Chad Hetherington and the trouble with standing still

The photo studio needed shelves. Bethany Schrock was new at The Stable and trying to put them together when Chad Hetherington joined in. He had a conference call in his ears and the instructions in his hands. Schrock asked what he did there. He told her he was one of the founders. The room, she later recalled, was above a taco place and smelled of tortilla chips. Corporate culture sometimes arrives with rather less ceremony than its consultants would prefer.

The memory surfaced when Hetherington announced his departure from The Stable in December 2025. There were plenty of larger things to remember: clients, acquisitions, the sale to Accenture. Yet the shelves had stayed with Schrock. An ordinary task had given her a useful first impression of the person running the place.

Hetherington’s career is full of changes of setting. Film production in Adelaide. Consumer products in America. Quirky in New York. The Stable in Minneapolis. Now Third, a company built around social commerce. Follow the sequence and a recurring interest appears: how an idea becomes something people notice, want and eventually buy. He has worked at several points along that journey, including the less photogenic ones.

A filmmaker learns the shelf

He grew up in Adelaide and attended Findon High School. His early work was in television and film, and he co-founded Logic Films in 2004. A 2005 Australian Young Achiever Award for Career Achievement followed. In 2007, he moved to the United States and entered the consumer products business. It was a change of industry, though the problem of reaching an audience was familiar territory.

Production gives you a finished piece of work. Distribution asks who will actually encounter it. In consumer products, that question acquires a particularly stubborn physical form: a shelf. Somebody has to persuade a retailer that your object deserves space on it. The work involves relationships, judgment and a tolerance for hearing about all the other objects that also deserve space.

At Quirky, which developed products from crowdsourced ideas, Hetherington led sales and business development. His SKU biography describes a retail business that reached 50,000 stores within five years. The scale matters because it gave him experience of taking new products into established retail systems. A promising invention and a functioning retail business are separated by a considerable amount of work.

Those years also put him alongside Quirky founder Ben Kaufman. Hetherington has identified Kaufman as an important influence. For someone who learned through work rather than university, the people in the room were part of the education. His eventual businesses would depend heavily on assembling rooms with the right people in them.

A bigger agency, a smaller boat

In 2015, Hetherington and Nik Larsen founded The Stable in Minneapolis. The premise grew out of a practical frustration: a brand’s route to a customer was becoming more complicated than the traditional retail representative’s job. Stores mattered. So did marketplaces, the brand’s own website and the content that persuaded somebody to visit either one. Helping with only a portion of that journey left a lot of work for the client to connect.

The Stable began bringing those capabilities together. Within two years, it had expanded to Seattle and raised outside capital, an unusual step for a service agency. Its work included helping digitally native brands such as Ring reach shoppers across online and physical retail. The opportunity was broad enough to require a company that could handle several kinds of problem at once.

In April 2020, the agency merged with Kreative, a Bentonville firm with expertise in Walmart, Sam’s Club and Costco, and secured investment from Growth Catalyst Partners. Hetherington was explicit about the gap: Walmart had been missing from the agency’s offering. The transaction added people who knew that retail environment. It was expansion with a particular job attached.

Other deals extended the range. RichContext brought e-commerce technology; Jacobs Marketing brought an established Minneapolis retail agency. By the end of 2020, The Stable had about 200 employees. Its growing map included Minneapolis, Seattle, Austin and Bentonville. Each addition made the original promise more plausible, while making the organization itself more complicated to run.

In December 2021, The Stable acquired BVA and Zehner, two Shopify agencies. The additions gave it more capacity to build and operate brands’ direct-to-consumer businesses. The scope now ran from winning retail business to designing the place a brand sold for itself. A client could ask a larger question without immediately being handed a list of other agencies to call.

The growth showed up in the rankings: No. 229 on the 2021 Inc. 5000, followed by No. 329 in 2022. Rankings are tidy. Growing companies are generally less so. Hetherington was already considering how to preserve the feel and responsiveness of a smaller firm while adding people and capabilities.

