A good sailor is always converting information. A change in pressure becomes a trim of the sail. A ripple becomes a warning. A rival's angle becomes a decision made before anyone has time to hold a meeting about it. Jeremy Wallace began his working life in that world, as an athlete and coach with Sail Canada from 1992 to 1999. The setting later shifted from water to web browsers, boardrooms and retail stores, but his work kept circling the same small, expensive interval: the gap between seeing something and doing something useful about it.
Today Wallace is Zipline's chief marketing officer, based in Tofino, British Columbia, while the enterprise software company he represents is headquartered in San Francisco. Zipline helps retail headquarters communicate with the people who must turn plans into a Tuesday morning reality. Promotions need building. Tasks need assigning. Training needs finishing. Feedback needs returning. The software lives where corporate intention meets a store floor full of customers, deliveries, broken printers and competing priorities.
It is a fitting place for Wallace to land. His résumé is long, but its logic is compact. He has spent more than three decades studying what makes people move, what makes them hesitate and what clarity is worth when the clock is already running.
The wind was the first dashboard
Wallace studied Human Kinetics at the University of British Columbia. By the end of the 1990s, his professional work had moved into interactive technologies and digital accounts. He joined TELUS in 2001 and led web user experience work there through early 2005, when many companies were still deciding whether a website belonged to marketing, technology or an unlucky committee trapped between both.
User experience is an unusually revealing apprenticeship for a marketer. It punishes what a company meant to say and rewards what a person can actually understand. A button is either findable or it is decorative. A path is either clear or it leaks attention. Wallace carried that perspective into product marketing at Riptown.com Media, then into ventures of his own.
Rooster caught the visitor at the door
In 2013 Wallace co-founded Rooster Engagement Tools with Yosem Sweet. Its flagship product used exit-intent technology to recognize when somebody appeared ready to leave a website. A marketer could respond with a targeted message instead of watching the visitor disappear into the statistical fog called bounce rate.
The product was narrow in the flattering sense of the word. It had a moment, a user and a measurable outcome. Unbounce, the Vancouver company known for landing-page software, used Rooster in its own campaigns. The customer became the buyer. In June 2015, Unbounce acquired Rooster and brought its team into the Vancouver office. Wallace became chief marketing officer; Sweet became director of business optimization.
“For us, this is an opportunity to team up with a company that shares our passion for online marketing and conversion optimization.”Jeremy Wallace on the Rooster acquisition
An acquisition can make a founder's story sound finished just as the work gets complicated. Wallace moved from selling one focused product to marketing a broader platform. At Unbounce he spoke for integrations with CallRail and Zapier, both designed to give marketers a cleaner path between tools and a more complete view of what happened after a campaign attracted attention. The scale changed; the concern with continuity did not.
Patience for the hire, pizza for the room
Two Unbounce stories supply a better picture of Wallace as an operator than any row of adjectives. In 2016, the company's Call to Action podcast devoted an episode to its search for a director of marketing. The search had taken almost a year. Wallace explained what he wanted from a senior marketer, and the eventual hire, Michelle Mercier, described the experience from the other side.
The episode preserved a useful tension. Software culture adores speed, but a senior hire rearranges the way a team thinks. Moving quickly is valuable only when the direction is right. The patient search suggests a willingness to leave an important chair open until the fit made sense.
Then there was lunch. During an Unbounce event in New York, a catering truck crashed while the venue was packed. Wallace ordered roughly $700 of pizza on his wife's credit card. She texted: “Did you just order $700.00 in pizza?” His reported reply was gloriously economical: “Yes. Actually, you did.” The event team shared the exchange with the audience. A logistical failure became a meal and a joke, which is about as close as management gets to alchemy.
These are different forms of timing. Wait when a choice will shape years. Act when hundreds of people need feeding. Strategy is partly knowing which clock is running.
The portfolio years made the question larger
After Unbounce, Wallace did not immediately settle into another single-company CMO role. He assembled a portfolio. His work included advisory or fractional leadership assignments with BlocPal, Comm100, Bananatag, Staffbase, Advisor Websites, Theory+Practice and Bucketlist Rewards and Recognition. He also took board and investor roles, including with Agency Employment Services, and joined the advisory board of Bía Neuroscience.
Fractional work offers a peculiar education. An executive enters after the origin story but before the ending, with enough authority to influence the plot and too little time to confuse motion with progress. Across Wallace's assignments, the recurring terrain was growth, marketing, revenue and communication. He was no longer only tuning a page. He was helping companies tune the systems around the page: the team, the message, the handoff and the route to market.
Zipline first brought him in as a fractional growth advisor in August 2023. In July 2024 he moved into executive marketing leadership. It was a return to the operator's chair, but in a category that stretched his old conversion problem across an entire organization.
The funnel now ends on a store floor
Retail operations software has an awkward audience. The buyer may sit at headquarters. The daily user may be opening a store before dawn. The brand promise is drafted in one room and judged in another, often hundreds of miles away. A campaign can be perfectly conceived and still arrive as an email nobody has time to decode.
Zipline packages communication, tasks, learning and operational feedback so a store team can see what matters now. That makes the product a close cousin of Wallace's earlier work. Rooster asked how to reach a visitor before the tab closed. Unbounce asked how to turn campaign attention into action. Zipline asks how a headquarters decision survives the journey to thousands of hands.
On Black Friday 2024, the company put that argument in Times Square. The billboard read “STORES DON'T SUCK,” a phrase borrowed from Zipline's broader campaign about retail execution. Wallace, then publicly titled EVP of Marketing, explained the choice in human terms: “Stores are the heart of every retail brand, and store employees are the lifeblood that keeps them running.” He added that Black Friday was among the toughest days of the year for those teams and that Zipline wanted them to know the company was in their corner.
The sentence matters because it chooses a side. Enterprise software marketing can become fascinated with the buyer's dashboard and forget the employee whose shift produces the data. Wallace put the worker back in the frame. The screen was enormous; the claim was modest. Give people clarity, context and a fair chance to do good work.
“Stores are the heart of every retail brand, and store employees are the lifeblood that keeps them running.”Jeremy Wallace, Zipline
A long career, one useful move at a time
Wallace now works from Tofino, a place where weather refuses to be background scenery. His public profile is quieter than those of many marketing executives. There is no personal content machine, no busy constellation of public social accounts. The visible record is mostly work: roles, partnerships, an acquisition, a few interviews and the campaigns themselves.
That reserve leaves the artifacts to make the case. A conversion tool noticed departure. An integration joined online and offline response. A year-long search treated a senior hire as a consequential decision. A pizza order solved the immediate problem. A Times Square message acknowledged the people carrying retail's heaviest week. None of these acts is identical, but each begins with attention and ends with a clearer next step.
The fashionable story of technology is scale. Wallace's story is about the unit beneath scale: one person receiving one signal and deciding what to do. The sailor adjusts. The visitor stays. The marketer sees the conversion. The store employee knows what matters today. Large systems work, when they work, because somebody made that small passage easier.