Gut Feelings

Dayna Quanbeck leans into her instincts, and comes out on top

by Shelly Leachman

Commanding a boardroom was not part of the plan. Rather, it was a physician’s exam room where Dayna (Mintz ’01) Quanbeck thought she’d make her mark.

But that was then. It was her first year at UC Santa Barbara, where she arrived fully expecting to leave with a biology degree and acceptance to medical school.

And this is now: her sixth year in the C-suite at Rothy’s, a sustainable footwear company, where she landed after working first on Wall Street and later as a fashion industry executive.

Reflecting on her journey from aspiring doctor to chief financial officer, Quanbeck characterizes it as a “very random series of events that led me to where I am today.” Yet her approach, then as now, was decidedly (if initially subconsciously) deliberate: Follow your gut and see where it leads.

It’s how she landed at UCSB in the first place, committing last minute when her intuition sparked eleventh-hour remorse over her original choice. “As soon as I came to the campus, I said, ‘Oh, this is it. This is where I need to be,’” Quanbeck recalls. “I saw joy. I saw students hanging out together. It was beautiful. And it felt like a place that — if you’re going to push yourself, you should also find comfort and respite and beauty. And UCSB was all of that for me.”

Two developments early in her college years prompted her to change course from her pre-med path: an unexpected discomfort over doctorly things, and an unforeseen fondness for accounting. Who knew?

“I’d go into the lab, or even see lab coats, I’d get light-headed. I would get very fainty at the sight of blood. I passed out a couple times and my grades were not good. This was my dream, but it wasn’t intuitive to me at all,” she says. “But sitting in my first accounting course the next quarter, it just clicked. It made so much intuitive sense to me. It was like, ‘I love this. I understand it. I have zero background in this, but I can pick it up.’”

And so she did. Within another quarter, she had shifted into the economics department. Maybe corporate law would be her calling? A summer interning in Washington, D.C., and studying for the LSAT brought another fire to her gut: Nope.

It was accounting or bust from there on out. Master’s degree from UCLA Anderson School of Business, check. Investment banking on Wall Street — hello, Merrill Lynch — check. “I found my spot. I found my people. I found my jam,” Quanbeck says today.

Eventually moving to the client side, she went on to spend five years at fashion brand Charlotte Russe, as VP of finance, then CFO, then interim CEO. And then …

“I started to feel maybe I was out of my element in that fast fashion didn’t really fit with my values,” Quanbeck says. “Growing up in Santa Barbara County, then being here on a pretty forward, sustainable campus, there is an awareness that this beauty right in front of us can be destroyed. So I started to really struggle with just the amount of cheap goods being put into the world.”

Enter Rothy’s, a California-based shoe company known for its washable footwear and accessories made from plastic bottles and other recycled materials, designed with zero-waste principles in mind. The founders met Quanbeck and their own intuition, perhaps, compelled them to recruit her. It wasn’t a hard sell.

And six years in, she’s more passionate about it than ever.

“I pivoted pretty hard into sustainability,” she says. “My job now looks a lot like what I did on Wall Street, or at Charlotte Russe, but it’s aligned with my values, with my moral purpose. Whatever you can do, from a business perspective, to be more sustainable — it matters. And at Rothy’s, we’re trying to help in our own small way. I spend a lot of my time trying to think more innovatively and cleverly about what’s next.”

What’s next for Rothy’s? They’ve just unveiled velvet made from recycled plastic bottles and they’re looking into leather made from mushroom fiber.

As for Quanbeck? She wants to write a book, maybe give a TED Talk one day on the lessons she’s learned. She recently spoke to some Gaucho undergrads, sharing her experience in letting intuition lead the way.

“When you look back and see this incredible climb that you didn’t even know you were on? I love that,” she says. “It’s like putting together a puzzle in the dark and then the lights come on and you’re like, ‘Look at that. Look what I did.’”