The Perfect Fit

An Interview with Gabi Marcus ’14

“This past summer was the first time I didn’t have a job since I was 12 years old,” jokes Gabi about the atypical few months after her college graduation and before she started her new job. The summer was, in fact, a rare respite for Gabi, who is enterprising and industrious by nature. Whether she is launching her own business or bringing her openness to learning and a willingness to contribute to the workplace, Gabi prioritizes receiving and offering mentorship. She consistently seeks out roles and jobs in which she can benefit from others’ experience or, inversely, use the skills she has accrued to coach and teach others.

After graduating summa cum laude from the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis this past May with a degree in Marketing and Organization & Strategic Management and a minor in Spanish, Gabi accepted the role of Assistant Merchandiser at Summersalt, a direct-to-consumer apparel brand based in St. Louis. Fewer than six months into the job, Gabi is tapping into a decade of well-earned experience, mentoring and her intrinsic business sense to help move the company forward.

Gabi has always demonstrated an appreciation for beginning at ground level. “My very first business was being a dog walker in our neighborhood when I was 10 years old. I rang doorbells and offered to walk people’s dogs for free so that I could get experience.” After a few fizzles, Gabi launched her own startup in fifth grade at Schechter by crocheting and selling colorful trellis scarves for $25.00 each. “Everybody was walking down the hallway wearing them, and kids were buying them for their mothers. I came to school with a bag of scarves every day. I made about $2,000.00, and I was so grateful to the Schechter community for supporting me. It ended up being a huge part of why I ended up majoring in business.” Fittingly, Gabi penned her college essay on her entrepreneurial work, highlighting the false starts that paved the way for the eventual success of the scarf sales.

“In the startup ecosystem, there is a lot of freedom to do what you want and to create a for-profit business that is potentially solving a problem. The intersection between profit and social impact is really cool,” observes Gabi. As a student at Natick High School, she chanced upon a job posting for an Operations Assistant at the women’s clothing company, NIC+ZOE. “I had always been drawn to fashion and trends. The job was filing and data entry. While my work didn’t really have as big of an impact as it does now, I was getting experience in a corporate office, which was really big as a high-schooler and which I knew I could leverage later. I admired the merchandising team because they were a middleman between the hyper creative design department and the hyper analytical planning department. It was right in the middle which is where I like to operate. I have always described myself as being at the crossroads of creativity and analytics.”

Mentorship has been a consistent throughline in Gabi’s work, both volunteer and professional. In recognizing the benefits she has derived from the guidance of experienced supervisors, she has been eager to offer her own skills to counsel others. In high school, Gabi volunteered with Jewish Family Service of Metrowest as part of its All Stars afterschool program. Through weekly sessions at a Framingham elementary school, she coached bilingual third-graders to bolster their self-confidence by helping them with reading, homework and overall communication skills and cultural acclimation. “It was a huge part of my high school experience,” she recalls. “Many of the kids were reading two or three grades below grade level, so we worked to close the achievement gaps along with providing free after school care.” She was honored with a JFS monthly volunteer spotlight in November 2015 and received the Ellen Bloch Youth Leadership Award in 2017.

As a freshman at Washington University, Gabi hit the ground running. “I knew I wanted to get involved right away, so I applied for an Olin Peer Ambassadors (OPA) Executive Board position as the Co-Director of Events. I planned the Accepted Students Weekends and the Women in Business Weekend for the business school that year.” Gabi laughs recalling the three weekends during which she barely slept and put out numerous little fires, but she was ultimately pleased with the success of the weekends. The following year, she pivoted into the role of Vice President of Mentorship which was a continuation of working with incoming students and facilitating relationships among new students and upperclassmen. “It was a really rewarding experience to have been part of new students’ transition to the university.”

Gabi took her skills into a school again during her first two years in college when she joined a group called MoneyThink. “We went to high schools in St. Louis and taught financial literacy skills to students under the guidance of their teachers. The goal was to show kids that they could afford college or that they could buy the car they need to get to work or help put dinner on the table. The class was designed to empower students to develop money management sense.”

