SPOTLIGHT: TIGIST KETEMA

Founder, Tigist Petites®

Written by Kate Troiano

One thing about NYWICI members is that we refuse to accept the status quo. That’s especially true for Tigist Ketema, who has spent her career noticing what doesn’t exist for women like her, and building it herself.

Tigist is a global marketing executive and brand-builder, having led global brand, digital, content, operations, and event marketing functions worldwide. She is a creator at heart, designing luxury collections featured in Vogue and carried by global retailers including Wolf & Badger. In 2022, Tigist launched Tigist Petites, a luxury workwear brand for women under 5’4”, created for a historically overlooked and underserved market.

NYWICI member and volunteer Kate Troiano sat down with Tigist to understand what it means to reject the norm, innovate, and build the spaces you want to see for yourself and women around you.

Closing the clothing gap

At 5’0’’ tall, frustrated by a lack of clothing options in the corporate space that made her feel feminine and powerful, Tigist found herself choosing between workwear that fit terribly but was professional, or clothes that fit better but weren’t professional. One day, perusing a department store, she found a dress that fit perfectly – only to realize it was in the children’s section.

As she moved up the corporate ladder, she found herself thinking more about her appearance and how she wanted to present herself in the workplace. Tigist explains that as she grew more senior in her roles, even though she had experience successfully building and growing global teams, physical appearance still mattered – and she wanted to show up with authority. This impact wasn’t just in her head – new research even suggests that when workers wear clothes they feel good about, they perform better.

“Clothes say a lot before you open your mouth – they represent how you relate to the world and how it relates to you.”

Refusing to resign to a life of ill-fitting clothing (and the very real career ramifications that come along with it), Tigist built what was missing. Captivated by the idea of what power ‘looks like,’ she identified patterns everywhere from Wall Street to Davos, noticing trends in how leaders show up in the rooms where decisions are being made. “How do I adapt this to the petite form?” she asked herself. “How do I give women like me that power while still helping us feel feminine?”

“Why should petite women accept the world the way it is when the world is not built for them?”

While Tigist Petites launched with a focused collection of work dresses, its broader vision is to create a world where women under 5’4” are a starting point in design, rather than an afterthought. Given that the average height of women in the U.S. is 63.5 inches, the brand challenges long-standing industry assumptions about who clothing is actually made for.

Build for impact

Tigist’s appetite for building from scratch didn’t start with creating more clothing options for women. She began her career in marketing and professional services, rising from a digital marketing specialist to head of a global marketing department in less than ten years. In subsequent roles, she built entire marketing functions from scratch, encouraging her communications teams to swap B2C or B2B for H2H – “human to human.

Before AI became widely embedded in marketing workflows, Tigist transformed revenue streams by integrating owned channels and launching initiatives across SEM, SEO, and emerging areas like GEO. As a global marketing executive, she built and scaled multi-channel marketing functions from the ground up.

As AI capabilities evolved, she became an early adopter and internal advocate, leading efforts to integrate AI-driven tools and efficiencies across marketing operations, including the development of AI agents to support various functions.

Before that, Tigist built an entire marketing workstream for an EMEA telecoms company hoping to establish operations in the US, setting them up as a US subsidiary and presenting more ‘‘American” – paving the way for them to become a preferred vendor of the federal government. She cut her teeth as a product developer for a major watch company at the start of her career, working with brands like BCBGMAXAZRIA and Ted Baker.

Passionate about international relations, history, and globalization, Tigist has degrees from around the globe. She completed her undergrad in Marketing & International Business at NYU Stern and a postgraduate degree in Fashion Design at Parsons. After that, Tigist completed, a Globalization and Multinational Corporations Masters’ program at London SOAS. She credits the school’s focus on understanding the economic, political, and social dynamics of corporate-led globalization with making her a more knowledgeable global citizen, helping her grow the critical thinking skills essential to a global career.

Be your own mentor

One of the main barriers to entry to building from scratch, Tigist maintains, is the sheer number of tasks it takes to get started. It’s overwhelming, for example, to go from “zero’”to “company”. When founding Tigist Petites, the enormity of the task felt demoralizing at times, especially while juggling a full-time corporate job. So, she tackled each task one at a time – telling herself “today,

just form the LLC; today, just look up a factory”. Getting started takes not only the strategy and operations savvy to understand what’s involved, but also a fundamental belief in yourself to take the first steps.

Often operating with a high degree of autonomy – as a marketing executive and now, as a founder – Tigist learned quickly that she had to trust her inner compass. Without a traditional mentor who had walked the same path, much of her approach involved simply trying things out and seeing what worked. This wouldn’t have been possible, she notes, without building a strong, reliable team from whom she was eager to learn. She cites a key element of her management style as giving her teams a high level of ownership and responsibility over projects, and after six months, expecting them to lead, innovate, and implement new ideas.

Navigating an untraditional career path only strengthened the need to “trust her gut” – which Tigist realized several years later was, in fact, making decisions based on decades of experience, rather than just acting on a “gut feeling.”

The power of connection

It’s exciting to have the opportunity to build things, but Tigist reflects on how being the only marketing executive in a company or a solo founder can be lonely. It’s difficult to create a path where there isn’t one to model.

In 2025, Tigist joined an executive group for support, where she was referred to NYWICI through another member. At NYWICI, she connected with the mission of the organization and with the women she met, energized by meaningful conversations about navigating the marketing world as a female leader. This experience resonated with her, especially given her experience working in industries where Marketing functions differently than in consumer-facing sectors.

“I met a community of like-minded women who charted their own path and made me feel ‘normal.’ “

Tigist reflects on her love of creating things from scratch, and how much she appreciates it as a unique experience, when building her community of support. “When you encounter others within NYWICI who have done the same, you have a bond with them that is unlike anything else,” she describes. “It gives you a unique perspective.”

Don’t pigeonhole yourself

Navigating an untraditional career path has its challenges, but the perspective it provides you is invaluable. When communicators early in their career ask Tigist for advice, her most essential tip is not to worry about being a generalist.

“When people get started, they tend to be generalists and within a year they are jacks of all trades and masters of none,” she explains. As someone who started her career as a generalist, it became her biggest strength – enabling her to become an effective leader across a variety of specialties. As the marketing function grew and Tigist began hiring teams, she had previously sat in all the seats she hired, and could relate to the challenges of each of her direct reports.

“Starting life as an operator ended up helping me become more strategic. It gave me what I used to call a ‘gut feeling,’ which I now understand to just be the result of lived experience.”

If someone wants to go down the leadership route, she advises, being a generalist in the beginning is a great way to get started.

Tigist Ketema’s career represents the framework of thinking required for communications leaders in our current sociopolitical moment – what gaps exist for who gets to tell this story, and how can we fill them? An innovator to her core, she’s unafraid to identify and build creative solutions to limitations that we often accept or assume “that’s the way it is.”

She tackles these questions head-on through Tigist Petites – drawing from decades of knowledge and lived experience – and has her sights on expanding on this perspective in 2026.

Readers can learn more about Tigist and her work by visiting Tigist Petites, www.tigistpetites.com, or follow along on Instagram and LinkedIn for brand updates and perspectives on fit, professional presence, and the broader conversation around how women are considered in fashion.