There is a particular species of professional that the internet economy invented and then quietly made indispensable, and Justin Kassan is a fine specimen of it. He does not design the garment. He does not sew it, name it, photograph it or write the line of copy that appears beneath it. What he does is decide, with a precision that would have baffled every advertising executive who ever lived before about 2011, exactly how much it costs to convince a stranger to buy the thing - and whether that stranger will ever come back.
He is, as of 2025, the Chief Marketing Officer of Honeylove, the Los Angeles sculptwear brand headquartered in a building on East 2nd Street that once would have housed a printing press and now houses people arguing about attribution windows. It is a good job at a company with an unusually good story. And Kassan arrived at it by a route so circuitous that it deserves recounting slowly.
The degree that explains nothing
Between 2007 and 2011 he was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying Environmental Science. This is worth pausing on, because it explains precisely nothing about what came next, and that is exactly the point. Almost nobody in performance marketing set out to be in performance marketing. The discipline did not exist in any recognizable form when Kassan was choosing his major. He graduated into a job market that had recently been set on fire, in a field that suggested a future of soil samples and grant applications, and instead found himself in the business of buying advertising on a social network that was, at the time, still deciding whether it wanted advertising at all.
He started agency-side, as a Senior Ad Manager at SocialCode - a company that would later rebrand itself as Code3, in the great tradition of agencies that outgrow their own names. Agency work is the apprenticeship of the trade. You handle other people's money, other people's brands, other people's panic. You learn quickly which levers move a number and which merely make everyone feel busy. It is an unglamorous education, and it is the only one that works.
Nobody grows up wanting to be a media buyer. This is a considerable advantage, because it means everyone who becomes one arrived by choice rather than by inertia.
On the accidental disciplineRazors first
Then came Dollar Shave Club, where he was Senior Manager, Marketing for Facebook, running all paid social acquisition. Consider the timing. Dollar Shave Club had already made the video - the one with the founder walking through a warehouse being funny about razor blades, the one that every marketing conference has cited approximately nine thousand times since. That video is the part everyone remembers.
The part nobody remembers is that a video, on its own, is a home movie. Somebody had to put it in front of the right several million people, repeatedly, at a cost that made subscription economics survive contact with reality. Somebody had to notice when the audience stopped converting and find the next one. That somebody, for paid social, was Kassan. The company was eventually acquired by Unilever for a sum that made everyone involved reconsider their opinions about razor blades.
Then watches, then leggings
From razors he moved to MVMT, the watch brand that convinced a generation that a wristwatch could cost less than a dinner and still look like a decision rather than an accident. He joined as Director of Acquisition and left as Vice President of Growth, which is the most informative sentence in his entire professional history. Job hops tell you where somebody wanted to go. Internal promotions tell you what somebody actually delivered while they were there. Somebody at MVMT looked at what Kassan was producing and handed him more of the company. There is no more honest performance review than that.
In 2023 he became Vice President of Media at Fabletics, where the challenge is different in kind rather than degree. Fabletics is not a brand so much as a membership machine wearing the costume of an activewear label. Its economics depend on the second purchase, the sixth, the fourteenth. Acquiring a customer who buys once is a rounding error there. The media plan has to reach people who will stay, which is an enormously harder question than reaching people who will click, and the two are frequently in direct opposition.
Acquiring a customer who buys once is a rounding error. Acquiring one who returns fourteen times is a business.
The membership problemThe company he joined
Honeylove deserves its own paragraph, and probably its own film. It was founded by Betsie Larkin, a vocalist in electronic dance music, which is not a background that appears on any conventional list of routes into the intimates industry. Larkin's complaint was practical rather than entrepreneurial: the shapewear available to her was miserable to perform in. Rather than accept this as one of life's fixed inconveniences, she designed something better and put it on Kickstarter, where it raised roughly $300,000 from people who evidently shared the complaint. A $13 million Series A followed. By 2025 the company was an Inc. 5000 honoree with a product range that had expanded well past its founding category into bras, tops and leggings.
The engineering vocabulary Honeylove uses is faintly industrial - targeted compression, flexible boning, bonded underbust construction, seamless panels, a no-roll design. It reads like the spec sheet for a suspension bridge, which is more or less the intention. The brand's argument has always been that shapewear was a solved problem badly solved, and that the solution was materials science rather than resignation.
Into this arrives a marketer whose previous four employers sold razors, watches, activewear and social advertising. It looks like a mismatch until you notice what all of those businesses have in common, which is that they live or die on the same four numbers: what it costs to acquire a customer, what that customer is worth over their lifetime, how fast the money comes back, and how quickly the creative stops working. Change the product and those four numbers stay exactly where they are, wearing a different outfit.
Why apparel keeps hiring the acquisition people
A generation ago, an apparel company appointing a Chief Marketing Officer would have gone looking for pedigree - somebody with a fashion house on their résumé and strong opinions about seasonal campaigns. Honeylove went looking for somebody who could read a media mix model. This shift has been underway for a decade and is now essentially complete across direct-to-consumer retail, and it says something faintly unromantic about where the leverage sits. Brand still matters enormously. It simply cannot be measured on a Tuesday, and the people who allocate budgets increasingly want to measure things on a Tuesday.
The unglamorous part of the job is that somebody has to kill things. Somebody has to spike the advertisement everyone in the building adores because it converts at half the rate of the boring one. Somebody has to explain, in a room where nobody wants to hear it, why the channel that carried the first quarter has stopped carrying anything at all. This is the actual content of the role, and it is not the part that makes it onto conference panels.
Fashion once hired its marketers for taste. It now hires them for arithmetic. The two are not enemies, but only one of them files a report.
On the modern CMO briefFour categories, one instrument
Line up his employers and you have something close to a syllabus for the last fifteen years of American consumer retail. Dollar Shave Club taught the subscription. MVMT taught accessible luxury and the power of an Instagram feed. Fabletics taught membership and retention at scale. Honeylove is teaching category reinvention - the harder trick of persuading people that a product they already own, and quietly resent, could be rebuilt from first principles.
Kassan has now sold something to nearly every demographic the internet has to offer, using more or less the same instrument each time. That instrument is not charm, and it is certainly not intuition. It is a willingness to be told, daily and in numbers, that you were wrong, and to adjust before lunch. Wilde observed that experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. In performance marketing the mistakes arrive with a timestamp and a cost per acquisition attached, which rather removes the option of giving them a nicer name.
What comes next
He is listed as a speaker with Brand Innovators, the marketing leadership community, which is the customary signal that a person has crossed from doing the work to being asked about the work. Both activities are respectable. Only one of them scales.
Honeylove's ambition is legible enough from its product catalogue. A company that started with a single garment category and now sells bras, tops and leggings is not planning to remain a shapewear brand. It is planning to become an apparel business, which requires a different marketing operation entirely - broader reach, wider assortment, more channels, and considerably more room for expensive error. Getting a company across that gap is the assignment. It is the sort of problem that consumes several years and does not resolve neatly.
There is a lesson buried in all this for anyone currently convinced that their degree has sealed their fate. A man studied Environmental Science on a coastal campus in California and now oversees marketing for a company whose core competency is compression fabric. Careers, it turns out, are less like railways and more like weather. The degree opens a door. Everything learned afterwards decides which room you end up standing in - and, occasionally, whether anyone hands you the budget once you get there.