Welcome to “What’s In Your Cart,” a Modern Retail series where executives at some of the world’s biggest brands and retail companies tell us about their personal shopping habits — from their favorite finds and guilty shopping pleasures to their most regrettable buys and impulse purchases. We last spoke with Carly Gomez, chief marketing officer at Crocs. Up next is Richa Srivastava, Anthropologie’s Chief Creative Officer. Richa Srivastava jokes that working in fashion has ruined shopping for her. Years of studying fit and material and drape have left her unable to browse without dissecting everything in front of her.
“You notice every fit, and you notice every seam, and you notice every construction detail,” she said. “Why is it that you gravitate towards that one white tee versus another white tee? That part of my brain is always on.”
Srivastava has spent much of her career thinking about why people fall in love with certain objects. As Anthropologie’s chief creative officer of design, she leads design across the retailer’s women’s apparel business. She grew up in India and moved to the U.S. for fashion school at FIT, landing in New York, where she spent close to two decades working at design houses like Adrianna Papell and Liz Claiborne. She joined Anthropologie over a decade ago and, true New Yorker that she is, spent a full year commuting two hours each way from the city before finally settling in Philadelphia, where the retailer is headquartered.
