Core capabilities
Key appointments we deliver include:
- Chair & Non Executive Director/Independent Board Director
- Chief Executive Officer / Managing Director
- Chief Marketing / Commercial/Revenue/Growth Officers
- Chief Product / Merchandising Officers
- Technology Officers
- Supply Chain & Operations
The Essenta difference
Why Essenta?
Combining global coverage, listed and private capital expertise, and brand sensitivity to secure leaders who deliver sustainable commercial results.
Deep sector expertise
Deep expertise across apparel, footwear, accessories, and luxury brands combining both a creative product and commercial growth lens.
Global talent networks
Truly international network spanning North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific accessing all global markets.
Every ownership model
Extensive experience advising across PLCs, private capital assets, and founder-led disruptors at every stage of growth.
Context-led Assessment
Reading true business context, stage, challenge, and operating model, rather than assessing career history alone.
Case studies
Proven lasting impact
See how retail and lifestyle brands have found leaders who combine creative instinct with commercial capability.
Sebastien Cavanagh
Senior Partner, Consumer
B2C
London
Katriona Windsor
Partner, Consumer
B2C
London
Ewan Peaston
Consultant, Consumer
B2C
London
Cara Sawyer
Senior Associate, Consumer
B2C
London
Emily Little
Principal, Consumer
B2C
New York
Natasha Lewis
Consultant, Consumer
B2C
New York
Nanda Veldink
Senior Partner, Consumer
B2C
London
Stephen Menkes
Senior Associate, Financial Officers, Technology and Digital
Financial Officers
Technology and Digital
New York
Connect with Sebastien 
Email Sebastien Professional overview
Seb has spent more than 25 years helping consumer organizations build their boards and management teams. A member of Essenta’s Senior Leadership team, he co-heads its Consumer divisions and is responsible for building the firm’s reputation across consumer industries in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific.
He is also closely involved in developing Essenta’s broader offering, including Assessment, Advisory, Interim and referencing. Seb’s time is split equally between publicly listed and private capital-backed businesses, which gives him a clear sense of what each requires, separately or together.
Having worked globally for most of his career, Seb has supported organizations and investors with both domestic and international growth ambitions. His clients range from public companies to private equity-backed businesses building towards secondary, tertiary and IPO capital events.
Personal perspective
A strong leader creates followership. A healthy balance of EQ and IQ builds the trust and loyalty at the heart of high-performing teams, and finding and qualifying those teams is what motivates me. That’s why executive referencing is now so focused on those qualities, particularly when growth and transformation sit at the heart of a business’s strategy.
Professional overview
Scaling, transforming, going digital: Katriona works with consumer businesses at the moments when leadership matters most. As a Partner at Essenta, she works with boards, investors and management teams across private equity-backed, growth equity and publicly listed businesses, finding exceptional leaders for ambitious organizations in complex, high-growth and transformational environments.
Her work spans consumer, consumer technology and consumer services, with a keen focus on leadership teams driving scale, digital growth and value creation. She advises on executive and non-executive appointments, bringing deep sector knowledge and a rigorous understanding of what sustains performance. Katriona’s approach is pragmatic. She takes time to understand the business, its context and the leadership it needs for its next phase.
Before joining Essenta, Katriona spent 17 years in specialist, boutique environments, building deep expertise in Executive Search and the consumer sector. Most recently she spent three years at Founders Keepers, the Executive Search arm of Founders Forum, advising investor-backed businesses on board appointments. Before that, she spent 14 years at The Talent Business, where she led the European Executive Search business, working with consumer and creative-led organizations on senior leadership appointments.
She began her career in client services at Havas and McCann Erickson, which gave her an early grounding in consumer brands and the commercial and creative dynamics that shape them. That mix of sector knowledge and search experience has underpinned her work with boards, investors and management teams ever since.
Personal perspective
The best leadership appointments come from understanding what a business will need in the future, as well as what it needs today. I take the time to sink my teeth into an organization’s context, ambitions and culture, and I’m candid with both clients and candidates about what it will take to succeed. The aim is always a thoughtful, well-informed appointment that works for the business and the individual over the long term.
Professional overview
Ewan advises consumer brands on senior leadership appointments as part of Essenta’s B2C team, working across consumer packaged goods, health and beauty, fashion and apparel, and sports and lifestyle, in particular.
His work goes well beyond Executive Search. Ewan also leads market insight, talent mapping, and succession planning projects. Having partnered with clients across a wide range of functional disciplines, he sees how consumer businesses build and structure their leadership teams, end to end.
Before joining Essenta, Ewan spent three years at Fortune Hill Executive Search, specializing in commercial and marketing within the European consumer market. He started out as a researcher, moved into account management and ultimately led the delivery teams, so he knows the work from the ground up.
Personal perspective
The best leadership appointments come from understanding not just what a candidate has achieved, but how they achieved it: how they’ve built teams, navigated change and made difficult decisions under pressure. Consumer businesses move fast, and the leaders who succeed in them are rarely the ones who look best on paper alone. Our job is to get past that and find the person who will genuinely thrive in the context our clients are asking them to lead in.
Professional overview
A Senior Associate within Essenta’s B2C practice, supporting PE-backed, and publicly listed businesses across the US and Europe. Cara’s consumer experience is broad, with a notable focus on CPG – including health and beauty, food and beverage, alongside sports, lifestyle, fashion, and apparel.
