biography
Virginia Saussy has built successful brands and made struggling businesses into stable success stories. With over thirty years of experience in marketing, sales, advertising, public relations and business development, she knows how to make a brand iconic and plan a path to the next level of achievement. She is able to balance creativity and sound advice.
While working with Sucre, a New Orleans based Sweet Boutique and confection studio, Virginia strengthened administrative management, reorganized fulfillment and revamped sales and marketing efforts. Within eighteen month she had defined a wholesale product line and introduced a beloved local brand to the national gourmet and specialty food marketplace, expanding distribution by over three hundred percent.
In her extensive tenure at Mignon Faget, Ltd., Virginia Saussy enabled company growth through strong branding and relationship marketing, taking sales from $1.3 M to over $13 M; and saving the company from tragedy after Hurricane Katrina. She developed the company's first ever customer database, which would become essential to the future of growth. She established this local jewelry business woman as an artist and designer, connected community leader, philanthropist and Louisiana legend, securing her place in history with a traveling retrospective exhibition in 2011 at the Historic New Orleans Collection. The exhibit traveled to the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge in 2012.
Virginia spent several years in corporate America developing the telephonic wireless that would become Verizon Wireless through marketing demographics and negotiated roaming agreements, pioneering the wireless retail industry with innovative strategy and rate plans still used today. She encouraged a national corporation to value localized marketing and used it to build brand strength and customer loyalty.
After Hurricane Katrina, Virginia used her skills to repopulate a devastated New Orleans neighborhood, engaging property owners and citizens of New Orleans to force its survival and establishing Broadmoor as the come-back story of the city. Her devotion to her city has benefited numerous community organizations. She is a charter member, twenty year officer, theme chairwoman, and a creative force behind one of the city’s most popular carnival organizations, The Krewe of Muses.
Virginia Saussy has been honored with numerous awards including Gambit Magazine’s 40 Under 40 (2002), Newcomb College Outstanding Alumnae (2006), and Top Female Achiever by New Orleans Magazine (2012) and is a frequent speaker at area universities. She was also a featured speaker at the Katrina 10 TedX talks series commemorating the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Beginning her career in advertising agencies as a copy writer, media buyer and account executive, Virginia realized her marketing passion was to understand and impact all aspects of the marketing spectrum, from product research to concept to advertising to sales to distribution to customer service, giving her the perspective to guarantee success.
Her latest ventures have included opening her own business, the instantly iconic NOLA Craft Culture (which she later sold). Since starting her consulting business in 2013, she has aided dozens of businesses.
Virginia continues to support businesses of all types and sizes through consulting. She does public speaking engagements at area universities and to visitors and locals. She, of course, speaks about marketing, but her favorite topics are Women in Mardi Gras and the Birth of the Krewe of Muses. Virginia is also a writer and in the past has been published in The Times Picayune and St. Charles Avenue Magazine. She is currently working on a book of retail sales advice.