The trip from the middle-class, Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., where Angele Robinson-Gaylord was raised to the commencement stage at The George Washington University Law School is short, but she took a circuitous path through California to get there. That move from Waldorf, Maryland, to Stanford University would yield a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science, the first step toward her bold high school yearbook prediction: “I will become an international corporate lawyer.”

So it was back to her D.C. home base to earn her Juris Doctor, then to Chicago for that corporate law gig. But, Robinson-Gaylord said, the rigidity of law forced a midlife career shift to a more creative field: retail. That tack led to key posts with titans McDonald’s, Ikea and Rite Aid. Twenty-two years later, in 2024, she would cross the country again, from Philadelphia to Seattle, to settle in with another venti-size retailer, Starbucks, as senior vice president of store development for the Americas.

The education-minded Robinson-Gaylord — who has served on the boards of the ICSC Foundation, Project REAP and Success Academy — was gaveled in as ICSC’s new chair on Dec. 5, succeeding Brixmor CEO Jim Taylor. She is ICSC’s second retailer chair and its first Black chair. It’s a role that comes with great responsibility, she said. “I want to spend my year as chair amplifying the industry and leaving it in a better place.”

Lauded by her colleagues for her commitment to fairness, process improvement and portfolio optimization, Robinson-Gaylord leads, grows and sustains Starbucks’ company-operated store portfolio. This coming year, she and her team will focus on strengthening the store portfolio approach, implementing a warm and welcoming coffeehouse style and supporting the vision of Getting Back to Starbucks. Angele joined Starbucks in September 2023 and opened and celebrated the 10,000th company-operated store around six months later. She looks forward to building on the momentum she saw in her first year.

From Corporate Law to ICSC to Retail

Her law career laid the groundwork for her entrée to the Marketplaces Industry. After earning her law degree, Robinson-Gaylord in 1999 took a post in the large Chicago international law firm, Winston & Strawn. She focused on liability casework in its corporate litigation department. Her personal jurisprudence, she noted, originated early. “I had a strong sense of right and wrong since I was a young girl,” she said. “I was always one to argue a point and to never be afraid to speak my mind.”

Staying in Chicago, she departed Winston & Strawn after six years for a senior associate role at a boutique firm under attorney Nancy Schiavone, practicing commercial real estate law, including leasing, acquisitions and dispositions for local and national landlords. Here, she was introduced to ICSC. She traveled to ICSC’s Vegas national convention to meet with landlord clients and “caught the retail bug,” she said. She was intrigued by the dealmaking climate. “I saw tens of thousands of businesspeople — landlords and retailers alike — rushing around building transactions and, it seemed, having a little more fun than I was in my practice. I wanted to be involved in deals,” said Robinson-Gaylord, who soon joined ICSC. “I had never seen anything like it. To this day, I call it our Super Bowl.”

From that first Vegas event, she has watched as commercial real estate “has begun to reflect the demographics of our country,” she said. “The number of women and people of color in this business when I went in 2004 was less visible. But now, we have many more people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, more women, more people with varied experience and thought processes who can all sit at the table and advance their deals for their organizations to benefit the communities we serve.”

Even before ICSC, Robinson-Gaylord had longed for a career with more tangible, physical outcomes. “In law, you can spend two or three years preparing for a trial, which may last another couple years,” she said. “With retail, the result is a building or store providing direct or indirect services like jobs, revenue, taxes, et cetera.”

After four years with Schiavone, Robinson-Gaylord departed law in 2009, immersing herself with economic development organizations while digesting all the commercial real estate intel she could get her hands on. She graduated that same year from Project REAP, a professional development and education program that seeks to diversify the commercial real estate industry. “It changed the trajectory of my career,” she said. “It gave me the confidence and tools I needed to enhance my skills, and it exposed me to all facets of commercial real estate, plus provided me with mentors and networks in my new field. It helped me pivot from real estate law to the business side of the table.” In all, her transition to retail took about five years, she said. “I’m fortunate to have a husband, Travis, who has been my biggest supporter along this career journey.”

Robinson-Gaylord joined the McDonald’s Restaurant Development team in 2009, finding her niche as lead property manager for around 1,000 eateries in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland. “McDonald’s taught me how to support the store life cycle,” she said. “It was an amazing training ground for learning the entire store-development process, starting with the property management team and carrying that through to the end of the transaction.” Today, when she drives past McDonald’s projects she supported, “I still feel proud of each positive outcome I was able to achieve for the organization,” she said.

In 2015, in a huge step up in scale and complexity, Robinson-Gaylord transitioned from 4,500-square-foot restaurants to stores as much as 10 times that size, becoming a real estate manager at Ikea in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, the retailer’s U.S. base. Just eight months later, Ikea boosted her to vice president of U.S. real estate and development, overseeing eight real estate managers who supported the U.S. property and retail expansion division.

Promoted again in 2017 to president of Ikea Property U.S., she led an 85-person team supporting site acquisition, leasing, design, construction, facilities management and asset management for all of Ikea’s U.S. retail, office and distribution properties. Robinson-Gaylord became president of Ikea’s North America real estate cluster in June 2019, overseeing site acquisition, adaptive reuse, leasing, construction, facilities management and asset management for U.S. and Canadian properties.

