In 1998, a website was still the sort of thing a company could discuss as a future project. Google was new. The iPhone was nine years away. “Customer experience” had not yet been shortened into an industry with its own alphabet soup. Chris Pisapia and Joe Zarrett started Verndale in that smaller internet, then spent the next 28 years watching the website swallow the store, the service desk, the catalogue, the loyalty program, and quite a bit of corporate strategy.
Pisapia’s career is unusual for its continuity. He did not build one company, sell it, and begin narrating the lesson from a podcast studio. He remained inside Verndale as the job kept changing. Project manager. Strategist. Account leader. Senior problem-solver. CEO. The titles chart a practical education in how digital promises survive contact with deadlines, legacy systems, nervous clients, and the mysterious committee that owns the login no one can find.
Today Verndale is a Boston-rooted digital experience and technology company with global offices, hundreds of employees, and a portfolio stretching across strategy, design, engineering, data, commerce, marketing, and managed services. Pisapia still leads it. The current assignment is larger than any single implementation: turn an enduring founder-led agency into a connected platform for digital growth.
The useful kind of range
Pisapia studied business at the University of New Hampshire, then earned a master’s degree in information systems from Bentley University between 1999 and 2002. The overlap is telling. He was studying systems while helping run a young firm built to make systems useful. Business and technology were never separate lanes in his story. They were two halves of the same client problem.
That dual fluency became his operating signature. He has worked in a senior strategy role on more than 150 digital projects, spanning ecommerce, application development, and the integration of older technology. He is also known for entering a hard client situation personally. The image is less corner office than open ticket: someone who can discuss the account, inspect the machinery, and translate the trouble into a decision.
“This partnership marks a significant milestone in shaping our future ambitions to create great outcomes for our clients and people.”Chris Pisapia, on the Trinity Hunt partnership
There is a management advantage in doing several jobs inside the same business. A project manager learns that optimism needs a calendar. An account leader learns that a correct answer can still arrive badly. A strategist learns that elegant diagrams become expensive when they ignore the installed plumbing. Pisapia carried each perspective into the next role.
Verndale’s stated values sound like the operating version of that journey: be relentless, do the right thing, and help others win. The company says client and employee satisfaction are its most important measures. Those are ordinary words with inconvenient consequences. They require leaders to care about delivery after the pitch and about the team after the launch.
Before the category had a name
An early account of Verndale captured a resourceful distribution strategy. The young company offered to build a website for a business association in exchange for exposure to its members. Pisapia and Zarrett understood that they could not outspend larger consultancies or underprice every freelancer. They could, however, become useful inside a community and let relationships do the marketing.
That bet aged well. The tools changed, but digital work remained an exercise in trust. A client gives an agency access to systems, customer data, brand reputation, and the fragile optimism surrounding a transformation budget. Competence opens the door. Reliability keeps it open.
By 2018, Pisapia was writing about customer experience as a company-wide coordination problem. Verndale’s survey of senior marketers found that brands struggled with real-time insight, measurement, legacy technology, and internal skills. His conclusion was practical: personalization required data, but data needed a strategic roadmap connected to business priorities. Buying software without fixing the plan was simply an expensive way to preserve confusion.
Can strategy, data, design, and technology behave like one system for the client? Verndale’s services have widened, but Pisapia’s public comments keep returning to this point of connection.
The observation looks sharper in the age of AI. Platforms promise faster content, deeper personalization, and new ways to search. Yet the hard work still sits between systems and teams: deciding what outcome matters, preparing the data, setting rules, and giving people a workflow they can use. The future has better demos. It retains a stubborn affection for integration.
The deal after the long build
In December 2024, Pisapia recapitalized Verndale with Trinity Hunt Partners. The transaction was announced publicly the following February, alongside a majority investment in Craft, a research, strategy, and digital product design firm. Together, the companies became the foundation of Trinity Hunt’s digital customer experience services platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The timing matters. Pisapia did not invite a capital partner to invent Verndale’s identity. He did it after the company had accumulated decades of client work, technical alliances, and operating habits. Trinity Hunt brought resources for a different pace of growth. Pisapia brought a clear view of the capabilities clients kept needing around the core.
Verndale acquires Yaksa, adding Montréal-based digital commerce depth.
The company is recapitalized with Trinity Hunt Partners.
Fishtank joins, expanding Verndale’s Sitecore practice.
Vaan Group and Amp’s Product Experience division add Shopify, product design, UX, and engineering.
Homestead Studio adds acquisition, retention, and lifecycle marketing for direct-to-consumer brands.
The post-deal sequence moved quickly. Verndale acquired Fishtank in November 2025. In January 2026 it added Vaan Group, a Shopify-focused D2C agency, and the Product Experience division of Amp. Homestead Studio followed in March, extending the platform into customer acquisition, retention, and lifecycle marketing.
On paper, the logic forms a clean chain: research the need, design the product, build the experience, connect commerce and data, attract customers, and keep improving performance. In organizations, chains are messier. Every acquisition arrives with its own vocabulary, heroes, habits, and preferred calendar invite. The serious work begins after the celebratory quote.
The connected-experience build
Products, not projects
Pisapia gave the integration thesis a useful phrase when Verndale acquired Amp’s Product Experience division. The combined model, he said, should help clients create digital experiences that “evolve like products - not projects.” It is a compact rebuke to the launch-and-leave tradition of agency work.
A project has a finish line. A product has users, evidence, maintenance, and another version. Treating digital experiences as products changes the economics and the posture. Teams measure what happens after launch. Designers watch behavior. Engineers plan for change. Marketing and technology departments share a scoreboard, or at least begin the lively negotiation required to create one.
“Together, we’re building a unified model that helps clients move faster and deliver digital experiences that evolve like products - not projects.”Chris Pisapia, January 2026
Verndale’s partnerships reinforce the same idea. The company has built practices around Sitecore, Optimizely, Salesforce, Shopify, and other enterprise platforms. In 2024 it received global Sitecore recognition for customer success and strategic excellence, along with Optimizely’s Customer Choice Partner of the Year award. In June 2026 it joined the Sitecore Velocity Program, giving its teams earlier access to SitecoreAI capabilities and a closer path from experimentation to client use.
Awards decorate the shelf. Customer adoption pays the rent. Pisapia’s language around the Sitecore program emphasized marketers moving faster while retaining trust, control, and brand consistency. The qualifier is important. Every new tool arrives advertising freedom; an operator must also ask who approves the output, where the data travels, and what happens on a difficult Tuesday.
Patient ambition
Pisapia received CEO of the Year recognition from the Katahdin Group in 2022 and 2024. He has spent roughly a decade in the organization’s CEO network. Peer groups suit the pattern of his career: leadership as a practice refined in company, client, and colleague relationships, not as a solitary performance.
Away from work, he travels with his wife and two children and enjoys golf, hiking, and skiing. Three of those hobbies reward patience; the fourth depends on the airport. They fit a founder whose story is measured in decades rather than launch weeks.
The next Verndale will test whether patient ambition can survive accelerated growth. Pisapia has more capabilities to connect, more colleagues to align, and a capital partner expecting progress. He also has a long memory of what clients actually buy: clarity, competence, and fewer surprises.
That may be his most useful advantage. Technology companies love clean breaks with the past. Operators know that durable change is usually an edit. Keep the trust. Improve the system. Add what the customer needs. Remove what makes the work harder. Then do it again, long after the launch party has gone home.