THE FIRM
Vindie Strategies is an independent strategic advisory firm. The firm provides retained senior counsel to CEOs, boards, institutions, and influential figures at the moments that most define them – crisis, transformation, acquisition, reinvention, and the public inflection points where reputation and enterprise value are decided together.
FOUR CONNECTED PRACTICE AREAS
Crisis & Reputation
C-suite crisis counsel, issues leadership, rapid-response architecture, and media strategy at regulatory, litigation-adjacent, and stakeholder-sensitive moments.
CEO & Board Advisory
Executive communications, governance-aligned narrative, transformation communications, and M&A and post-close positioning.
Brand, Growth & Market Strategy
Brand architecture, market repositioning, go-to-market strategy, messaging platforms, and the positioning of new products and programs into competitive markets.
Culture, Trust & Enterprise Transformation
Leadership narrative, employee engagement, and purpose-led positioning built into the business strategy – not run alongside it as a separate program.
Engagements take the form of retained advisory relationships, confidential senior counsel, defined project leadership, and strategy development.
FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL
Latraviette D. Smith-Wilson has spent nearly three decades in the rooms where organizations decide what they're going to become — through growth, private-equity investment, a landmark billion-dollar acquisition, global expansion, ownership transitions, enterprise transformation, repositionings, and national and international crises.
An award-winning C-suite executive and advisor to CEOs, boards, institutions, and influential figures, she has held increasing leadership scope across Edelman, Deloitte, American Express, Sundial Brands (Unilever), ESSENCE, and Horizon Media.
At Sundial Brands, she served on the senior leadership team through the company's most significant period of growth — leading communications and strategy, assuming interim marketing leadership during a year without a CMO, and launching SheaMoisture's award-winning Break the Walls campaign. She helped navigate the company's private-equity investment, global expansion, and its acquisition by Unilever, at the time the largest exit for a Black-owned CPG brand, and remained through 18 months of post-acquisition integration. She later joined the founding executive team that reestablished ESSENCE as an independent, Black-owned company. At Horizon Media, she became the industry's first Chief Marketing & Equity Officer, with an enterprise mandate spanning brand, marketing, communications, reputation, culture, and equity.
She founded Vindie Strategies on a conviction formed across all of it: the hardest part of a consequential decision is rarely making it. It is that the decision a company makes and the decision it actually lives are so often not the same. Decisions get made in financial and operational terms and land in human, cultural, and reputational ones — where no function owns the outcome. And when what an organization says and what it does fall out of step, people believe the actions.
Vindie exists to close that gap before it costs something.
Her work has been recognized by Ad Age as a Leading Woman, PRWeek as a Woman of Distinction, Campaign US among its 40 Over 40, and Advertising Week as a Future Is Female honoree. She holds a bachelor's degree from Wake Forest University and a master's in Journalism from New York University, and graduated from the Chief Executive Officer program at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business with an executive certification in Emerging Tech Strategies.