In late 2020, she began a three-year stint with Rite Aid as senior vice president, leading the drugstore chain’s real estate redevelopment strategy across its 2,400-plus-store footprint. She supervised the team implementing the RxEvolution strategic plan to reimagine, optimize and transform Rite Aid’s existing stores into its store of the future. “With Rite Aid, I experienced their desire to reinvest and imagine what new and smaller-format stores would look like and execute the growth of the reinvention program,” she said. All this work was undertaken as the broader drugstore industry faced “an increase in the competitive landscape where the customers now have a variety of ways to engage with traditional pharmacies to secure their prescriptions, products and services,” she said. Her time with Rite Aid gave her additional experience “to provide a quality experience for the customers while reinvesting in the company’s core values, their mission and resources.”

All three pre-Starbucks retail posts “brought me unique skill sets that are proving very useful as I move forward,” she said. “The real beauty for me here at Starbucks is that we have a very experienced team that has been here for decades who will be instrumental in partnering with me to advance our goals. It is all about leveraging our collective talents.”

Always a judicious negotiator, Robinson-Gaylord once told Forbes: “You must be tough enough to get the deal done, yet you must learn to disagree agreeably to not gain a reputation as a deal killer.” The retail industry, she told C+CT, “is about longevity of opportunities. It’s about group solutions, not just holding the line for incremental gains.”

Mentorship and Diversity

As Robinson-Gaylord was growing up in Maryland, her mother had to drive to Virginia to find higher-end clothing and shopping centers. “It struck me: why I and other members of my community didn’t have access to these things in my neighborhood of middle-class, educated families. This epiphany was an early spark for my interest in retail and economic development. Today, I am pleased to work with people and brands who provide stores with the same goods and services I wanted to see in my neighborhood all those years ago.”

There’s still room for the industry to build more opportunities for people of color, women and other diverse groups, said Robinson-Gaylord. She supports this work by helping to mentor the next generation of retail leaders and serves on the board of the ICSC Foundation, which supports students with scholarships, mentorships, internships and university partnerships. She feels there is more work to do. “We still need to create more space and dialogue for diverse talent to network, engage [and] secure entry-level-through-C-suite roles and board seats,” she said.

Additionally, some commercial real estate employers still struggle to recruit, retain and promote diverse, high-potential candidates via conventional search methods, she said, noting that they could benefit from partnerships with the ICSC Foundation, Project REAP, CREW Network, the Real Estate Executive Council and other organizations to reach a broader demographic of candidates to achieve their goals.   

Among the mentors who have helped Robinson-Gaylord in her career, Project REAP founder and former Giant Foods vice president Mike Bush stands out. “He created a space that helped me and countless others who could have been overlooked to find a place in commercial real estate,” she said. Project REAP celebrated its silver anniversary in June.

Other mentors, she said, have included Virginia Coggins, a longtime McDonald’s leader who created the property management department where Robinson-Gaylord first worked in real restate outside the practice of law; G. L. Blackstone & Associates principal G. Lamont Blackstone, an urban shopping center and commercial real estate adviser who encouraged Robinson-Gaylord’s ICSC involvement; and current ICSC COO Valerie Richardson, a longtime executive of The Container Store and ICSC’s first retailer chair.

Robinson-Gaylord was among the recipients of ICSC’s first Impact Awards for advancing diversity, awarded on Sept. 12 at the Congressional Black Caucus Retail Real Estate Reception. Among other distinctions, Diversity Woman Media named her to its 2022 Power 100 list, and GlobeSt.com named her a 2021 Retail Influencer.

Recognition runs in Robinson-Gaylord’s family. Her sister, nurse educator Surlina Asamoa, won an Inclusive Excellence award in 2022 from her employer, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, landing her on ABC’s GMA3: What You Need to Know. The Hair Equity Initiative for which she was honored trains hospital staff to use individualized hair care routines and hair products instead of standardized care and products for total patient care and preservation of mental health for its diverse patient population. “The program has caught wildfire,” said Robinson-Gaylord, noting that other hospitals are following suit. “My sister is so talented, and I am extremely proud of her impact in the hair equity field,” she said.

Robinson-Gaylord said “an entire cohort” of ICSC folks, including outgoing ICSC chair Taylor and previous chair Glenn Rufrano, have been preparing her for the transition into the chair role at a time when she also has been segueing into her new Starbucks post. “Glenn and Jim are giants among men in their dedication to ICSC, and they’ve continued to expand the role of the ICSC chair,” she said. “I am stepping into their shoes and shoes of the other past chairs to be an ambassador for the organization and the industry. Being a steward for the legacy of lCSC during my year as chair is one of the pinnacles of my career.”

Robinson-Gaylord and her husband have two children: Trent, 23, a college student, and Tyler, 16. She enjoys travel, cycling and reading both for pleasure and for professional development. The leadership books she revisits are Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek and The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. Her getaway place is “anywhere with water, preferably a beach,” she said. Recent favorites include trips to Curacao, the Maldives and Croatia. Robinson-Gaylord’s still-evolving list of Starbucks favorites include a jade citrus mint tea, an iced matcha tea latte with the requisite coconut milk and lately, a lavender oat milk latte.

Reflecting on the two phases of her career, the law school grad is happy she made the midcareer switch to real estate. “I respect my legal training and tap into it almost daily, but with retail, you have the ability to negotiate for your side while bringing positive outcomes for all parties involved and goods and services to communities,” she said. “I love that the Marketplaces Industry is so collaborative and creates tangible outcomes that will outlive us all. You can have a neighborhood of homes and multifamily housing, but you do not have a community until you infuse that neighborhood with the vibrancy that comes from the Marketplaces Industry.”