Tattoos and skateboarding are perhaps not the usual topics of conversation during a CEO interview, but Joanna Allen was keen to convey to the Graze team that she was more than a corporate suit flown in from its new owner when she took on the role leading the business after it was acquired by Unilever a year earlier.
“I was very conscious that I would be perceived as someone coming in from a corporate background,” she says, having spent five years at Unilever managing the global brands for Hellman’s and Sure deodorant. “I definitely wanted people to feel like I was a human being and I respected the culture of Graze.”
That meant showing off her ink, her husband’s career as a pro skateboarder and talking as much about her kids as her career. It worked: Allen joined Graze at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and set about, in her words, transforming the business from a “gangly teenager” to a “slightly more mature 20-something”.