Core capabilities
Key appointments we deliver include:
- Chief Executive Officer / Founder Scale-up
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Chief Commercial Officer
- VP Digital & Commerce
- Chief Scientific Officer / Medical Director
- Operations Director
The Essenta difference
Why Essenta?
Combining deep sector crossover, global consumer networks, and leadership Advisory to help high-growth brands scale with confidence.
Deep sector expertise
Specialist coverage across beauty, wellness, longevity, health and consumer technology
Global talent networks
We know where relevant leadership sits beyond the obvious beauty competitor set — across wellness, healthcare, media, technology and the wider consumer landscape.
Proprietary Discovery Process
We evaluate candidates beyond direct competitors to assess cross-functional agility and cultural alignment.
Context-led Assessment
Combining Executive Search with Leadership Assessment to structure agile leadership teams for your next growth stage.
Case studies
Proven lasting impact
We bring deep sector crossover, global consumer networks and leadership Advisory to help high-growth brands scale with confidence.
Related experts
The team behind our beauty, wellness & longevity solutions
Cara Sawyer
Senior Associate, Consumer
B2C
London
Ewan Peaston
Consultant, Consumer
B2C
London
Jiarong Guo
Consultant, Consumer
B2C
London
Lily Stripe
Associate, Consumer
B2C
London
Nanda Veldink
Senior Partner, Consumer
B2C
London
Sebastien Cavanagh
Senior Partner, Consumer
B2C
London
Isobel Stevenson
Consultant, Consumer
B2C
London
Connect with Cara 
Email Cara 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
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
Jiarong helps consumer businesses find the leaders who can take them across borders. She advises on senior leadership appointments in international markets, with a particular focus on fashion, beauty, sports, lifestyle, and consumer goods. Her clients include global brands, private equity-backed businesses and founder-led companies across Europe and Asia, all growing, transforming, or expanding internationally.
Cross-border search is Jiarong’s specialism. She helps international businesses build leadership capability in Asia, and partners with Asian companies as they expand into Europe and other global markets. Her work spans CEO, president and general management appointments, as well as senior commercial, brand, retail and people leadership roles.
Jiarong works closely with clients to understand not only the experience a role requires, but the business ambition, leadership dynamics and cultural context behind it. This helps her identify and engage leaders who can handle complexity, work effectively across cultures and make a real impact as businesses evolve.
Jiarong has more than a decade of experience in Executive Search, where she advised clients across private equity, financial services and a range of other industries.
Her route into search has been a less direct one. A mathematics graduate, she began her career in banking, then moved into executive education as a programme manager at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. There, her interest in business, leadership and the people behind organizations grew, and it eventually led her into Executive Search.
Personal perspective
Our work takes more than industry knowledge and a feel for how markets are moving. It takes humanity too: empathy, integrity, openness and a genuine curiosity about people. That matters even more across cultures. Great leadership starts with understanding people deeply, what drives them and what makes them different. Give people with different perspectives and backgrounds the space to be at their best, and that’s often where something extraordinary happens.
Professional overview
Lily is an Associate in Essenta’s B2B practice, working across the full arc of a search, from mapping the market and identifying talent to engaging and assessing candidates. She supports Executive Search projects in fashion, beauty, consumer goods and lifestyle for global brands, private equity-backed businesses and founder-led companies across Europe and the US.
She works closely with clients and colleagues to understand what each business needs, what the leadership role demands and the context around it, then turns that into targeted search strategies and useful candidate insights.
Lily joined Essenta in 2025 as a graduate, and began her Executive Search journey from there, and has since built expertise across the international consumer markets.
Personal perspective
Search is both analytical and deeply human. Every business has its own identity, ambitions and culture, so finding the right leader means understanding how a person’s values, perspective and approach will fit that context. I’m curious about what motivates people, how they think and what they bring to a team, and I try to bring a creative, rounded view to each assignment. For me, the right appointment is about creating the conditions for both the individual and the organization to thrive.
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.
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
Thirteen years in search, across the UK, US and APAC, have taught Isobel to recognize a business at its most critical turning point. She partners with ambitious companies as they grow or transform, working as a key member within Essenta’s B2C team. Isobel runs the delivery of searches for listed, investor-backed and privately held organizations across a broad range of consumer industries and services.
Isobel joined Essenta in 2026. She began her career in London, in the Financial Officers practices at Eton Bridge and Blackwood, then spent four years working overseas before returning to the UK.
Personal perspective
No leader is one trait wide, so no assessment should be either. I aim to bring together the tangible, quantifiable side of a leader’s skills and the more qualitative, behavioural insights, so our clients get a true picture of the impact that person could have in their organization.
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.