“My passion for fashion started at a very young age.“
Sonia Syngal is the newly appointed CEO of GAP Inc. Prior to this appoinment, Sonia previously worked under the GAP Inc umbrella where she served Old Navy as the EVP of global supply chain and product operations. As CEO of GAP Inc., she is now is apart of the small group of female CEOs leading Fortune 500 companies.
Nationality: Indian-American
Industry: Retail
Question: Adriann Negreros (Stanford Interview): Appreciate it. You know, Sonia, there’s a lot of my talk about, let’s just dive right in. Learning more about you and your family it became very clear to me you have their support forever. Your mom recognized your natural creativity, your design skill. Your father said Sonia, you can break any barrier out there in the male dominated corporate world. That sounds like a pretty unique upbringing to me. Could you tell us more about it?
Answer: My passion for fashion started at a very young age. You’re right. I was 12 years old, I was five foot seven and 95 pounds and nothing fit. So for me, it was a necessity born of, or an invention born of necessity. We didn’t have a lot of money, I had to make my own clothes so that I felt good about what I wore. And my mother was amazing driving me around Montreal to any fabric store that I wanted and really enabled that creativity. In addition, one of the things I’m really grateful for her is she made sure that I could be highly functional in any room. And she insisted that, every weekend we socialize with her friends and family and other people that just happen to wander through our house. And it was an expectation that we would talk engage with adults from a very early age. And as I’ve walked into all the various scenarios this year that’s been quite helpful. So for the, my father, really just expecting us to do, my sister, and I to reach whatever height we wanted and that really being the expectation to education, which is what brought me to Stanford.
