Helena Helmersson is the first female Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of Swedish retail clothing company H&M. She has been head of sustainability of the company since 2010 and got the additional responsibility of CEO in 2020.
Helena Helmersson is working with a vision to transform the fashion industry. She began her career at H&M in 1997 as a Business controller, before she served as the section manager of various departments in the buying office. For 8 years she took care of the Children's Department, Lady's Department, and the baby's department at the Buying office.
Later, in October 2006, Helmersson went to Bangladesh and worked as H&M's production manager at Dhaka. She worked in Bangladesh for nearly 2 years and 3 months.
In 2010, she went to Hong Kong and served there as a department manager for lingerie production
for a brief period of 6 months. Later in 2010, she returned to Stockholm to be a manager for social responsibility and supply.
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In 2015, she returned to Hong Kong and was elevated to the role of Global Head of Production in Hong Kong. After serving for over 3 years in Hong Kong she came back to Stockholm, Sweden and worked as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the H&M group, from September 2018 to Jan 2020.
On 30th January 2020, she was promoted and became the chief executive officer (CEO) of the leading clothing brand H&M.
At present, her responsibilities as the company's CEO is to cover the improvement of the social and environmental sustainability of supply, contributing to H&M's sustainability strategy which was initially implemented in the 1990s.
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On 5 March 2014, she was elected Sweden's "Most Powerful Woman in Business" by the weekly business magazine Veckans Affärer.
Helena Helmersson was born in 1973 in Skellefteå in the north of Sweden. She graduated with a master's degree in international business administration at the Umeå School of Business and Economics in 1997.
