Bethany Evans has spent her career getting farther from the click without ever losing respect for it. She began in the close quarters of social media, where feedback arrives instantly and sometimes in capital letters. She moved through airline customer communications, paid media, loyalty programs and global brand work. Now, as chief marketing officer of Rhone, her desk contains almost the whole customer journey: brand, creative, performance, customer experience, ecommerce and marketing operations.
That route makes her a revealing operator for this particular retail moment. Rhone began in 2014 as a men's activewear label sold online. It now has women's collections, wholesale relationships and stores of its own. The company has crossed the point where an ecommerce dashboard can explain the entire business. A digital ad may create a sale, but it does not fully account for the person who tried on a shirt in Flatiron, noticed it later at a department store and remembered the name a month after that.
Evans's job is to make those scattered encounters feel like one brand. She brings more than 15 years of practice and a useful allergy to false choices. Her public work suggests that data and story can share a table, stores and ecommerce can help each other, and disciplined marketing can still leave a little room for surprise. The spreadsheet is invited. It simply does not get to choose the music.
The customer was the curriculum
Evans graduated from Washington and Lee University in 2005 and later earned an MBA from Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business. By 2012, she was managing social media at JCPenney. The title sounds narrower now than the work felt then. Retail social teams sat at an unruly intersection of advertising, service, cultural commentary and live customer research. Every post was a message; every reply was evidence.
At Southwest Airlines, beginning in 2014, Evans expanded from social marketing into customer communication strategy and then media and content. She helped create the airline's first influencer marketing program, Southwest Storytellers, and worked on consumer activations around its international flight launch. Aviation forces a marketer to understand that a customer relationship continues after the promotion. The product is not merely a ticket. It is a chain of expectations, messages and moments, all vulnerable to weather, logistics and the human preference for arriving where one intended.
Social media
Customer stories
Loyalty and brand
The whole journey
Her old university invited her back in 2018 for AdLib, a conference where alumni showed students that advertising careers rarely follow one approved route. Evans was living proof before the point needed making. Department-store social media did not seem like the obvious apprenticeship for outdoor loyalty. Airline content did not inevitably lead to activewear. Yet the changes become coherent when viewed through the customer. The category moved; the habit of listening traveled intact.
Loyalty without the velvet rope
At The North Face, Evans first led digital marketing and loyalty, then moved through global brand management, media and channel marketing, and ultimately became vice president of Americas marketing. One of her defining projects was the redesign of VIPeak, the company's loyalty program. The new XPLR Pass was meant to feel more approachable and useful to a younger explorer, replacing a name that carried the faint air of a roped-off lounge.
The team built the redesign with customer input and set an ambition of two million new members in its first year. The program later received a Silver REGGIE Award, with its case study reporting a 13 percent incremental revenue lift heading into the fourth quarter. The numbers matter, but so does the method: loyalty was treated as access to the brand's world, not a coupon drawer with a password.
“It's just all about authenticity and having that two-way conversation with our community.”Bethany Evans, 2025
Her North Face years also included the Climb Festival and a period that her professional biography credits with 11 consecutive quarters of growth in a $2 billion Americas region. The scale changed. So did her titles. But Evans continued to talk about the unglamorous foundations of modern marketing: understand what people need, build a message that respects them and create enough organizational space for a team to produce ideas rather than merely process requests.
Her leadership philosophy has a similar practicality. Evans has spoken about using a strengths assessment as a turning point, not because it offered a flattering set of adjectives, but because it relieved leaders of the fantasy that they must be excellent at everything. Her answer is the complementary team. Find what people do naturally well. Arrange the group so those strengths meet. Leadership, in her telling, is closer to composition than solo performance.
A brand leaves the browser
Evans joined Rhone in November 2024. The timing offered the sort of problem marketers secretly enjoy: a brand with a clear digital history was becoming a more complicated retail company. Its wholesale business was growing. Its store footprint was widening. Its women's collection was new. An efficient direct-response system could continue finding online buyers, but it could not do all the work of creating familiarity across physical and digital places.
