Left Brain/Right Brain Holistic Leader Jasmine Bellamy Sees Marketplace Through “Lens of Love”

Jasmine Bellamy ’92 leads with her whole brain and whole heart. Formerly the vice president of merchandising, planning and allocation for Reebok, she led all aspects of the company’s public interface. As a leader of the company’s change management initiatives, she had been transforming company culture and influencing the national conversation.

Bellamy thrives on combining the left-brained logic of her degree in marketing management from the Whitman School with the right-brained creativity she used to revamp an entertainment publication while at Syracuse. Today, she combines academic and practical sides of business in the Capstone project for a data analytics class of Associate Professor of Accounting Willie Reddic G’12, ’13 Ph.D., in which students study Reebok’s data and create proposals to improve merchandising. “It’s a piece that I enjoy most, that I get to have both the right and the left brain engaged, where I can drive through the P&L, but also… help cultivate lifestyle brands that resonate with their consumer base,” Bellamy says. “That’s what I’ve always loved about my job, that it is both art and science.”

On the merchandising and planning side, Bellamy handled all aspects of how the brand appears and what products are sold. As a former member of Reebok’s senior leadership team, Bellamy led the company’s culture change efforts. This includes Courageous Conversations, a forum she created to promote understanding among Reebok employees. The program, which she calls “a communal practice for culture transformation,” began as six recorded conversations. The first conversations were received so well that Bellamy led nearly two dozen conversations for Reebok and began offering a version of the program outside of the company.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Bellamy’s dual interests in creative and analytical pursuits were on display as a Syracuse student. For example, she led Happenings, a publication founded by Black students to highlight entertainment and culture on and around campus. Happenings had been on hiatus for a few years before Bellamy and some other classmates brought it back her senior year. While she did not have a background in writing, she enjoyed working alongside English and journalism majors and also lending her marketing skills to reviving the publication.

Happenings played a role in one of Bellamy’s formative Syracuse experiences. Before an on-campus interview with Lord & Taylor, Bellamy had picked up a copy of the first issue of the revived publication. Her work with Happenings came up in conversation during the interview, and she showed the interviewer the hot-off the-presses copy. She landed the job at Lord & Taylor.

 “That was one of those really beautiful moments of being practical, putting these things that you talk about, theoretically, in an interview, but showing how it’s coming to life, in your life,” Bellamy recalls. “I just remember feeling really proud of that moment, because of the experiences that Syracuse had afforded me.”

For the past three years, Reddic’s class has worked with Reebok for its final class project analyzing aspects of the company’s merchandising. For example, one class considered the quantities of clothing sizes sent to retailers to project future customer demand. Bellamy hopes this collaboration can give current Whitman students practical lessons that they can take to interviews just as she had.

A Joyful Disruptor

Recent years brought about an evolution in how Bellamy approaches her work, as she seeks to move beyond the skills of simply doing the job to “developing into a more integrated leader.” This philosophy led directly to the Courageous Conversations program at Reebok, as well as to a doctoral program at Fuller Theological Seminary she began in the fall of 2023 studying “redemptive imagination of the marketplace.”

As Bellamy, who calls herself a “joyful disrupter,” has brought together the analytical and emotional sides of herself in recent years, she says she’s also seen changes in the company culture around her. For example, one member of her team recently mentioned that she felt more free to take a risk that was ultimately helpful for the company.

 “That invitation to lead change management really was fueled by how I was evolving internally, myself,” she says. “It really became a moment of convergence, where all of me really showed up to work for the first time. And it’s transformed, not just me as a human, but also how I lead an organization, how I lead a team, how I see others rise up and grow because of the way I lead.

By Suzi Morales