Fran Millar

Biography:

Fran Millar was appointed Belstaff CEO in October 2020.

In her first year as CEO Fran has advanced the brand significantly, setting out a clear strategy and developing a new company culture to ensure success and expansion in the coming years. Sir Jim Ratcliffe appointed Fran to bring her winning team mentality to Belstaff, drive greater efficiencies, and reach new audiences. Being new to the fashion industry, Fran has relished the challenge of leading Belstaff, developing a new vision, and championing the icon of an independent spirit.

Before Belstaff Fran was the CEO of Team INEOS where she led the development of the Team’s operational and governance systems alongside all of the business and engagement strategies. Fran had been with the Team from the very beginning and during this time she has played a key role in the successes and gained considerable experience in all areas of the team.

She previously held a dual role as both Director of Business Operations and Head of Winning Behaviours at Team Sky. Returning to head up all the team’s “off bike” functions in 2015, her responsibilities included overseeing the team’s marketing and communications strategy, stakeholder management, and all the commercial and legal aspects that come with running the world’s number one cycling team.

In her previous role as Head of Winning Behaviours, Fran looked after Team Sky’s values, culture and people. A role introduced at the end of 2013 when the team had successfully won two consecutive editions of the Tour de France, its primary function was to focus the organisation on continuous improvement, ensuring every member of the team was constantly striving to get the best out of themselves.

Fran has worked alongside Sir Dave Brailsford for over a decade, and after helping build Team Sky from the bottom up, has remained at the heart of the team (now called Team INEOS) since its inception in February 2009. Prior to working at Team Sky Fran set-up and ran her own successful athlete and event management agency for 7 years initially representing her brother, going on to represent some of the UK’s highest profile cyclists including Sports Personality of the Year in 2011 Mark Cavendish and Tour de France 2018 winner and Sports Personality of the Year in 2018 Geraint Thomas.

With the end of Sky and into the new TEAM Ineos, the associated fear of loss of belonging and identity and how to replicate that success and develop into something new, achieving it by winning Tour De France in first year and then taking on Eliud Kipchoge challenge, the biggest challenge and change of her life/career, totally into unknown, managing stakeholders and perceptions and well as an entirely new team and sport.

Then came Belstaff, putting all of her methodology into practice and leading a business through five years of change in eighteen months to ensure its survival.

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