Top 25 eCommerce leaders 2022: Nadia Touil Louis

Our next finalist for the top 25 eCommerce leaders is Nadia Touil Louis (pictured). Louis has spent over 20 years working in marketing and sales. As a passionate executive in the space, she has worked in fast-moving environments such as China, and has extensive experience in omni-channel consumer experience, data management and eCommerce.

At Nestlé, where she has worked for 15 years, she has handled a gamut of roles from communications and marketing to sales and commerce. In her current role as head of digital and eCommerce of Asia Oceania and Africa, she is in charge of consumer-centric digital transformation strategies.

She is a trusted advisor to regions and markets where she ensures implementations are fast-tracked. Her responsibilities also include people organisation, data governance, analytics, technologies, innovation pilots and collaboration start-ups. She also works with partners such as Meta, TikTok, Salesforce, and e-retailers such as Lazada, Delivery Hero and Amazon across eB2C, eB2B, D2C and social commerce.

When it comes to team work, her motto is “together we rise”. She believes in “equal power, but different”, and a breaking of hierarchy where every colleague brings a different expertise to the table.

“Our team members work with a very collaborative and inclusive mindset. It’s also important that they feel safe to challenge the status quo,” she said.

“Respecting and understanding each other’s view points is crucial in a multicultural environment led by diversity and consumers’ differences. We need to have healthy passionate debates.” A straight shooter when it comes to work, she always encourages her team to get straight to the point and be clear on what it wants to achieve.

“The digital space can be complex for people who don’t work in this field, and so I encourage my team to communicate in a simple way and demystify the space so everyone understands and collaborates together in a better way,” she said.

An advocate for balancing work and play, she is also one who often asks her colleagues to take care of themselves and their families as she believes happiness leads to performance, and not the other way around. Calm and collected in a crisis, she believes it is the difficult moments that helps individuals grow.

“In good times you celebrate, in hard times you walk with mindfulness and care and extract all the learnings.”

When asked what makes a good leader, she said it is about being a visionary and always planning for the future rather than taking a short-term approach. “At Nestlé we are constantly thinking ahead so even if we are working on something today it was already in the works even before. For me, leadership is also about surrounding myself and walking shoulder to shoulder with other leaders, not followers. So I encourage my team to lead themselves.”

On a personal front, Louis tries to practise kindness as a leader and unlock the inner talent of her team to be the best versions of themselves.