Valentino Adds Chief H.R. Officer Position

MILAN — The house of Valentino has tapped Rosa Santamaria Maurizio as its new chief human resources officer, effective Oct. 19.

This is a new role and Santamaria Maurizio will report to the company’s chief executive officer Jacopo Venturini, who joined Valentino last June.

“Rosa represents a pivotal entry to sustain the strategic company direction and to grow toward an increasingly more global brand view culturally and structurally,” Venturini told WWD. “Her distinctive contribution and her experience will allow the brand to enhance the focus on human capital and to create a diffused colleague-centric company culture weaved with an ever-growing, client-centric approach, currently implemented toward [the] Valentino community.”

Santamaria Maurizio will hold the global strategic and administrative responsibility for h.r. and Accademia, which was founded in 2013 with the goal to develop and train internal resources. She will contribute “to the installment and execution of the company strategy via a thorough alignment with the new brand culture, values, resources and their behavior — all vital principles necessary to reach the desired concrete Valentino results in terms of positioning and development,” the company said.

A key mission will be to strengthen the values of house as a global Employer of Choice, “through an ongoing evolution and enhancement of the key processes involving selection, retention, development and management of the best talents and company welfare.”

Santamaria Maurizio has worked for 20 years in h.r., mainly at American Express, with growing responsibilities since 2006 until she was nominated head of h.r., Italy in 2012. The following year she was nominated vice president, chief h.r. officer for Italy, Spain, Northern European countries, Holland, Belgium and Turkey.

She was also part of the Italian leadership team and member of the board with full responsibilities across departments from payroll, health and safety, employee and labor relations to talent and performance management and change leadership.

Prior to American Express, Santamaria Maurizio was h.r. business partner at Bristol Myers Squibb. Before that, at Ernst & Young, she worked as a consultant for Carrefour, Poste Italiane and Banca Intesa.

Creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli has long championed a culture of inclusivity inside and outside the couture house, always praising Valentino’s seamstresses and his team. In 2017, when Valentino received the Art of Craftsmanship prize at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards, Piccioli handed the prize over to the seamstresses, who flanked him on the stage of the La Scala theater, wearing their white smocks. “They allowed me to dream,” Piccioli said at the time.

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