She started her career convincing strangers to whiten their teeth at home. Twenty-five years later she runs marketing for Ariat International, the brand riders and ranchers trust with their feet. The thread connecting toothpaste, eyeliner and cowboy boots is simpler than it looks.
In the early 2000s, a young brand manager at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati had an unusual assignment: talk millions of Americans into peeling a plastic strip off a card and pressing it onto their teeth. Crest Whitestrips was new, a little strange, and asked people to trust a drugstore box with something as personal as their own smile. That job - convincing ordinary people to believe in a product before they could see the result - turned out to be the whole career in miniature. The brand manager was Erin Daley.
Today Daley is Chief Marketing Officer of Ariat International, the Union City, California company that makes boots, denim and technical apparel for people who ride horses, work ranches, weld steel and rope cattle. It is about as far from a cosmetics counter as a career can travel. And yet the assignment is identical to the one she had at 27: get someone to trust what they are about to put on their body.
The ThroughlineLook at Daley's résumé and the categories seem to have nothing in common. Toothpaste. Nutritional supplements. Drugstore makeup. Fine jewelry. Western boots. But she has spent a quarter century doing the same thing in each: building the reason a customer picks your box off the shelf instead of the one next to it.
After P&G, she moved through brand and marketing roles connected to Schiff Nutrition and RB, then took on customer and brand leadership at Cast Group. Her highest-profile chapter came at e.l.f. Cosmetics, where she served as Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer during a stretch when the brand posted significant sales growth and a sharp rise in enterprise value. e.l.f. built its reputation on a simple promise - prestige-quality makeup at drugstore prices - and marketing was the machine that made that promise land with young shoppers.
Between the big jobs, she bet on herself. Daley founded Daley Consulting Group, advising consumer brands across categories on marketing strategy - the kind of move that only makes sense if you actually enjoy the puzzle of positioning rather than the title on the door. She has since taken a board seat at Hera Fine Jewelry, joining through the Women On Boards Project.
By The NumbersAriat is not a startup. Founded around three decades ago and named after the legendary racehorse Secretariat, it built its early reputation on riding boots that borrowed athletic-shoe technology - stability, support, moisture management - and brought it to the equestrian arena. From there it expanded into work boots, western fashion, outdoor gear and performance apparel sold around the world.
That scale is the CMO's real challenge. A brand this established has customers who have trusted it for decades - riders who literally put their safety in an Ariat boot - and it also wants new, younger buyers who found western style through fashion, not the barn. Those two audiences do not always want the same message. Keeping the heritage intact while growing the reach is the tightrope Daley walks.
One tell about how Daley thinks: when she shares Ariat's story publicly, she does not lead with celebrity or flash. She has spotlighted the making of the product itself - a behind-the-scenes look at how the company crafts its denim, the wash and weight and stitch that most shoppers never think about. In a marketing world addicted to the loud launch, that is a quiet, telling choice. Trust is built in the parts of the product nobody sees.
She also tied an Ariat push to the return of football season - a western brand leaning confidently into mainstream American sports culture. It is a small signal of a bigger strategy: meet new customers where their attention already is, without abandoning the arena that made you.
There is a reason craft resonates for her. Ariat's customers are people who buy with their hands as much as their thumbs - who judge a boot by how it holds up after a season of real work. You cannot fool that customer with a filter. The marketing has to be as honest as the product, or the boot barn finds out fast.
The Long BuildDaley's path is a useful counter to the idea that big titles arrive by leaping. She climbed: assistant brand manager, brand manager, chief customer officer, founder, board member, chief marketing officer. Each stop added a different muscle - the discipline of CPG, the growth engine of beauty, the independence of running her own shop, the governance view from a board seat.
She earned her MBA from Cornell University's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, and she never really left. Since 2015 she has returned as a guest lecturer and executive coach in the school's marketing mentorship program, working with students who want to do the job she has spent her life on. It is worth pausing on that: a full-time CMO who still makes time to teach the next class of marketers what the classroom cannot.
The words that recur when people describe working with her are not the usual executive-bio filler. Strategic. Passionate. And, notably, real - the sense that she is the same person in the boardroom and the boot barn, that the brand promise she sells is one she actually believes. In a discipline that can drift toward spin, that reputation is the whole game.
It is a fitting quality for someone whose current employer is built on durability. Ariat's whole pitch is that the boot will still be there after the work is done. Daley's career says something similar about how she builds: no shortcuts, no leaping - just the long, honest climb, one rung at a time, until you are the one deciding what the brand stands for.