From childhood, Alexandra Dillard carried the family’s flair for fashion, weaving her grandfather’s legacy into the enduring fabric of Arkansas-based Dillard’s.
Story by Cara Clark, Photos by Morgan Duke
By the time Alexandra Dillard Lucie and her twin sister began crafting and selling cardboard sandals as children, the spirit of entrepreneurship was already taking root. It was less about the money and more about the instinct — to create, to adapt, and to sell.
“We would take cardboard, cut out the shape of our foot, and staple rubber bands to it to make sandals to sell,” recalls Alexandra, now vice president and general merchandise manager of Dillard’s, Inc. “I feel like my twin sister was the most entrepreneurial of all of us. We would sell lemonade, and we would sell our McDonald's toys on the playground. We even sold my little sister’s toys to our friends. It was terrible. We convinced her to let us sell them.”
These were no ordinary childhood imaginations at work — they were the foundation of an entrepreneurial spirit fostered by a tightly knit, hardworking family. Alexandra credits her twin sister, Annemarie Jazic, now Dillard’s chief information officer, as “the really clever one,” always spearheading childhood sales strategies. That early energy — creative, ambitious, and scrappy — remains alive today with in many aspects of Dillard’s, where Alexandra is a key figure in guiding the iconic department store through a changing retail landscape.
Alexandra carries a unique perspective: simultaneously a torchbearer and an innovator, she balances reverence for the past with an eye fixed firmly ahead. Much of that is due to the scope of her journey, which didn’t begin at the top. Like many ambitious young professionals, she wanted to carve her own path — even if it meant temporarily stepping away from the family fold.
“I always thought I knew more than my parents. Of course, at times in my life, I wanted to work in the hottest, coolest places, so I worked for BCBG in LA for about four years,” she says. “That was an incredible experience. BCBG was a big vendor and partner for us at the time, but they were also the leaders of the contemporary space; they created the concept of contemporary sportswear. Max Azria was just an incredible visionary. I wanted to be in that action. I thought that was cooler than my family department store.”
