In our Leadership Spotlight Series, we are highlighting executives across our Company who are driving innovation, transforming business practices, and positively impacting the communities where we live and work.
In this edition, we spotlight Jaime King, Senior Vice President and Creative Director, Kids, based in our New York City office. Read on to discover Jaime’s story of curiosity, trust and the belief that the best ideas come from collective creative power.
Leading with Trust
For Jaime, leadership begins with trust. She wants every member on her team to feel empowered to bring their point of view, push back on an idea and know their voice genuinely matters, because in her experience, the best creative work almost never comes from a single person. It comes from great creative minds colliding. She sees her role less as directing that process and more as protecting it; creating a space with enough clarity, inspiration and trust for that collective creative energy to thrive.
Finding Her Fit at Centric
Two things drew Jaime to Centric specifically: a focus on big ideas and an obsession with product, values she holds unapologetically herself. But she’s quick to point out that no great idea or product happens in isolation. It takes an entire ecosystem, merchants, production, sales and creative, each bringing something essential to the table. For Jaime, the real magic happens when those different disciplines collide and make big ideas bigger. It’s why she’s spent much of her career fighting to make sure creative has a meaningful seat at that table, rooted in her belief that creative thinking isn’t separate from the business; it’s one of the most powerful drivers of it.
On Leadership and Curiosity
Ask Jaime what makes a good leader, and her answer is immediate: curiosity. She doesn’t believe a leader’s job is to have all the answers. It’s to ask better questions and build a space where creatives feel safe bringing ideas that might never have otherwise seen the light of day. She has a name for that space: “The Art of the Possible.” Creatives, she says, are born to draw outside the lines, it’s where they’re happiest, and great leadership simply gives them permission to do it.
That philosophy traces back to a line that has stayed with her throughout her career, from writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara: “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” It’s become something of a mantra for Jaime. A reminder that creativity doesn’t just respond to change; it can make people want to be part of it. She carries that idea into how she leads just as much as into the work itself.
Her advice to her younger self follows the same thread: trust your gut. Being an artist, she says, is a calling, and instinct is one of the most powerful tools a creative has, built over years of watching, making, experiencing and feeling. If she could tell her younger self one thing, it would be to trust that creative voice sooner and follow it with more conviction.
Beyond the Office
Jaime describes herself as a futurist, proudly LGBTQIA+, an AI enthusiast, and, by her own admission, a nervous winker.