Again, and true to her inclination to stay busy, Gabi was perusing a job board and noticed an opportunity at GiftAMeal. Despite managing full-time classes, her OPA board position and organizing Shabbat dinners and challah bakes for her Jewish sorority sisters, Gabi was drawn to the organization’s “profit with a purpose” mission. Gabi explains that every time diners take photos of their meals in participating restaurants, a meal is donated to a local food pantry. “The profit component comes in because restaurants subscribe to the app to get exposure to GiftAMeal app users. I worked directly under the CEO so I got a lot of exposure to the mission and extraordinary mentorship.” Gabi adds, “[it] was a very random thing that I saw the posting and applied, but it ended up being a really cool experience and in line with my interests.”

Random? Not really. Gabi has always actively scoured postings, ready to ferret out an intriguing opportunity whether professional or voluntary, while amassing and absorbing takeaways and know-how from every stop. The reverse has also happened in that volunteer organizations have sought out her involvement. MyMentor, a program aimed at helping international students navigate the admission process for American universities, contacted Gabi during her freshman year and invited her to come on board. She was regularly paired with a half dozen overseas students. “On top of school and my job, it was another way to get to know people I never would have met before.” During Gabi’s senior year, she was featured in “Poets and Quants,” a national news website covering business education, as one of their 100 Best & Brightest Business Majors. “The big theme in my highlight was how important mentorship is to me, both the mentorship I have received and that I hope to give back,” she explains.

Originally, Gabi thought she would pursue international business. “Wash U has these really cool short-term study abroad programs.” Gabi packed her bags for summer 2019 as part of Startups and Entrepreneurship in the EU, which offered two and a half weeks in Madrid followed by a week and a half in Sarajevo. “Spain is an EU country whereas Bosnia and Herzegovina is not, so our goal was to understand the role of the EU in startups and the role of government programs as a whole. In each country, we worked on a pro-bono consulting project with a local company. Life is just so different in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I look back on it and realize that I got to go someplace I never would have gone and do something I never would have done in my life without this program.” Gabi recounts a side trip to Srebrenica during which she was able to have a meal with her tour guide’s parents at their home. “We worked on their farm. It was this incredible, authentic experience that I will remember for the rest of my life.”

Along with stints as a Merchandising Intern at Talbots and a Buying Intern at Bloomingdales during college, Gabi says “it all came together” with an internship at Summersalt in fall 2020. “Summersalt was founded by two very empowering women, which I love. The founders’ idea was to create a swimwear line that would incorporate incredible, inclusive sizing that would be shown on women of all races, sizes, and ages and be made from recycled materials. It embodies ‘profit with a purpose’ because the company has stayed true to the ideals of inclusivity and sustainability, but is able to do it in a profitable way.”

Now back in St. Louis, where Summersalt is headquartered, Gabi is one of two team members in the new merchandising department. As the first hire in the department, she was able to craft her role to focus on tasks she likes such as the strategies for the line going forward. “We do ‘hindsight reviews’ in order to analyze what worked in the past and to decide what to take into the future. We look at competitors to see what they’re doing and figure out what we should be doing to fill that gap. Since we

At the core of Gabi’s commitment to mentorship is the heartfelt sense of fulfillment at seeing someone reach a goal. “I had a mentor through the Women’s Mentorship Program at Olin. At the time, I thought, ‘This is crazy. I can’t make it in fashion.’ My mentor redirected me and said, ‘You can.’ Giving someone else that same guidance and support, seeing them get into their dream school, seeing someone else’s excitement about getting an internship or doing well in a job is so rewarding. I love being even a tiny part of somebody’s path.”

Indeed, when Gabi says she likes being at the “crossroads” between creativity and analytics, it is an apt metaphor for someone who recognizes that the serendipitous opportunities that present themselves, the people she meets who will mentor her, and the deliberate choices that she makes all guarantee that there will be many perfect fits for her as she forges ahead.