Maithili Shenoy is the Founder and CEO of La Naia Collective, an advisory firm focused on consumer and retail strategy. She brings 30+ years of operating experience at Fortune 50 companies, including senior leadership roles at Nike and Target spanning sourcing, supply chain, sustainability, and marketplace operations.
Maithili coined the term “Regenerative Retail” as a deliberate break from sustainability thinking. Sustainability, she argues, is about slowing damage to a broken system — Regenerative Retail is about rebuilding it. Her framework centers on four commitments: designing for durability over volume, building demand-driven supply chains, making agility a core KPI, and holding the industry accountable for actual end-of-life outcomes rather than input substitution. Her provocation is that overproduction is not inevitable — it is a planning and incentive problem. The case for change: profit and planet don’t need to be an either/or but instead can carry the power of AND.
That thinking is grounded in two decades of operating work. At Nike, she founded the circularity and sustainability operations function. At Target, she led sourcing and manufacturing across a 40+ owned brand portfolio, with nearshoring and addressing overproduction at the center.
Today, through La Naia Collective, she is focused on advancing Regenerative Retail from concept to practice.
