1999 – Detroit, Michigan
Denise Ilitch is the vice chair of Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc., president of Olympia Development, her family’s real estate and entertainment development company, and executive vice president of Ilitch Ventures, Inc., a privately held Michigan corporation that owns and manages the family’s business interests in the food and entertainment industries (Little Caesar Enterprises, Olympia Entertainment, Olympia Development, the Detroit Red Wings, the Detroit Tigers and Olympia Specialty Foods). Ilitch Ventures’ consolidated revenues in 1998 exceeded $800 million. She is a member of the Board of Directors of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company and the Detroit Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Detroit Branch of the NAACP and Detroit Downtown, Inc. She also is a member of the Detroit chapter of the Young President’s Organization, and the Executive Committee of the Metropolitan Detroit Convention & Visitors Bureau. An extremely dedicated business and community leader in both Detroit and Dallas, she owned her own marketing firm in Dallas, Bright Lites, Inc. In 1993, she was one of the founders of the Lovelight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing the lives of impoverished families. She was inducted into Detroit’s International Heritage Hall of Fame in 1999, named the “Marketing Innovator of the Year” in 1998 by the Sales and Marketing Executives of Detroit and honored as one of four “Women of Achievement” by the Anti-Defamation League. She was named one of the Michigan commercial real estate community’s “Five for the Future” (1997) by Commercial Inc. magazine, one of Detroit’s 1996 “Newsmakers of the Year” by Crain’s Detroit Business, and “Woman of the Year” by both Women Mean Business in Dallas and the Boys Towns of Italy (1997). She was chosen by Advertising Age as one of the country’s “best and brightest marketers” (1992). Ilitch has a daughter, Brooke, and a son, Sam.
