MacCoy Merkley

There are more dignified ways to begin a career in marketing than answering a Craigslist ad without a resume. MacCoy Merkley did it anyway, and it worked out better than a resume ever would have. In 2018 he was a wedding photographer running a small business under the name MacCoy Dean Photography. He knew how to make people look good in a single frame and how to hold a room's attention. What he did not know was that those two skills were about to become worth roughly a hundred million dollars.

The listing was for a digital media specialist at a scrappy Portland outfit called Portland Leather Goods. At the time the company was, by MacCoy's own telling, a small Etsy shop. The founder, Curtis Matsko, had been cutting and stitching leather bags by hand in his garage. It was the kind of business that either quietly folds or quietly takes over a category. Nobody had decided which yet.

MacCoy walked into what he has described as a wild interview and walked out with a job. He was, for a while, the entire marketing department - a one-person army armed with a camera, a Meta ads account, and an unfashionable belief that the fastest way to sell something is to make something worth selling. Seven years later he is Chief Marketing Officer, the marketing team is many people deep, and Portland Leather Goods is the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America.

Ask most chief marketing officers how they grew a brand and you will get a lecture on funnels, attribution windows, and whatever channel is currently fashionable. MacCoy tends to answer a different way. Make the product good enough and people do the marketing for you. At Portland Leather Goods, roughly a third of new customers show up through referrals - the kind of number you cannot buy, only earn.

That does not mean he is precious about tactics. He has been candid that discounting, treated as a dirty word by branding purists, is simply a tool. Used with intention it drives volume without cheapening the name. He has kept running Meta advertising through years of people declaring it dead, on the reasonable theory that when the product genuinely merits advocacy, the ads work. And when the pandemic forced production to a halt in 2020, the disruption became an unlikely accelerant rather than a death sentence.