April Uchitel
“Leaders are thinking about what a modern organization looks like, and that's something I'm excited to play a role in creating.”
April Uchitel is a builder of communities and a student of modern leadership. After decades inside fashion, beauty, and technology—often at moments of reinvention—she found herself more interested in how people work than where they work.
That curiosity led her to co-found THE BOARD, a collective rooted in the belief that experience, generosity, and collaboration are the real engines of progress. April has spent her career navigating change—from scaling iconic brands to guiding founders through uncertainty—and she writes and speaks candidly about ambition, identity, and the evolving relationship between work and life.
An “accidental activist,” she is a founding member of I AM A VOTER and a longtime mentor to emerging leaders. Her perspective has been featured in Women@Forbes ,Oprah Daily, Glossy, and Ageist.
AI, TikTok, tariffs, consolidation … a lot is going on in the fashion world. You've spent much of your career in that world. What's the current "state of the union" of fashion in your eyes?
Fashion is challenged in many ways. It's been hurt hard by dupes, tariffs, supply chain challenges, overproduction, and changing consumer behavior.
Many brands struggle with customer acquisition as performance marketing has lost its previous ROI. There's a push pull with third-party partnerships like department stores, marketplaces, and all the social commerce platforms that your brand needs to show up in to capture consumer attention.
Investing in fashion now is harder due to these shifts and industry consolidation. It's dynamic, and the targets keep moving. The cost of acquisition is high, and retention can be fleeting because the next and the next and the next are always coming out. Brand loyalty is not what it used to be as there are so many options at all price-points.
I've always thought of fashion as a frenetic, moving industry that also moves in painful, snail-paced steps. Things are changing so fast, all the time, from consumer behavior to trends. The speed of fast fashion changed the game, but now we're in the hangover with so much mass product pollution. So much stuff nobody needs, yet the speed of (non-fast fashion) production cycles does not move as fast as consumers. Herein lies the challenge.
“It again goes back to product pollution. There’s just too much stuff. When trust gets eroded, consumers get confused. ”
You've also advised many beauty brands. Do you think that the industry is dealing with the same issues?
It used not to be the case in beauty but that has changed. The barrier to launching a beauty brand is lower than ever. Pick a name, create a brand story, find a manufacturer, white label a solution, spin up a website, and go on TikTok - ok I am over simplifying it … but you get the point. All of those components are more readily available than ever.
Now there are a gazillion brands, a gazillion SKUs, a lot of noise, constant navigation of influencer marketing, content creators, social commerce, and TikTok shops. Every month brings a whole new learning curve for a company. But the audience is moving fast too, so it's a bit of a whack-a-mole approach to where you put energy, effort, budgets, and time.
It again goes back to product pollution. There's just too much stuff. When trust gets eroded, consumers get confused. When we launched Augustinus Bader at Violet Grey, we had the exclusivity and two SKUs and did a million dollars in less than six months. It was incredible.
When you have endless SKUs you can lose the story and dilute the message. It usually never works when the industry/investors guide founders to raise too much money, chase paper customers and scale at all costs.
I personally respect the brand that really stays true to its mission, starts with a smaller catalog, never goes on sale, and protects the brand. It may never reach the scale of a Glossier (look how that has been going), and maybe it doesn't want to.
I think it's ok for a brand not to strive to be a $300M brand—or have a massive exit—but to build a solid business that the founder and customers love.
What was your "aha" moment when you knew you wanted to create THE BOARD?
COVID was the moment when I saw how technology has changed work, normalizing remote, taking geography out of the talent equation, and watching the mass exodus of senior leaders out of corporate into fractional and consulting work.
When I was in tech in 2013 and running around Manhattan onboarding 1,600 brands to the platform, I would sit with the people at each brand and listen to all their other problems. I realized how gated and siloed everything was. My initial idea was, How do I build Angie's List meets Tinder for brands?
So that's what I set out to do. Over the next five years, as I talked to more and more brands, people were always reaching out to me looking for a president, a formulator, or this or that. I'd become this uber connector.
I remember sitting in my bedroom during COVID, thinking this is what I want to do next. I can create a point of sale (a marketplace of people), a destination for vetted, curated, highly actionable talent that shifts with the way people want to work. This is the time. That was almost 5 years ago, and how it's evolved has been amazing.
You never know where it's going to go when you start down a new path. Founders build what they wish existed but couldn't find. For me, when I was a beauty CEO, that would have been access to experts on speed dial.
It's a tricky moment right now. Leaders are thinking about what a modern organization looks like, and that's something I'm excited to continue to unpack and play a role in creating.
“What I’m most excited about is that we have proven that generosity and ambition don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”
Has anything surprised you about how the members engage with each other?
In the beginning, we weren't a paid model. I got to 250 amazing members pretty quickly, but thought, "What exactly am I doing?" I realized many were just waiting for the phone to ring.
I wasn't into building an agency the way they were imagining; as my heart was telling me there was so much more value here. So we moved to a paid membership model, and that's when I discovered who really wants to invest and show up - and 50% left.
It's lonely when you're working from your home office after decades of being on teams. My thesis was to join forces to be stronger together. To support each other by sharing learnings, opportunities, and resources. I wanted to build the bridge.
What I'm most excited about is that we have proven that generosity and ambition don't have to be mutually exclusive. This defines the culture at THE BOARD. Here's who I know, what I know, what I need. Who do you know? What do you know? How can we exchange and help each other?
That spirit allows for all the armor to fall away. No one's bringing an ego into this. The corporate world prepares you to armor up, leave half yourself outside, come to work, and then pick your personal side back up when you leave.
Bringing both sides together in a really intentional way is something I wished for in my years of corporate roles - so I built it.
You are seemingly in constant motion. What do you do to slow down and be brainless for a moment?
I hike outside my front door here in Laurel Canyon. My savior is nature. Just walking out and doing a 45-minute loop, sometimes with music or a podcast, or just listening to the birds, the coyotes, and an occasional rattlesnake. I try not to look at texts and take phone calls.
I also love cutting and arranging flowers, so I like to forage while I'm hiking and then come home and put together a crazy arrangement of whatever I grabbed along the way out on my patio to look at from the office white I work. Bringing the canyon home. There's something in the act of arranging and making a piece of art for a few minutes. It just makes me happy.
Who's an artist we should follow, from any genre?
My sister, Brooke Fischer creates a lot of amazing activist art focused on voting, equality, women's rights and the environment. She's worked on projects with REI and Merrell.
She's done packaging design, painting, botanical photography, posters … her passion for using her gifts to champion and empower is endlessly inspiring.
