Cristy Simon Is Building the Commercial Language for a 160-Year-Old Company

The phrase is almost comically modest: “established a commercial strategy foundation.” It sounds like something that might sit in the middle of an annual review, between a system migration and a refreshed set of templates. But foundations are where organizations reveal their priorities. They determine which ideas can travel, which decisions can be repeated, and whether thousands of people understand the same plan in roughly the same way. Cristy Simon began that work after joining Hanger in 2021. Four years later, she announced that she was becoming the company’s chief marketing officer.

The promotion made the role visible. The more revealing chapter came first. Hanger is headquartered in Austin, where Simon is based, but its footprint reaches across the country: more than 925 clinic locations, two broad business segments, and about 7,000 employees. Patient Care sits beside Products & Services. Research, fabrication, distribution and newer venture investments add more rooms to the house. A marketer working inside that system is not simply choosing a headline. She is deciding how the rooms connect.

Simon’s public biography is brief, which makes its verbs useful. She established. She executed. Before Hanger, she led global upstream and downstream marketing teams for several medical-technology organizations, most recently Abbott. Upstream marketing looks toward unmet needs, portfolio choices and what should exist. Downstream marketing takes what exists and helps it find a market. One discipline begins close to the product decision; the other lives close to adoption. Carry both for long enough and marketing starts to look less like promotion and more like translation.

“I am so excited for this new chapter and to work with our amazing team of marketing and communications experts.”Cristy Simon, announcing her CMO role

The career is hiding in the bridge

There is a pleasing biographical rhyme in Simon’s education. At the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, she concentrated in marketing and minored in Spanish. The point is not that a language minor predicts an executive career. It is that the habits sit near each other. Translation asks you to preserve meaning while changing form. Marketing inside a technical organization asks much the same thing.

A clinician, an engineer, a distribution partner and a prospective customer may all be talking about the same offering while using different measures of value. One sees the fit. Another sees the component. Another sees inventory and timing. Another sees what becomes possible on an ordinary Tuesday. A commercial strategy has to respect those distinct vocabularies without turning the company into a collection of unrelated conversations.

This makes Simon’s earlier global work more than a line of career history. Global upstream and downstream teams force a leader to notice where meaning breaks. A strategy that works in one meeting can fail in another country, function or channel. The leader’s job is to locate the durable idea, then give each team enough freedom to make it useful in context. Hanger’s biography does not enumerate the programs Simon executed, so the honest observation is structural: the company chose to describe her contribution as a foundation, not a single campaign.

A bigger title, earned in public

On January 8, 2025, Simon posted that she was starting as Hanger’s chief marketing officer. Her message was two sentences. The first named the role. The second named the team. It was a small choice, but a telling one: she framed the promotion as a new chapter with “our amazing team of marketing and communications experts.” The title belonged to one person. The work was plural.

The responses filled in a little more texture. Colleagues mentioned work ethic, integrity, passion for the mission and leadership. One called her a “fearless leader.” Another looked forward to continued partnership. Public congratulations are not performance reviews, and they should not be treated as such. Still, repeated language is a clue. People were not only celebrating a rung on the ladder. They were naming qualities they believed had been visible on the climb.

The order matters. Simon did not join with the CMO title and then go looking for a mandate. She joined, built within the organization, and moved into the larger role after the foundation was underway. Careers are often narrated through job titles because titles are easy to date. The work between them is harder to package. In this case, the in-between work is the most portable lesson: build the mechanism before asking everyone to admire the output.

Marketing as organizational memory

Hanger gives Simon an unusually long timeline to work with. The company traces its history back more than 160 years. That heritage can be an asset, but only if it helps explain the present. Otherwise, longevity becomes a fact trapped in a lobby display. The commercial task is to carry the durable parts forward while making room for a business that now includes national care, products and services, research, and investment in emerging companies.

Hanger Ventures makes the tension visible. The venture arm talks about incubation, commercialization and access to an organizational ecosystem. Its first announced investment, made in July 2024, backed Bionic Power, a company developing smart orthotic technology. The story expands from an established operator to a platform for newer builders. Simon appears on the Ventures leadership team alongside clinical, financial, strategy and acquisitions executives. Marketing is in the room where the organization decides how innovation enters the system.

This is where commercial language earns its keep. A venture founder needs to know what access to Hanger might unlock. An internal team needs to know how a new partnership fits the company’s priorities. A customer needs a clear account of value. The story cannot be identical for each audience, but it should feel as if it comes from the same institution. Coherence is not repetition. It is consistency of intent.

The marketer’s product is sometimes a campaign. In a complex company, it can be the shared sentence everyone is finally able to finish.

Simon’s seat on the Hanger Foundation general board adds another layer. It connects her corporate work to an organization that supports community programs and education in the orthotics and prosthetics field. There is no need to invent a grand theory about the board appointment. The simple fact is interesting enough: her remit touches both the commercial center and a charitable arm of the same ecosystem. A person responsible for language is also close to the places where institutional purpose becomes action.

The useful thing to steal

Executives often inherit a request for more awareness, better content or a refreshed brand. Those may be real needs. Simon’s career suggests a prior question: what must the organization agree on before any of those things can compound? If the product team, sales team, service network and leadership group each carry a different map, adding volume only creates louder directions.

A foundation begins with definitions. Who is the work for? What problem does the organization solve? Which claims can every team support? Where should local judgment override central consistency? The output might include positioning, portfolio logic, planning rhythms or measurement. The public material does not say which pieces Simon chose, so it would be wrong to assign her a proprietary playbook. What it does say is that the foundation exists and that several programs followed. Sequence is evidence enough.

There is also something worth noticing in the balance between her old and new domains. Upstream marketing rewards curiosity before certainty. Downstream marketing rewards clarity after decisions have been made. A CMO needs both postures, sometimes in the same afternoon. Listen widely enough to shape the choice. Decide clearly enough that thousands of people can act. Then keep listening, because markets have a habit of editing the plan.

Simon’s public story remains deliberately work-sized. There is no sprawling archive of keynote videos or first-person essays to turn into mythology. What is visible is a coherent line: a Texas marketing education, global medical-technology roles, an operating chapter at Hanger, a foundation built, a larger mandate earned, and a board seat that keeps the company’s wider purpose nearby.

That restraint fits the subject. Infrastructure rarely makes a dramatic entrance. It becomes noticeable when people can move faster without colliding. The same is true of commercial strategy. When it works, the organization sounds less like a stack of departments and more like a group of people who know what they are building together. Cristy Simon’s next chapter is to keep that language useful as Hanger’s old history meets its new bets.