Small Business Survival Series Speaker

Michael Celestino is a highly accomplished senior luxury retail executive with a distinguished career in developing strategies and leading successful sales, marketing, merchandising, and operational concepts for growth focused and extremely competitive organizations. Michael has mentored many executives across all aspects of luxury retail to add great value to the organization they supported and to their own personnel growth. During his successful career, Mr. Celestino has continually applied his leadership, focused decision-making abilities to conceive, develop, and implement strategies that expand market share, increase sales, and make a lasting presence in new domestic and international marketplaces.

Michael is an expert in building brand recognition, opening new operations, and launching innovative retail concepts within highly competitive luxury-brands. Across his career, he shows a proven track record in consistently delivering innovations to generate new revenue streams, eliminate aged inventories, improve service levels and improve operational productivity. Mr. Celestino has learned, incorporated, and supported vital changes in technology and e-commerce to the strategic advantage of his employers.

Most recently, Mr. Celestino is the CEO of The Greater Mahopac Carmel Chamber of Commerce and has been consulting for variety of companies to help develop and improve wholesale, brick and mortar and e-commerce businesses. Mr. Celestino has served as President of retail at Elie Tahari where he was responsible for all retail channels including e-commerce. Mr. Celestino has also served as Executive Vice President of Stores and Operations for Barney’s of New York. During his illustrious 20-year tenure, Mr. Celestino was a driving force behind all facets of bottom-line growth within 45 store locations. Under his leadership Barney’s expanded it organization by 30 stores, including the opening of 5 new flagship stores. He leveraged his extensive industry experience and understanding of consumer trends to launch a highly successful COOP concept to support the expansion of sportswear and accessories categories. Mr. Celestino continually remained ahead of the curve and led Barney’s to substantial growth in sales and consumer spend by emphasizing key business categories, developing / facilitating seasonal merchant planning meetings, and focusing management and sales staff on building and retaining strong client relationships.

Mr. Celestino originally was recruited to join Barney’s as Store Manager of its original flagship store from Saks Fifth Ave. He was challenged by senior leadership to bring a fresh approach to restructuring store operations due to opening of a new store on Madison Avenue. He quickly demonstrated his leadership abilities and inclusive management style to gain the respect and trust of long-term executives and employees, resulting in smooth transformation in corporate culture and acceptance of new ideas to drive business. Mr. Celestino developed and implemented a strategy that effectively responded to the reduction in sales volumes by improving and refocusing on merchandise assortments and downsizing both personnel and product categories. He was rewarded for his efforts in this role, along with providing the vision and strategy for growth and management in the following four years, through the promotion into Executive Vice President position.

Mr. Celestino started his career with Saks Fifth on the executive training program and learned all aspects of the high-end retail merchandising through performing as a buyer, merchandise manager and in other diverse management positions within the organization.