Reinvention from QVC to Garnet Hill

Currently serving as the president of direct-to-consumer retailer Garnet Hill, Connie Hallquist (MBA ’91) has experienced a broad range of roles and a number of reinventions during her career.

Hallquist came to Darden as a career switcher. After working in banking trading currencies (putting an undergrad French degree to unorthodox use), she was searching for a long-term career and a transition into marketing. Imposter syndrome reared its head at first. “I had so many doubts,” she recalled, but ultimately, her learning team eased the stress when she realized, “We’re all here to help each other.”

Hallquist’s career-switch gambit worked, as she landed a brand management job at Kraft Foods after Darden. When the dotcom boom reached a fever pitch in 1999, Hallquist took a leap. She founded Gold Violin, which sold products for senior citizens. When the NASDAQ crashed in 2000, one week after the company shipped its first product, Hallquist had to think outside the box — and she found an unlikely lifeline in TV shopping network QVC. Hallquist found herself in the unenviable position of needing to go live on-air at the last minute.

“This was about company survival,” she said. “I either did this, or we would go down in flames. So I dug deep, I pushed outside my comfort zone, and I walked onto that stage set and spent the next four years on live television saving our company.”

But another inflection point came through the sudden loss of her husband, Brian Cowan (MBA ’91), to brain cancer in 2019. “Everything happened so fast,” she said. “He was 61 when he passed away, the picture of health. I never even conceived of something like that happening.” Navigating grief took time. “There are things in life — it could be divorce, loss of a spouse, loss of a parent or child — that you’ll deal with during your career. How you handle that if you have a busy career or you’re in a leadership role, how you come out the other side, nobody talks about that. We have a long way to go.”

After taking a year to process the loss, help manage the sale of Cowan’s company and spend time with their children, Hallquist wondered what she would do next. She knew she had plenty of options in theory, but “it was really hard at that point. I had always been recruited. I had never been unemployed. I was a little lost.” But her powerful network worked its magic, and today Hallquist is leading as president of Garnet Hill through the shocks of COVID, remote work and beyond.

— Molly Mitchell