This Chanel chief launched her 40-year luxury career off the back of a failed teaching exam and a chance encounter at a student forum | Fortune

Claire Isnard can trace her 40‐year career-including 17 years at fashion house Chanel-back to one bad exam. Had she passed, she’d likely still be in a classroom, grading essays on Italian literature. Looking back, in her first-ever sit-down interview ahead of her retirement, Isnard says she feels like she’s come full circle. Despite having zero HR qualifications, she wound up as Chanel’s chief people and chief organization officer. “When you draw my story back, the first compelling and meaningful thing that would end up spread across everything I’ve done is helping people become who they didn’t think they can become,” she told Fortune . “For me, teaching was not about the speciality of French or Italian, it was about helping those young people-especially the ones who were having difficulty unleashing their skill set and couldn’t find themselves internally, I could help them become larger, bigger than what they thought,” she said. “And I loved it very much.” At the time, Isnard took that career plan “very, very seriously” and was giving language lessons to teenagers in both Italy and France while studying, which made the final exam failure that would have cemented a lifelong academic career all the more confusing. “Not only I failed,” Isnard said, “but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had no clear path ahead of me. I had no clear goal.” With no plan B, she went back to school and threw herself into student forums and networking events. It led to a chance encounter that would drag her from the classroom into consulting-and eventually, right into Chanel’s corner office. Gen Z: Failure might be your lucky break-but not if you don’t get out 40 years later, Isnard still remembers how crushing that first experience of failure was-but she refuses to let younger generations see similar setbacks as the end of the story. Now, the lesson she reminds her millennial children (who are 30 and 33) is that failure is simply “a roadblock on the road, not the end of the road.” “It hurts, it’s very uncomfortable,” Isnard said. “It can be very frustrating because you worked hard. Although it may not feel like it in the moment, this pause could be a blessing in disguise.” Isnard recommends using failure as an opportunity to reassess the direction you’re going down-as well as whether you’re even enjoying it. “There is a signal here that either you’ve not worked enough-if you really want to do it again, work harder, and you will get it-or maybe there was something that was not for you,” she said. “Look at what you enjoyed in doing that, but also look at the thing you don’t enjoy, and go where your passion is... I’m really convinced that we cannot be good at something we don’t like doing.” Of course, passion alone is not enough to land a big break after a failure. It doesn’t matter how much you love talking about luxury brands or coding -if you don’t get out...

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