Some careers begin with a five-year plan. Laurence Gagnon Beaudoin’s begins more usefully: with an eye for how a detail changes what someone sees. Long before she was the chief marketing officer of Omy Lab, she wrote about clothes, beauty and culture. An early contributor biography described her fascination with clichés and first impressions, her belief that a small adjustment can alter perception. It reads now like an accidental job description for a marketer.
The details grew larger. A student newsroom became a personal blog. Content work became community strategy. At Cook it, marketing expanded into customer experience, then into partnership and executive responsibility. Consulting led to FoodHero. FoodHero led to Omy, where a questionnaire, a photo analysis and an in-house laboratory have to feel less like machinery than a clear answer to a familiar customer question: what should I choose?
Across those moves, Gagnon Beaudoin has kept returning to the same piece of terrain. She works where a digital interface meets an everyday ritual. Dinner. Shopping. A daily beauty routine. These are crowded categories, full of habits people already have and decisions they would rather not make again. Her work is to reduce the uncertainty without sanding away the personality.
Before the funnel, the byline
At Université de Sherbrooke, Gagnon Beaudoin studied communication, writing and multimedia. She competed in the social-media category at the Jeux de la communication, and by 2014 she was the culture editor of the student newspaper Le Collectif. She also passed through Sid Lee’s content team and launched Les Pas Sortables, a blog she edited for four years. The early clips moved freely through fashion, beauty and culture. They show a writer interested in taste, but also in the mechanics of taste: why one choice lands, why another feels flat, and how presentation shapes judgment.
That editorial apprenticeship matters because good marketing resembles editing more than broadcasting. It asks what the audience knows, what it needs next and what can be removed. Gagnon Beaudoin later added a graduate diploma in management from HEC Montréal and executive education at Cambridge Judge Business School. The combination is visible in her career: language on one side, systems on the other.
She brought both to Montreal’s 375th-anniversary organization in 2016, managing community and content for a public celebration spread across a city and its screens. Then, in March 2018, she joined meal-kit company Cook it. The move placed her inside a young e-commerce category where marketing could not be separated from the product journey. A beautiful ad might win a click. The weekly menu, the checkout, the recipe card, the delivery and the customer-service reply had to earn everything after it.
Culture editor, blogger and content maker.
Joins Cook it and begins building its marketing operation.
Becomes a Cook it partner and enters Infopresse’s 30/30.
Moves from consulting to CMO roles at FoodHero and Omy Lab.
The checkout sentence
At Cook it, Gagnon Beaudoin’s remit widened quickly. She assembled a team, directed marketing and customer experience, and became a partner in 2020. Her public descriptions of the role were strikingly operational. She talked about sitting with the kitchen to improve recipe cards and with marketing to choose tactics. She described customer service as a structure through which information had to travel back into the company. The marketer did not stand outside the product with a megaphone. She walked through it in the customer’s shoes.
One experiment captures the method. Customers were leaving the checkout flow because it was unclear when they would choose their meals. The team tested a reassuring line explaining that menu selection came in the next step. Reported conversion increased by 25 percent. The sentence did not add a feature or discount. It returned a little control at the exact moment a shopper wondered whether control had disappeared.
The broader performance followed the same logic. A Cook it digital campaign case study reported a 97 percent increase in first-time signups, alongside large gains in branded and overall Google Ads conversion. The company also reached the top of a Léger ranking for online customer experience in Canada. Awards are the visible part. Underneath sat the less photogenic work of connecting media, product, service and data.
Recognition arrived while the organization grew. In 2021, Gagnon Beaudoin was a finalist for Executive of the Year in the RJCCQ’s business succession awards. Colleagues publicly described her as bold, creative, empowering and collaborative. She built teams around a brand that became familiar in Quebec culture, then left Cook it in 2022 after four intense years.
A year between operating seats
Her next chapter was deliberately plural. As an independent consultant and executive adviser, Gagnon Beaudoin worked with growing Quebec businesses including Womance, Signé Local, Beauties Lab, cVert and Arsenal. She helped with strategic planning, coached internal marketing teams and built systems meant to keep working after the presentation ended. Consulting let her see the same growth problem through several windows.
One mandate became a job. In spring 2023, FoodHero recruited her to its executive committee as CMO. The company’s mix of technology, food and everyday usefulness matched industries she had already learned from the inside. She said she was proud to join a service that was innovative, ecological and capable of making a tangible difference in customers’ routines. Six months later, another Quebec company offered a new version of that challenge.
Thousands of formulas, one clear promise
Omy Lab appointed Gagnon Beaudoin chief marketing officer in October 2023. Founded in Quebec City in 2018, the company controls formulation, testing, manufacturing and shipping in its own laboratory. Its commercial puzzle is unusually rich. The product is made locally and sold online and in stores. The recommendation begins in software but ends with something mixed, filled and labeled for an individual customer. Scale depends on standardizing a process whose appeal is that it does not feel standard.
By early 2025, Gagnon Beaudoin was leading a marketing group of about ten people and overseeing growth, customer experience and technology. Omy had more than 350 points of sale across Quebec and Ontario, and its overall team had doubled in two years. The figures describe reach. The more revealing part is how she talks about the machinery behind it.
Omy’s operating canvas, reported in 2025
Bars use separate scales and show three different dimensions, not a direct comparison.
Omy’s SkinIA analysis gathers customer inputs and helps guide a personalized formula. Gagnon Beaudoin’s framing is careful: artificial intelligence is a means to serve the customer, not a destination. The company also keeps people in the loop through consultations and the option to adjust a formula. Teams receive training so that new tools are understood rather than merely announced. In her telling, technology earns its place by making the next decision more useful.
That restraint also shapes the brand’s public faces. Gagnon Beaudoin has said Omy chooses ambassadors who already believe in and use the products. The point is not purity. It is coherence. A personalized brand cannot treat the person representing it as interchangeable inventory.
Even Omy’s language has become part of the product. On a company page signed simply “Laurence,” the brand explained a shift away from presenting formulas as a string of numbers. The underlying product did not change. The explanation did. Customer-facing language now leads with needs and desired results. It is a small editorial move with a large strategic point: personalization fails if only the database can understand it.
The useful thing to steal
Gagnon Beaudoin’s career can be read as a sequence of sectors: media, civic culture, meal kits, food technology, beauty. A more useful reading is a sequence of feedback loops. Journalism trains attention. Community management makes response immediate. E-commerce turns hesitation into visible behavior. Customer service supplies the words people use when the journey breaks. Leadership determines whether those signals reach the team that can change anything.
Her advantage is not a single channel or signature campaign. It is the habit of translating between rooms. Customer to kitchen. Data to copy. Laboratory to storefront. Technology to ordinary language. The work looks creative from one angle and mechanical from another. She appears comfortable with both.
For operators, the transferable practice is plain. Put customer evidence somewhere decisions can reach it. Ask the person closest to the complaint what repeats. Walk the purchase flow as if the company’s internal knowledge had been erased. Then test the smallest honest clarification before reaching for a larger promise. This approach does not make brand building easy. It makes the work specific. It also explains why Gagnon Beaudoin’s roles keep stretching past conventional marketing boundaries: when the message depends on the experience, responsibility follows the experience all the way through.
That is also why the 25 percent checkout lift lingers. The scale of the result and the modesty of the intervention belong together. A person did not know what would happen next. Someone inside the company noticed. A sentence crossed the gap. For all the new tools now available to marketing, the job still begins there.