Valerie Gillas Email & Phone Number

Woodinville, Wa

Leadership to inspire and support tasting room operations to ensure a remarkable guest experience, drive revenue, create operational efficiencies while adhering to all applicable policies and procedures.

Woodinville, Wa

- Event planning for internal corporate and industry events, such as network events, trade meetings and tastings to provide opportunities to connect with our brand and wine education.- Facilitate and plan externally-focused events such as concert receptions, wine blending, and wine education. These events provide business development opportunities and reinforce the Ste Michelle Wine Estate brand in alignment with company values. - Implement and update ReServe event planning data base- Support brand development, visual style guidelines, design marketing materials and enterprise templates and tools.

Woodinville, Wa

Ensure our guests with a memorable experiences and education of wine. I take great care in guiding our guests through tours and tastings, lead corporate events/dinners, concerts, and represent the company at off premises marketing events.

Corporate Seattle

Provided strategic guidance on project work flow including active, forecast work and backlog producing timely and effective project deliverables. As managing the regional B&BS teams I focused on collaboration, development, and coordinate project activities across team members and departments. Recognizing opportunities to develop process for operational improvements to result in increased efficiencies and financial savings.• Mastered a staffing restructure to connect similar job functions which empowered people to become subject matter experts, reduced redundancies and eliminated internal silos.• Increased access to vendor resources with a focus on value added service programswith attention to vendor character. Created substantial financial savings in vendor procurement and managed contracts.• Develop and facilitate new hire training program by discipline to bolster career growth, global knowledge of the companies offering and created enlightened cross departmental collaboration.

Seattle, Wa

Directed division wide business processes with collaboration of multiple departments to develop and execute shrinkage reduction, inventory accuracy, new store openings, improved processes, new accounts, and to maximize customer’s experience.• Launched 12 new stores resulting in the business unit’s 24% growth to 62 units with revenue exceeding $1 billion. • Designed comprehensive division wide strategies that decreased shrinkage resulting in net savings of $2.1 million.• Restructured store level Customer Service and Logistic manager responsibilities increasing efficiencies and reducing costs. • Director of regional and store level managers developing stakeholders

Oakbrook, Il

Directed all unit level Store Info. Mgrs. for 11 Nordstrom and 6 Nordstrom Rack stores in inventory processes, sales tools and facilitation of education materials.• Oversaw transition of manual inventory and sales process management to fully automated systems.• Realigned store level team structure and responsibilities to build a team that would effectively implement inventory control systems reducing shrinkage from 3.04% to 0.87%.• Transitioned Information managers from basic auditing functions to store level facilitators of enterprise wide sales methods and inventory management.

Responsible for unit level store information systems including front and back of the house merchandise movement, inventory tracking, and reporting for nationally top 5 ranked Nordstrom with annual revenues of $116 million. Led catalog sales and distribution. Managed store level communication office, staff, and interfaced by telephone and online relationships with customer base.

Managed store level Customer Service department including Cash room, Concierge, and Communication with a team of 20 for $87 million revenue full line Nordstrom located in the “old money” bastion of Chicago’s North Shore district. Known as a particular challenging customer base, service in this location provided an invaluable level of experience in working with high impact customer service challenges.•Drove profit center initiatives for customer credit and gift cards along with affinity programs exceeding store expectations with a 13% increase.•Planned and promoted customer bus trip during annual store sale from Milwaukie, WI to Chicagoland producing an additional $38,000 in store sales.•Consolidated local Rack store cash room processes with full line store reducing labor and courier expenses.

Business, Business Administration And Management, General

Associate'S Degree, Associates Degree