Prior to joining Essenta, Cara worked in an independent recruitment business. This was where she developed a keen, detail-oriented approach and ultimately learned to work at pace across multiple searches.
Personal perspective
I believe great leadership is about bringing clarity to complexity, building trust, and creating an environment where people can do their best work. A strong strategy and good results matter, but so does how you bring people with you along the way.
I bring the same approach to Executive Search: taking the time to understand people, what motivates them, and what they could bring to an organization. The goal is to connect exceptional people with businesses where they can make a meaningful impact.
Professional overview
Fashion, retail, and the wider consumer world are what Emily knows best. She has built her career recruiting C-suite and senior executives for publicly listed and private equity-backed businesses, as well as founder-owned brands.
At Essenta, she leads every stage of a search, from defining the role and mapping the market to assessing and benchmarking talent, guiding clients through to a successful hire. Her clients range from founder-led start-ups and private equity-backed portfolio companies to established public brands.
Emily’s driven by finding creative answers to complex talent challenges, giving clients and candidates an exceptional experience, and building Essenta’s reputation as the firm of choice – both to work with and to work for.
Emily joined Essenta from Herbert Mines Associates and before that, she was at Egon Zehnder, first in London and then supporting the Dallas office, mostly on retail, apparel and luxury Executive Search. Throughout her career, she has enjoyed working with both established and disruptive businesses on their senior leadership needs.
Her early career was in financial services, focused on retail and consumer, and in retail itself as a merchant.
Personal perspective
Each search is a chance to make a real difference, both to a business and to the people in it. The right leader can transform an organization and the lives of its people, and I approach every mandate with that sense of possibility. Add a naturally competitive streak, and the work is both rewarding and genuinely enjoyable.
I’ve long believed that culture is a critical driver of performance. When placing senior leaders, I give cultural fit equal weight with technical capability instead of focusing on skills alone, and in my experience that typically means longer tenures and greater success in the role.
Professional overview
Natasha brings Essenta’s international network to the US market. A Consultant in the B2C practice, she is based in New York, where she focuses on senior leadership appointments across CPG, luxury, beauty, retail and technology-enabled businesses.
She works across the full search process, from gathering market intelligence and identifying talent to assessing candidates, managing client relationships and supporting decisions. Natasha also weaves Leadership Assessment and Advisory into her searches, giving clients a fuller view of the talent landscape and the capabilities their business needs to succeed.
Her understanding of where talent is heading in her industries helps her turn business context into a clear leadership profile, a tailored search strategy and a differentiated shortlist.
Natasha studied Economics at University College London and joined Essenta in 2021, she has built her Executive Search expertise in London before having relocated to New York in 2026.
Personal perspective
A job description only tells you part of the story. The more closely you understand an industry and a company’s ambitions, challenges and culture, the better you can spot the leadership it needs. I bring that thinking to every conversation, helping clients think more broadly about the market and giving candidates a clear, honest view of the opportunity. I particularly enjoy the moments when talent gets to shape a role and make a real difference to the business.
Professional overview
As a Senior Partner at Essenta, Nanda co-leads its global B2C practice, advising listed, privately owned and private equity-backed businesses on senior leadership appointments and broader talent matters. Her work spans health and beauty, CPG and FMCG, retail, lifestyle, luxury and fashion, across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia.
Nanda has lived and worked in eight countries, including Singapore, the Middle East and the UK, and now divides her time between London and New York. The result is a culturally fluent, international perspective.
Clients value how closely Nanda listens, how well she understands their context and culture, and the care and credibility with which she represents their brand in the market. She also draws on the full breadth of Essenta’s unified talent offering to meet their evolving leadership needs and help build stronger, future-ready organizations.
Nanda has more than 15 years’ experience in Executive Search, and she specializes in complex, cross-border consumer appointments and has a strong record of challenging conventional talent assumptions to find diverse and unexpected leaders. Her international experience helps her read local nuance within a global context, and advise clients with both cultural sensitivity and commercial rigour.
Personal perspective
The best outcomes are co-created, and the real work is listening with curiosity to understand the business, its culture and context, where it wants to go and what leadership it will need to get there. That takes being personally invested, agile and creative, whether we’re shaping a role before it formally exists, benchmarking the market, assessing leadership or running an unconventional search.
I want clients to experience us as a trusted extension of their team: honest in our advice, committed to quality and able to represent their brand with real conviction. Understanding both the immediate need and where the organization is heading means we can find not just an impressive candidate, but the right leaders to close critical gaps and deliver its ambitions.
Stephen Menkes
Senior Associate, Financial Officers, Technology and Digital
Professional overview
Stephen helps companies find the leaders who drive sustainable growth and long-term value. A Senior Associate at Essenta, he leads Executive Search delivery across the North American market, advising on critical leadership appointments for private equity-backed and global public companies, across a variety of sectors and functions.
Before joining Essenta, Stephen was a recruitment consultant at a global firm, specializing in senior technology and product leadership appointments for high-growth businesses.
He partnered with companies at critical stages of growth to identify and build the teams they needed to scale and keep expanding.
Personal perspective
I’ve spent much of my life playing competitive sport, including at collegiate level, and it taught me that success starts with the right team. I approach Executive Search as a way of solving complex leadership challenges: identifying the missing pieces, bringing the right people together and building teams ready for sustained growth.
Let’s build your next leadership team
Tell us what the business needs to achieve. We will give you an honest read on the leadership challenge in front of you, and how you should approach it.