plus-person global organization through its acquisition by Vox Media, rebuilding the brand's cultural relevance and its partnerships with Chanel, LVMH, and Nordstrom. Earlier, at Teen Vogue, she drove 400% audience growth and helped redefine the title as the cultural voice of a new generation.
Across every role, the through-line is the same: storytelling as brand architecture. Translating editorial authority into commercial growth, and building the teams, standards, and infrastructure that make that growth compound.
She holds an M.S. in Journalism with Honors from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Southern California. She speaks English and Dutch.
Three companies, one thesis.
Editorial authority is the most durable competitive advantage in consumer, and almost nobody knows how to build it.
ROUX
A closet-first AI commerce platform for shopping, styling, and resale, built around the one thing every woman already owns and no one has ever organized. Its agent has a name: Margaux. Patents filed. A working prototype she shipped herself.
myroux.co →SK Studios
An integrated, commercially driven lifestyle studio spanning home, beauty, and fashion. It develops editorially driven residential environments that function as both lived spaces and content production sets. The environments it designs are also the media it publishes.
skstudios.com →Resting Rich Face™
A publication for women who want the source, the price, and the truth. Essays, interiors, sourcing, and the occasional receipt. Reached #19 in Substack Fashion & Beauty within five days of launch, before anyone was told to read it.
restingrichface.substack.com →The receipts.
Selected interviews and bylines.
What she’s hired for.
Brand stewardship, omnichannel marketing, cross-functional leadership, and the consumer-and-AI shifts reshaping retail.
She is open to board & advisory roles.
Brand & marketing strategy
Positioning, architecture, and the standards that keep a brand coherent as it scales across channels and owners.
Editorial content as competitive advantage
Why most brand content doesn't convert, and what the media-to-margin math actually looks like inside a large retailer.
Consumer & AI-driven commerce
What agentic commerce changes about discovery, what it doesn't, and where brand identity survives when the buying decision moves to a model.
DTC & omnichannel growth
Building the infrastructure that makes growth durable rather than campaign-dependent.
Brand partnerships & transitions
From structuring Chanel and LVMH programs to steering a newsroom through acquisition — keeping the brand intact when the deal closes.
Culture and audience development
How to build an audience that pays — no ad spend, no funnels — and what that kind of loyalty is worth to a brand.