Jenn Ericksen and the stairwell that led somewhere

Jenn Drago Ericksen was standing in a stairwell when she learned about Jet.com. She had joined Walmart only a few months earlier, was still finding her feet in retail, and was being briefed on an acquisition involving a company rather fond of purple. It was an unlikely setting for a career turning point. Stairwells generally promise another floor.

What caught her attention, eventually, was the person behind the company. Marc Lore could set a large ambition, recruit people to pursue it, and give them room to work. Years later, Ericksen would leave Walmart to lead his public relations and communications. The briefing had introduced a business transaction. It also introduced the next chapter of her working life.

Today she is eBay’s Director of CEO Communications. Her route there runs through technology, bicycles, mass retail, entrepreneurial ventures and kitchenware. The continuity is the work of helping people explain what they are doing. The scenery has changed considerably: a networking company, a basketball arena, a proposed city, a day with Drew Barrymore. Executive communications can have a surprisingly varied itinerary.

A degree, a network, a bicycle company

Ericksen studied at San Jose State University, graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in public relations. The university includes her among its distinguished alumni. Her professional roots are in the same Bay Area where she remains based, though the organizations and people she has worked with have taken her far beyond it.

Her early career included executive communications at Cisco, first as a specialist and then as a manager. She later moved to Specialized Bicycle Components as chief of staff to the founder and CEO. Those titles put two kinds of work alongside each other: communicating a leader’s priorities and helping the leader’s office operate.

There is a useful distinction between those responsibilities. A message needs words; an executive office also needs decisions, coordination and follow-through. Her career would keep returning to both. The combination became explicit again when she worked for Lore as his chief of staff and publicist.

The sequence is interesting because it resists the tidy idea of a communications career spent within one industry. A bicycle manufacturer and a technology company have different products and customers. A founder’s office has a different rhythm from a large corporate communications department. Moving between them changes the questions a communicator has to ask before writing anything.

Read as a whole, the route suggests a practical editorial question: what does this particular audience need to understand? The answer changes with the business, even when the executive communications title sounds familiar.

The next job was already in the room

Walmart became a substantial chapter. Ericksen joined its corporate communications operation in 2016 and subsequently became a director. When she announced her departure in 2021, she described five years of learning, friendships and attachment to the people around the company. The small Arkansas town at its center had made an impression on someone with a California career.

Her move to work for Lore grew out of that experience. This was a professional relationship developed over years, followed by a decision to continue with him as he pursued new projects. A job at an enormous retailer had led to the more open-ended business of communicating for an entrepreneur.

The contrast has a certain comic appeal. A retailer has departments, categories and shelves. An entrepreneur’s next idea may require an entirely new category. For a publicist, the practical question becomes how to explain each project clearly without letting the personality at the center swallow the particulars.

By 2021, Lore’s activity included a basketball ownership venture with Alex Rodriguez, a venture capital firm, startups and Telosa, his proposed city. Ericksen described the period as busy for him and consequently for her. The variety itself tells something about that assignment: a single executive relationship could contain several very different public stories.

A city on the cover, sneakers at courtside

Telosa gave that work a conspicuous moment. Ericksen celebrated the project’s appearance on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek and called it her first cover. She also singled out communications colleague Adam Schiff, describing the pleasure of working alongside him and learning from him. The celebration included the person who had helped make the work happen.

“my first cover”

Jenn Drago Ericksen, celebrating the Telosa coverage

A cover is an unusually visible artifact in a profession where much of the activity takes place before publication. It provides something to point to. The preparation, conversations and coordination are less photogenic. Her reaction captured the satisfaction of seeing a project become a finished piece of journalism, with a collaborator receiving some of the credit.

In May 2022, she appeared in a rather different setting: a Mpls.St.Paul Magazine account of an evening with Lore at a Timberwolves game. The article identified her as his chief of staff. While the conversation wandered through basketball and sneakers, she supplied a concise explanation of his tendency to commit fully to a new interest.

Later, when Marc and his brother Chad exchanged competitive banter, Ericksen offered a short translation: “They’re very competitive.” It is a pleasingly economical line. Anyone who has watched siblings argue knows that some family dynamics require neither an organizational chart nor a lengthy briefing document.

These episodes show two scales of the same professional proximity. One concerns explaining an ambitious public proposal. The other concerns knowing a person well enough to make a scene intelligible in a few words. Communications work needs room for both the major announcement and the small observation.

A beautiful day, with actual shoppers

Made by Gather brought Ericksen into another kind of consumer business. Its leadership page named her Chief Communications & Strategy Officer. The company’s portfolio includes bella, Beautiful by Drew Barrymore and CRUX. Its products occupy a domestic setting where design, price and usefulness have to coexist on the same kitchen counter.

The public work around that period had tangible subjects. In 2023, she was a press contact for a CRUXGG collection with Ghetto Gastro. In 2024, she was listed for the refreshed bella brand and a company leadership announcement. Those releases concern products and organizational decisions; they give the communications role a concrete setting.

One account of a day with Barrymore is particularly revealing about the range of people around a consumer brand. Their itinerary included Earthbound partners, Walmart merchants, shoppers in a store, and an audience of women hearing Barrymore speak. The route moved from business partners to the people who might actually take a product home.

There is something refreshing about that order of business. A brand can become very abstract when discussed entirely in meeting rooms. A shopper standing in front of a display brings it back to earth. The product has a price, a place in a kitchen and competition for someone’s attention.

Ericksen ended her account with a question Barrymore had put to the audience: whether they had done something that day they could be proud of. Her answer was yes. The accompanying photographs include a warm embrace between the two women. For once, a report on a busy workday came with an image considerably more appealing than a calendar.

The secondhand shopper gets the microphone

At eBay, Ericksen’s professional subject overlaps with a personal interest. In October 2026, she wrote about enjoying thrift shopping long before the word recommerce entered her working vocabulary. The appeal, as she described it, was finding something distinctive and getting a good deal. Corporate terminology had caught up with an existing habit.

She was marking eBay’s 2026 Recommerce Report and credited Ravi Jariwala and Carsen Rodgers for their collaboration. Her response was both professional pride in a team project and amusement that her shopping habit now had further justification. Few shoppers object when their interests acquire supporting research.

Her recent account of Stephanie Mehta’s conversation with eBay CEO Jamie Iannone emphasized listening to employees, buyers and sellers. That is a fitting subject for someone whose work now centers on CEO communications. Before a leader’s views become a story for others, there is the question of whose experiences enter the conversation.

Read across her career, those experiences form an unusually varied collection: colleagues in Arkansas, an entrepreneur’s collaborators, retail partners, shoppers and sellers. The jobs have different titles, but people keep reappearing in her accounts of them. Even when she celebrates a cover, she makes room for the colleague beside her.

The stairwell is a good place to leave the story. At the time, Ericksen was new enough to retail to need an introduction to a purple-loving company. The introduction eventually helped change where she worked and whom she worked with. Careers often look orderly once the dates are lined up. Living them involves rather more listening, and occasionally finding yourself between floors.