Cristina Ceresoli
She has spent more than twenty years teaching legacy retailers to fall in love with data - and consumers to fall in love with brands. At Rebel Athletic, the marketing chief is aiming both talents at the world of crystals, sparkle and competitive cheer.
There is a particular kind of marketer who never gets attached to the product. Ask them what they sell and they will pause, because the honest answer is not lingerie or mattresses or crystal-studded leggings. It is the feeling a person gets when a brand seems to understand them. Cristina Ceresoli has spent more than two decades chasing that feeling across some of the biggest names in American retail, and it has led her somewhere most executives with her resume would never expect to land: a competitive cheer and dancewear company in Carrollton, Texas.
As Chief Marketing Officer of Rebel Athletic, Ceresoli now oversees the brand story of a company that makes sparkle its business - crystal-embellished uniforms, performance leggings, sports bras and bags for all-star cheer and dance teams. It is a niche most people never see unless they have a child in the sport, and yet it runs on the same emotional engine she has been studying her whole career: identity, belonging, and the desire to be seen.
01 / THE THREADDifferent products, one obsession
Trace her career and the products refuse to sit still. Early roles took her through Sapient Corporation, Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria's Secret. Then came a long run at Express, roughly six years, ending as Vice President of digital, marketing and PR. From there she moved to Chico's FAS, where she led marketing for Soma, the intimates brand. Somewhere in the middle she stepped fully out of any single company and into the industry itself, joining the National Retail Federation as Senior Vice President of Retail Strategy.
Lingerie, loungewear, mall fashion, a trade body, and now competitive cheerwear. On paper it looks restless. In practice it looks like someone who figured out early that the skill travels even when the category does not.
02 / THE CLASSROOMLearning it, then teaching it
Ceresoli's foundation is a bachelor's degree in marketing from the University of Miami, later sharpened by executive education at Harvard Business School and the Wharton School. But the more telling credential might be the one that points outward: she has served as an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design, standing in front of the next generation of designers and marketers while running the discipline in the real world.
That instinct to teach shows up again in her board seat with the Women in Retail Leadership Circle, which she joined in 2021, and in her own advisory firm, Cristina Ceresoli & Associates. The practice is built around three ideas that read more like a personal philosophy than a service menu: transition, growth, and the power of meaningful connection.
The Ceresoli toolkit
- Omnichannel brand-building across store and screen
- E-commerce and direct-to-consumer growth
- CRM, loyalty and customer retention
- Creative and brand strategy
- Digital transformation of legacy retail
- Team development and leadership
03 / THE BIG STAGEA view from the top of the industry
Her years at the National Retail Federation gave her something most brand marketers never get: a seat above the whole sector. She helped shape the organization's content and event strategy, including the NRF Big Show, the industry's marquee gathering. On podcasts from that era she talked less about tactics and more about the forces underneath them - the slow death of the mall, the rise of customer data, and the quiet ethics of personalized pricing.
On the Lions Share Marketing Podcast she pressed a point that has aged well: retailers who gather customer data and actually use it will outrun the ones who don't, and brand love is the payoff for getting that relationship right. It was a data argument in service of an emotional one, which is more or less her whole worldview in a sentence.
04 / THE INVENTIVE STREAKMarketing a bra-fitting robot
One of the more memorable chapters came at Soma, where she championed SomaINNOFIT, a piece of technology that reimagined how women are measured for a bra. Selling a fitting-room gadget to skeptical shoppers is a strange marketing problem - part product, part reassurance, part theater. It is also exactly the kind of thing that reveals whether a marketer can turn an awkward innovation into something a customer actually wants. She could.
The through-line, again, is not the gadget. It is the willingness to sit with a customer's discomfort and design around it rather than shout over it.
05 / THE PIVOTFrom scale to speed
In 2022 she was named Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Altar'd State, along with its sister brands AS Revival and Tullabee. It was a purpose-driven, women-led company, and she said as much when she arrived.
More recent stops - interim CMO work at Coco de Mer London, a CMO seat at City Mattress - kept her moving between categories and company sizes. And now Rebel Athletic, a smaller, louder, faster company than most of the giants on her resume. Big retail teaches you scale. Small retail teaches you that every decision lands by the next morning. She has spent twenty years learning the first and now gets to apply it where the feedback is instant.
06 / THE PRESENTSparkle, with a strategy
Rebel Athletic sits in an unusual corner of apparel: luxury sportswear with crystals, built for competitive cheer and dance. Its customers are all-star teams and the families behind them, a community that is intensely loyal and emotionally invested in a way most mass retail can only envy. Running roughly $22 million in annual revenue with a couple hundred employees and a Shopify Plus storefront, it is precisely the kind of brand where a seasoned omnichannel marketer can move the needle fast.
It would be easy to see sparkle as the opposite of strategy. Ceresoli's whole career argues otherwise. Behind every crystal-covered uniform is the same question she has been answering since Victoria's Secret: who is this for, and why does it matter so much to them? At Rebel Athletic, the answer happens to shine.
What holds all of it together is not a category or a title. It is a conviction that the best marketing is not loud, it is loyal - loyal to the person on the other side of the transaction. Whether that person is buying a bra, a mattress, or a rhinestone-covered leotard for a Saturday competition, the job is the same. Make them feel understood. She has been doing it, product after product, for a very long time.