Founder & Principal
Lydia Smith
Lydia Smith built her 17+ year career as an executive inside the brands she now advises. At Victoria's Secret, she led the launch of the first adaptive bra line in company history, debuting at New York Fashion Week. Her insight doesn't just come from theory. It comes from having held the seat and done the work.
She built A New Thing to bring that same operator rigor to companies ready to unlock new growth by connecting cultural insight, commercial strategy, and the people who bring it all to life.
Meet Lydia
She's not offering theory. She's offering what she's already built.
Outside the frameworks and boardrooms, Lydia is a published author, professor, and mother. She thinks in systems — the same instinct that makes her strategy work — but she's never just the logic. She's creative and pragmatic in the same breath, with the kind of judgment that comes from making real decisions with real consequences. Music, travel, dancing, and time with the people she loves are where she recharges and, often, where the pattern recognition she brings to client work begins.
The Corporate Career
Lydia built her corporate career across Fortune 500 companies — GE, Northwestern Mutual, and Kohl's — before becoming Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President of Inclusive Marketing at Victoria's Secret.
Her Victoria's Secret years are worth a closer look, not because they're the most recent chapter, but because they're the clearest proof of how she actually works.
How She Actually Works
Nobody had built the bridge between the idea and a commercial reality. Lydia did.
For years, the idea of an adaptive bra had floated around inside Victoria's Secret — the kind of idea that gets mentioned in a meeting and then quietly disappears.
It took more than a good concept. Design, marketing, merchandising, and the DEI function weren't working together, so she built the systems and management infrastructure that got them functioning as one unit around a single product. She identified and onboarded Runway of Dreams, not as a PR moment, but as a strategic community partner whose involvement gave the launch authentic credibility with the disability community. She secured executive sponsorship from the Chief Design Officer and CEO, and held onto it through the internal battles that followed, including fighting for in-store shelf space when the sales numbers didn't yet justify it on paper.
The result
The first adaptive bra and panty in Victoria's Secret history, launched at New York Fashion Week. It sold through, was extended in colors and sizes, and is still on shelf today.
Going Independent
Lydia later left the corporate seat to build A New Thing, taking on fractional CMO and Head of Marketing work for brands like 31Originals. The budgets and built-out teams of a Fortune 500 company weren't there anymore, but the results held up anyway. The scale had changed. Her ability to diagnose, build, and move the work forward hadn't.
What She Believes
"It's one system, not three priorities competing for attention."
Lydia isn't checking DEI boxes. She believes a brand's cultural relevance depends on staying authentic to its own mission, vision, and identity while genuinely understanding the customer in front of it now — and that representation alone doesn't prove that understanding.
A brand can look like its customer and still miss what that customer actually needs. Cultural relevance is difficult to build without inclusivity at the center of it, and commercial results are difficult to build without cultural relevance. To Lydia, none of it is separable.
Recent Work
That’s the exact gap she identified at Black Opal. The scaling beauty brand’s growth had plateaued, and the issue wasn’t the product or the customer. It was the voice. The brand’s messaging hadn’t evolved at the same pace as its customer had, creating a gap between how Black Opal spoke and what its customer actually wanted and needed in 2026.
Lydia led the strategy and activation to close that gap, sharpening the brand’s voice, strengthening its connection to the community, and bringing greater cultural relevance to its marketing. During her tenure, the brand saw measurable gains in social media engagement, conversion, and average order value.
Today
A systems thinker who's built things from the inside of a boardroom and from the outside as an independent operator — who still shows up as a whole person while she does it.
Lydia doesn't leave the creative, the emotional, or the pragmatic at the door for either. That's the version of her every client actually works with.