Billings, 38, wasn't born with the soul of a retailer. In fact, she was an art-history major at Brown and was on her way to graduate school when her father warned her off of the monastic existence she was likely to find there. So she entered Macy's heralded executive-training program, where she realized that her eye for detail could serve her well in an entirely different industry. From there, she went to Pottery Barn, and after her success, she longed to see what it might be like to build a brand outside of the retail business.
Right about that time, she heard from Barry Sternlicht, the style-obsessed chairman and CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., now the parent company of Sheraton and Westin, among other brands. "I wanted to find someone who could execute great design at a great price," he says. "At the top of the list was the product offered in the reinvention of Pottery Barn. I wanted to know who had done that." One call to a headhunter turned up Billings, and Sternlicht hired her: "She quickly understood and embraced what I was trying to do."
What he was trying to do was split the difference between stodgy chains that served business travelers well and such stylish boutique hotels as the Mondrian and the Royalton, which Ian Schrager made famous. "The same consumer that was identifying so strongly with Pottery Barn was having a fairly dismal experience with business hotels," Billings says. "If they could get excited about home furnishings, maybe they could get excited about a similar environment inside a hotel." Sternlicht's wife christened the brand "W," which stands for nothing in particular but suggests a question: What took the hotel industry so long to think of this?
Billings's job was to help oversee every detail of the design of some of the first W hotels -- and to do it on a budget that would allow Starwood to charge prices comparable to those at a decent Hilton or Marriott. The W brand essence sprung from some of the choices that she and the other designers made, from each room's chaise longue and feather bed to Aveda toiletry supplies and the cushy cotton robes. "Everything had to fit the brand image," Sternlicht says. "My instructions were to find things that would surprise guests."
The biggest surprise for many of those guests was that the room actually looked like the bedroom they might have in their homes -- if only they could figure out how to achieve the W's offhandedly glamorous yet utterly comfortable look. "The W had to be affordable yet equal to or better than what people experience in their own bedrooms day to day," Billings says. "Only then, we figured, would people want to book it in another city, to make it an extension of their lifestyle, to buy into it."
She means that literally too. Rather than putting a sign on those robes alluding to the fact that they are for sale, the W now has catalogs in the rooms so that you can buy the robe, the bed, the linens, whatever. The new W Lakeshore in Chicago even has a store that sells the stuff straight out of the rooms.
Many people in the hotel industry thought that the dreamers at Starwood were nuts. The first time that Billings spoke at an industry conference, only a handful of interior designers showed up. Now everyone is paying attention. There are five W hotels in New York today, with others in cities from Atlanta to Sydney. Occupancy rates are nearly the same or higher at W hotels than they are at either Sheraton or Westin, Starwood's other business hotels.
Today, Barry Sternlicht has a high-class problem with many of his W hotels: how to make the lobbies welcoming for guests when so many locals want to hang out and have drinks there. Creating a door policy isn't a part of Billings's skill set, so she decided to get back into retail when she heard about an effort to create a company that would sell unique gifts.
"I was at a point in my life, as were many people in my peer group, when I had a laundry list of people on my gift list," she says. "My children, my in-laws, as well as business associates. It was such a hassle to go to my five favorite specialty stores in the hopes of finding something, then buy a card, then go to Mail Boxes Etc. to get it all wrapped. Forget it. And as a result, no one was getting gifts.
"Then I wondered, Why am I approaching this as a problem to be solved -- as one of the things I least enjoy -- rather than as a wonderful part of my life? And how many people were in the same position that I was in because there was no great gift brand?" Billings focused further on these questions after she received a call in 1999 from Scott Galloway, the founder of 911gifts.com, who was in need of a merchant who could transform the site and its offerings.
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