Who

As the CEO of Bloomingdales, Gould is one of the most important men in retail.

Backstory

The son of a biochemistry professor at MIT, Gould grew up in Brookline, Mass., earned his bachelor's degree and MBA from Columbia, and started off as an executive trainee at Abraham & Strauss, where he worked alongside future retail king Allen Questrom. Gould became an assistant buyer in the sheets department, but it didn't take him very long to shoot up the ranks. Several years later he was the company's youngest vice president, and left in 1978 to join the Robinson's department store chain as an SVP. Three years later he was elevated to CEO, and developed a rep in the '80s for his ballsy marketing stunts, such as the time he put a sable coat on sale for $170,000. (The coat came with one-week, first-class trip to Russia, where a tailor handled custom fittings.)

Robinson's parent company forced Gould out in 1986, in part because of his excessive spending. He soon signed on as chairman and CEO of Giorgio Beverly Hills—and gave the retailer a brief moment of relevance in the late '80s—before jumping ship in 1991 to take over as chairman and chief executive of Bloomingdales, replacing Marvin Traub, shortly after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. He's remained in charge of the retail behemoth, and now works closely with Terry Lundgren, the CEO of Bloomingdale's parent company, Macy's Inc.

Of note

Gould has spent the last few years repositioning Bloomingdales as a much more up-market retail venue. With sister company Macy's focused on the mass market, Bloomingdale's has been restructured to target the fast-growing luxury sector and compete against the likes of Neiman Marcus and Saks. (It's a sharp turnaround from the strategy Gould pursued when he landed at Bloomie's in the early '90s and sought to make the store more accessible to the masses.) He's spent millions upgrading the physical locations, has established in-store boutiques like Jimmy Choo, Hermès and Marc Jacobs, and decreed a trendier, all-black company-wide dress code. Gould's had to press ahead with the changes without his longtime style impresario by his side: Kal Ruttenstein, Bloomingdale's famed fashion director and the public face of the company for close to three decades, passed way in 2005.

Board game

Gould helped co-found the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He continues to serve on Hebrew College's national board and the board of trustees of Lenox Hill Hospital.

Personal

Gould is divorced from his second wife, Avon CEO Andrea Jung, with whom he adopted a child. With his first wife, Roberta, he has a grown son, Charles, who is a producer of On the Money on CNBC. His daughter-in-law, Danika, is an assistant buyer at Bloomingdale's.

No joke

His grandfather was Rabbi Louis Ginzberg, one of the leaders of Conservative Judaism for more than half a century.