Gallatin alumnus Elliot Greenfield has always had a passion for fashion retailing, but he didn’t want to pursue the field academically until he went to NYU. After acquiring many jobs and industries since the university and later, Greenfield was able to rise to the top marketing position at Swarovski, a world-renowned crystal jewelry company, six years after graduation.
Swarovski, under the popular name, collects revenues of around $2 billion a year. The company’s high quality gems and gems can be found both naturally and by themselves in approximately 2,800 stores in 170 countries around the world.
In an interview with WSN, Greenfield navigated NYU schools, experimented throughout the industry and discussed working with Swarovski celebrities.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
WSN: What were the highlights of your time as a Gallatin student?
Greenfield: I loved fashion business practice. That was my highlight from a lesson perspective. I also loved the media and fashion courses taught by Moya Luckett. There were several different courses, both offered to the general student population and the courses I built in collaboration with my trusted advisors and professors. I was also very specific to having the broadest experiences during my internship. So with each internship, I took on a different subject within the retail or entertainment industry. It was really important to diversify the experiences I had before selecting my focus area for my full-time role, whether it was sales, communication, finance or digital. I worked every semester during my semester at NYU. Except for the semester I studied abroad in Florence, full-time adult professional life was extremely important to my current success.
Greenfield’s academic journey at NYU was not linear. He originally majored in media, culture and communication at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, but found himself looking for flexibility in his education. So, with a deep-rooted passion for fashion retail, Greenfield decided to move to a Gallatin School of Individual Research and pursue a focus on “fashion and entertainment as social and cultural derivatives.”
From marketing and communication roles for companies such as Burberry and NBCuniversal to freelance in fashion news publications, Greenfield graduated from NYU in 2016 and graduated with extensive experience. However, he said his first job after graduation was in a very different position from any role he had ever had – a mailroom attendant at New York’s Paradigm Talent Agency.
WSN: After graduating, how did you realize you are working as a mail-room attendant?
Greenfield: Within talent institutions, the institutional way to grow within an organization is to start in the mail room. All the leading Hollywood agencies have the same kind of workflow and promotional processes. I started from there, and I was helping out with the Shadowing Agent and I didn’t see my own trajectory just as I knew some of my peers had seen it for myself. “What should I do next?” I really missed out on the fashion and retail and apparel area. It wasn’t integrated into the agency work, as I probably would have liked. So I left the agency and went to work at Calvin Klein. There, I started as a global marketing coordinator for Calvin Klein underwear.
Greenfield worked for about five years at Calvin Klein, a fashion brand known for designer jeans and underwear. By the second half of 2020, he had been promoted to Senior Director of Global Marketing roles and received the CLIO Award in 2018, internationally recognising his creative marketing strategy for his work in the “My Family #Mycalvins” campaign.
He left Calvin Klein after women’s fashion label Tory Burch asked if he wanted to join the brand to build an integrated marketing team in the role of senior director. However, Greenfield was only with the company for a year before Swarovski reached out and tied to his current role.
As Vice President and Head of Marketing and Communications at Swarovski, Greenfield leads retail and trade marketing strategies, visual merchandising, public relations and more. Additionally, he oversees Swarovski’s influencer and celebrity team, establishing a prominent collaboration with Skim (a shapewear line founded by Kim Kardashian), creating a line of accessories, and Ariana Grande creates a collection of silver jewelry.
WSN: What inspired you to start a partnership with Swarovski celebrities?
Greenfield: I’m part of a company that was 130 years ago. That long-established company must continue to engage with young customers and find ways to continue to find ways to bring young customers into the brand. These various partnerships, celebrity endorsements, campaigns and projects reflect just that what we’ve done over the past few years. How do you continue to modernize your business and brand? My mother, grandmother, or great grandmother have collected works from the brand, so how do I introduce the brand to young consumers who may have known it for generations? It is our job to continue protecting our core customers and fight for more.
Greenfield also said the company launched synthetic-grown diamonds in 2023 and worked with many celebrities to support the product at the 2024 Academy Awards, including Jennifer Lawrence and the Met Gala model.
Greenfield said Swarovski is planning a special product release to celebrate this year’s 130th birthday. He will also talk at Digital Marketing World Forumhighlights senior marketing leaders in October.
WSN: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
Greenfield: What I really believe in is myself. I know it sounds cliché, but not everyone has to get it all right. That’s the purpose of teamwork – trust you really are good at being good, trust the people you work with and trust that means they are good at, and that’s when you find the greatest success. Be confident in yourself. That way you will exude that confidence in the people you work with. But you have to find that confidence in it. There are no connections or resources that are different to the average person. I was just an ordinary student at NYU, just like everyone else. I made all this happen myself. People can do that – they have to find their inner self-confidence and find what stands out in the workplace.
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