Biography
Magazine publisher and consultant Caroline Issa is well known as a perennial street style favourite. As chief executive and fashion director of London-based biannual title Tank and editor of online magazine Because, the Montreal native is an established fixture on the fashion week circuit, often photographed by bloggers and photographers like Scott Schuman and Garance Doré. In February 2015, she also launched a line of ready-to-wear essentials with American retailer Nordstrom, and in July 2019, a seven-piece capsule collection for Label/Mix.
The former management consultant describes herself as “a businesswoman who loves fashion.” With a Chinese mother and a Lebanese-Iranian father, Issa has lived all around the world, from Seattle to Texas to Singapore, although she has called London home for the last decade. Originally a retail and consumer goods consultant with a business degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, she met Tank founder Masoud Golsorkhi by chance while working on the Boots account for her former employer. He offered her a partnership in the company and she left consulting for the world of magazine publishing. Since then, her visibility and profile has landed her a series of modelling campaigns and brand collaborations with the likes of J. Crew, LK Bennett and Monique Pétan.
In 2004, Issa founded Tank Form, a creative agency that boasts an impressive client base. The consultancy has devised advertising campaigns for a number of major brands, including Mulberry, Silhouette, Debeers and Monica Vinader, and also creates digital content for several retail and fashion clients, such as Hugo Boss and Lane Crawford.
Issa has also worked on creating and releasing new publishing technology. In 2007, she launched Becauselondon.com — a digital magazine of which she is editor-in-chief — under the auspices of Tank. Six years later she launched a print edition featuring Fashion Scan, an experimental app developed by Golsorkhi, Issa and their team, that enabled users to unlock digital content within physical magazine pages using their smartphones and tablets. The technology was later brought to O: By Tank, a long-standing supplement created by Tank for The Observer, a Sunday newspaper published by the Guardian Media Group.
In January 2019, Belgravia’s Eccleston Yards announced that Issa would be curating two entrepreneurial masterclasses focusing on ways of achieving a healthy work/life balance as part of a two-week "New Year’s Revolutions" event.
Today Issa spends most of her time between Tank magazine, Becauselondon.com and Tank Form consulting. She is currently the external examiner for Central Saint Martin's MA journalism and fashion promotion courses.