The Model Marketer, Scott Woodward and the Nineties Playbook

By his account, Scott Woodward has had a busy fall in the city he's called home for decades now, juggling his next social impact PSA idea for client the Aspen Institute (hint: it's centered on the science of curiosity), attending Clios on Culture at Chelsea Piers last month and guest lecturing at NYU, orchestrated by several of his former Parsons students now enrolled in the famed university's MS in Integrated Marketing program.

A few weeks ago he shared with the NYU class the irony around integration that began his storied career. As a young marketer, he was determined to address the lack of consistency across the world around the famous Ray-Ban sunglass brand. He passionately made his case to the team of Ivy-educated packaged goods executives that ran it on the importance of brand consistency, and used Calvin Klein as his case study. He made his case, was appointed its first global image director and then eventually became Calvin's VP of global marketing and public relations for the storied fashion house.

He describes sharing his global brand experience, having worked with over 100 brands during his career, with the next generation of marketers and creative directors as both humbling and gratifying. That bridge between client work and the classroom is what makes him, in Suite 646's estimation, the model marketer.

Woodward founded SEW Branded, a brand marketing consultancy whose contact address, according to his website, sits on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. He has spent close to four decades selling sunglasses, clothes and watches while in-house, and everything under the sun since with his own consultancy. Lately he has been making the case that the advertising of the 1990s worked because it left things out.

The Nineties Handshake

The clearest version is an August piece on Nylon's site. In it, Woodward says the decade was not cooler because people tried harder. It worked, he says, because brands "trusted the audience to understand simple, beautiful, authentic messages."

The piece reads the current nineties revival, in clothes and food and television, as a search for that kind of trust. Millennials are going back to the decade. Gen Z is borrowing its look. Nostalgia, in Woodward's telling, gives a brand a shared memory to stand on, even while algorithms and trends keep moving underneath it. He's also quick to note that other elite marketers recoil at the use of "authentic" (as if, what's the alternative?), but he's unbothered by it and embraces its use.

Say less. Let the viewer finish the sentence.

From Ray-Ban to Calvin to Movado

Woodward came up the long way. According to his website, he joined Chevron's in-house marketing training program after business school, then moved to Ray-Ban, where he started as an analyst and product manager and rose to global director of image marketing.

The Nylon piece, which never names the brands for whom he worked, describes his eyewear years as a mix of fashion advertising, film placement and a store opening tied to a major sporting event, which happened to be the Olympics, no less. Grazia is more specific. Its profile credits him with the Ray-Ban surge that followed the product integration in Men in Black, the 1997 film in which Will Smith wears the sunglasses for most of his time on screen.

Calvin Klein came next. His website lists his title there as vice president of global retail marketing and public relations, and Grazia connects him to the first cK store in Tel Aviv. The house still runs on subtraction. Its latest show stripped a Chelsea warehouse to bare brick and steel.

Then came the Movado Group, where he was chief marketing officer and, by his own account, built that role from scratch. His website says GQ singled out the company's Concord campaign, Be Late, Time is a Luxury. Nylon notes that most watch advertising of the era was a product shot on a white background. The Concord work went the other way, with spare images and the idea that time itself was the luxury.

Kindness as the Brief

The second act is social impact marketing. In the summer of 2013, The Daily Front Row reported that SEW Branded had created 1D+OD Live. Love. Move. Together Against Bullying, Office Depot's back-to-school campaign with One Direction. Woodward, then listed as the firm's chief executive, said at the time that he wanted to show the band in a way nobody had seen before.

The Daily Front Row later reported that the One Direction campaign won a Clio. Saint Leo University credits his youth empowerment work with One Direction and, a year earlier, Lady Gaga, whose Born This Way Foundation was a client, with Clio, Summit International, IAC and Emery awards. The Emery came from the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the New York organization for LGBTQ young people, at a ceremony at Cipriani more than a decade ago, where Liam Payne presented the award via satellite from the band's Australian tour.

In May 2025 he was back at Cipriani. A public service film his firm made for the Luisa Diaz Foundation opened the foundation's Mia Amor Graciousness Gala on May 6, and Woodward received its Kindness is Cool Award for his social impact work, The Daily Front Row reported. He told the outlet he was drawn to Diaz's view that kindness is a strength and a quality of leadership.

Back in the Classroom

Saint Leo University, where he graduated in 1986 when it was still Saint Leo College, and where he says he was voted most likely to succeed, named him its 2025 Distinguished Alumnus. His website adds an MBA from Loyola University New Orleans and completed graduate coursework at Villanova University.

He has also taught marketing, public relations and branding as an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design, in the Strategic Design and Management program at The New School. The students are young enough to think the nineties are vintage, and the lesson is older than they are, yet they seem drawn to Woodward as the vessel to learn more about it at both Parsons and NYU.

It is a quiet lesson for a loud city. Say less. Let the viewer finish the sentence. In the portrait at the top of this page, half his face sits in shadow, and he does not explain a thing.