She began speaking about stores as community hubs. The observation came with a charming piece of field research close to home: her teenager and his friends still went to the mall, just as earlier generations had. They also thrifted. Physical shopping had not vanished; it had become social again, with a sharper awareness of value and reuse. A store could offer fabric, fit and advice, but also events, local relationships and a reason to linger.
That view helped set up ReRhone, the resale channel launched in January 2026 with Archive. The input was a common retail nuisance: returns. Rhone was processing about 5,000 each month, many of them new pieces with tags still attached. Instead of treating the pile only as a cost, the company turned qualifying items into opening inventory. Lightly worn pieces could be cleaned and repaired; unsuitable products could be donated.
Evans had seen The North Face's Renewed program develop, but she did not pretend that precedent removed uncertainty. Her summary of the ReRhone approach was wonderfully plain: “Let's launch and learn and see what our community feedback is.” For an executive, admitting that the first version is a question can be a form of confidence. It also turns operations into storytelling without dressing the warehouse in a cape.
The romance of the upper funnel
By August 2026, Rhone was ready to make the strategic shift visible. “A Love Letter to NYC” follows a real couple through a Manhattan day, complete with near-misses, a park and the warm machinery of a 1990s romantic comedy. The activewear campaign contains no workout. Its characters are moving, but nobody is asked to count repetitions for the camera.
The omission is the pitch. Evans has argued that performance is not confined to athletic achievement; clothing participates in commutes, meetings, errands and the modest choreography of an ordinary Tuesday. Rhone divided its products into move, play and live. The campaign placed all three in the city and trusted viewers to recognize themselves without the usual activewear liturgy of sweat, strain and a sunrise alarm.
It also signaled a change in media logic. Performance advertising had suited a direct-to-consumer business because the path from impression to ecommerce sale was clean enough to measure. Stores and wholesale muddied that line. Rhone responded with an omnichannel campaign across television, connected TV, social, direct mail, print, out-of-home, retail and digital. New York received Citi Bike placements, a hand-painted mural, a photo booth and an integration with the New York Times' Connections game. A missed-connections story had found its media pun.
“This campaign was meant to reflect how our customers actually live.”Bethany Evans, 2026
The lesson is not that brands should flee the bottom of the funnel and start commissioning murals. It is that a changing business requires a changing account of value. A click is precise, useful and small. Brand memory is unruly, delayed and capable of traveling into a store the ad platform cannot see. Evans's remit puts both forms of value under the same roof, where they can argue productively.
Her career has prepared her for that argument. Social media taught immediacy. Airlines taught the continuity of experience. Loyalty taught the value of recognition over time. Outdoor marketing taught how a product can invite people into a larger identity. Rhone now asks her to fit those lessons into a company growing in several directions at once.
Progress, minus the theatre
Evans's public persona is bright but notably short on executive mysticism. She talks about consumer basics, team strengths and launching before every question is settled. Colleagues describe a leader who combines a data-driven view with openness to new ideas, makes time for people and can hold brand and commercial needs in the same frame. A company post once prompted co-founder Ben Checketts to joke that she was the Karate Kid. Evans answered another welcome message by complimenting Nate Checketts as both a leader and pizza chef. Corporate life improves when someone remembers the pizza.
Away from work, she reads, travels with her family and has taught barre. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two sons and two dogs. Those details do not unlock a secret formula. They simply make the scale of the job more recognizable. The CMO directing television, customer experience, ecommerce and a New York mural is also the parent observing teenagers at the mall and noticing that their behavior contradicts an easy industry cliché.
That may be Evans's most useful instinct: look again. A loyalty program can be access rather than discounting. A store can be a meeting place. A return can be inventory. An activewear campaign can work without a gym. A performance marketer can defend brand memory. None of these moves requires a thunderclap. They require an operator willing to notice when the old category for a problem has become too small.