“We want to be the little boat that continues to be able to maneuver.”

Chad Hetherington, 2021

That image is useful because a little boat has a limitation: it cannot carry everything. An agency serving more clients needs capacity, yet every additional capability can bring another handoff or decision. Hetherington’s stated preference for maneuverability gives the acquisition story an interesting tension. Building the bigger business was only one part of the assignment. Keeping it responsive was another.

The early finances had been less graceful. Hetherington has described a period when new clients were arriving but cash was insufficient to comfortably fund staffing and payroll. He and his business partner put in personal money. His wife Kate was involved in the business. Spreadsheets carried work that a stronger finance function would later handle. Growth could be exciting and expensive in the same fortnight.

There was also room for a product of their own. In 2021, The Stable introduced fundays, a hard seltzer with bright packaging, distinctive patterns and cheeky flavor names. Hetherington discussed the typography and the occasions the brand was meant to evoke. After years of helping other brands compete for attention, the agency had supplied itself with a can-shaped examination paper.

A way in without the degree

One of the more revealing projects had little to do with a sales channel. The Stable created “No College? No Worries.”, a paid executive apprenticeship inspired by Hetherington’s own route into work. It began in Minneapolis in 2021 and later expanded its recruitment to Northwest Arkansas. The opening was aimed at people who had not attended college.

The structure was concrete: an initial three months across the business, then two six-month rotations, with mentorship and practical projects. Grace Slaubaugh joined in March 2022 as the first executive apprentice. The program gave an alternative route a timetable and a place inside the company. Potential could become observable work, with someone responsible for helping it develop.

That choice belongs alongside Hetherington’s other experience of education. His public profile records service on a University of Minnesota retail merchandising and design board from 2018 to 2022. His own route had been different, but he was involved in creating connections between learning and the business. The apprenticeship widened the entrance.

The customer has changed channels

Accenture announced its agreement to acquire The Stable in July 2022. Financial terms were undisclosed. The agency would add commerce capabilities to Accenture Song, bringing together work in sales, operations, creative, digital and technology. For Hetherington, the deal supplied a much larger setting for the proposition he had been building since 2015.

He remained within the organization before leaving in December 2025. His farewell thanked employees, clients, investors and Accenture Song. It returned to the small team working from a conference room at the beginning. After a decade, the company had become the kind of place whose alumni remembered both the ambitious projects and who helped with the shelves.

In March 2026, he launched Third by combining Orca and Sapphire Studios, backed by Growth Catalyst Partners. Orca brought experience in livestreaming and social commerce; Sapphire brought performance creative. Third began with approximately 70 employees across Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Mexico City and London. This time, the opening chapter already had an international cast.

The name reflects Hetherington’s view of commerce in three eras: physical retail, e-commerce and social commerce. His attention is on what happens when discovery, entertainment and purchasing sit close together. In a May 2026 interview, he described a business operating 14 production studios across Los Angeles and Mexico City. A feed may look weightless. Producing things for it requires rooms, equipment and people.

He also emphasized that brands differ in their customers and starting positions. That makes the work more involved than arriving with the same instructions for everybody. Third’s offering combines creative work with shop operations, creator relationships and performance analysis. The old concern with getting the pieces to work together survives in the new business.

His early hiring at Third included a search for a Head of People & Culture who would work directly with him. He described the position as helping define the business and wanted someone who cared about ambitious people doing good work. The company was young enough for that person to help shape its habits. The experience employees had inside the business was part of what he wanted to build.

In 2026, Campaign US named Hetherington to its 40 Over 40 list, identifying him as Third’s founder and CEO. The title is current; The Stable remains part of his history. His career has moved from production to distribution and back toward an increasingly close relationship between the two. The next task is familiar enough: work out where the customer has gone, assemble the people who understand it, and get on with building.