There is a particular kind of resume that can walk into almost any boardroom in retail and be handed a corner office. Dan Clifford has that resume. Two decades of brand building. Victoria's Secret, Express, J.Jill. A run that helped push one of those names from $3.2 billion to $7 billion in revenue. The safe next move is more of the same - another big logo, another growth target, another quarter.
He took a job selling backpacks made from leftover fabric instead.
In January 2026, Clifford became Chief Marketing Officer at Cotopaxi, the Salt Lake City outdoor brand that is equal parts gear company and social mission. Cotopaxi is a certified B Corporation that directs 1% of its revenue toward fighting global poverty. Clifford now leads the whole marketing function there - creative, brand storytelling, growth, performance, and e-commerce. And the through-line of everything he says about the work is a single, slightly stubborn idea.
01A resume built in the aisles
Clifford's education started close to home, with a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. What followed was a tour through some of the most recognizable names in American retail, at the exact moment those names were being forced to reinvent themselves for a digital world.
At Victoria's Secret, Express, and J.Jill, he led teams that combined three things that do not always sit comfortably together: storytelling, data-driven media planning, and old-fashioned retail marketing. The job was to drive traffic and sales across hundreds of physical stores while the e-commerce side of the business grew faster than anyone's org chart could keep up with. It is a specific skill - keeping a brand's soul intact while the plumbing underneath changes completely.
The headline number from that era is the one that gets repeated: at Victoria's Secret, he helped scale the brand from $3.2 billion to $7 billion, reimagining the market strategy and unlocking innovation in the digital and mobile space. It is the kind of line that opens doors. What is more interesting is what he chose to do once those doors were open.
02The detour through a founder brand
Before Cotopaxi, Clifford was CMO at Pepper, the lingerie brand built by founders serving a customer that mainstream retail had spent years quietly ignoring. It was a smaller, sharper, founder-driven world than the billion-dollar names on his resume, and it clearly changed how he thinks.
His take on founder brands is admiring and specific. Founders, he argues, have a structural advantage that no amount of marketing budget can buy.
The Pepper years also sharpened his instincts about where marketing was heading. He talks about trust as something increasingly scarce - "a fragile commodity" - and about community as an asset worth more than any single paid campaign. His approach leans toward building an audience that wants to stick around, rather than renting attention one click at a time.
On the industry's favorite anxiety - artificial intelligence - he is refreshingly unbothered and clear.
03Why Cotopaxi, and why now
Clifford did not rush into the Cotopaxi role. He advised the team for several months first, effectively test-driving the company before taking the seat. That patience says something. This was not a leap for a bigger title; it was a considered choice about what he wanted the next chapter to be about.
Cotopaxi gave him a brief that most CMOs only get to talk about in conference panels: sit at the intersection of purpose and performance. Deepen a mission-driven identity while bringing the commercial discipline and digital sophistication that a modern outdoor brand needs to lead its category. The mission is not a marketing layer bolted on top - it is baked into how the company designs products, including the Del Día line stitched from remnant fabric that would otherwise head to a landfill.
When Cotopaxi marked its 12-year milestone, Clifford used the moment to thank the founders - Lindsay Shumlas, Davis Smith, and Stephan Jacob - and to line up the numbers above as proof of a thesis he keeps returning to: that purpose-driven business actually works. His own summary of the moment was short. He said he was "proud to be part of what comes next."
04Boston to Salt Lake City
There is a small geographic wrinkle to all of this. Cotopaxi is headquartered in Salt Lake City, at the edge of some of the best terrain in the country for the sports its customers love. Clifford runs its marketing from the Greater Boston area. Leading a brand's creative culture from two time zones away is its own kind of discipline, and it fits a career that has always been about translating - between physical and digital, between story and spreadsheet, between what a brand says and what it actually does.
Away from the work, his interests read like a Cotopaxi customer profile: soccer, skiing, scuba diving, live music, and adventure travel. It is not hard to see why the brand and the marketer found each other.
The bet Clifford is making is not a comfortable one. Purpose is easy to claim and hard to prove, and consumers have grown allergic to companies that treat a cause like a campaign. His answer is to hold both halves of the job at once - the mission and the margin - and to insist they reinforce each other rather than compete. Twenty years in the aisles taught him how to move product. What he seems most interested in now is whether he can move product and mean it.
If he is right, the scoreboard will show it in the only two places that matter to him: what Cotopaxi sells, and what it gives away.