Megan Gardner had an objection to the way people talked about her sales force. Plum District's district consultants were mothers, yes. They also had targets. “These women are salespeople,” she said in 2011. “They care about the money, bonuses, and making targets.” There was an entire employment argument inside that correction. Parenthood had become the headline; professional competence was being asked to wait politely in the corridor.
The company sold daily offers to mothers and families, using local mothers to find merchants and negotiate deals. Its proposition depended on a familiar bit of social knowledge: someone who lives nearby may know things a distant sales desk does not. Which outing is worth the drive? Which offer will fit into a family afternoon? Gardner wanted to make that judgment part of a business.
A coupon is a small document with considerable social ambitions. It promises a bargain, introduces a merchant and asks a stranger to trust both. Add a local consultant and the introduction acquires a human intermediary. That was the appeal of Plum District. It also made the business more complicated than a website full of prices. Every relationship had to work after the email arrived.
Gardner's career makes an interesting study in who gets recognized as useful. It runs through investment banking, a consumer startup, international boards and a practice advising chief executives. Along the way, her work has repeatedly involved assessing someone else's business. The storefront and the boardroom ask different questions, but both punish a lazy answer. A good introduction helps. It does not finish the job.
Before the neighborhood came Wall Street
Gardner graduated from Smith College in 1998 and later earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. Her early career included investment banking at Deutsche Bank and SoundView Technology, with a focus on technology clients. She subsequently worked in strategy and business development at Ameriprise, advising senior management. Before she was responsible for a startup's daily decisions, she had worked on the financial and strategic questions that surround them.
That background matters because Plum District's public identity was so domestic. A business aimed at mothers can be described as though its founder simply expanded a shopping habit. Gardner arrived with experience in finance, corporate strategy and technology businesses. The household audience and the financial machinery belonged to the same undertaking. One supplied the customer problem; the other supplied a way to build around it.
Her Harvard leadership fellowship also took her to Central America to work on attracting foreign investment. The geography changed again later: her advisory portfolio would extend across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Long before that international practice, the career already required translating between people with different priorities. Investors want a credible return. Executives want choices they can execute. Customers would quite like their purchase to work.
- 1998Smith → investment banking
- 2006Harvard MBA
- 2010Plum District launches
- 2013Independent & Co begins
- 2018Tinybeans board appointment
Twenty-seven markets, one very particular customer
Plum District launched in March 2010. By December 2011, it was operating across 27 US markets with more than 300 salespeople. That month brought a $20 million funding round led by General Catalyst, following earlier financing that included Kleiner Perkins. The company also bought DoodleDeals and the mobile loyalty business Chatterfly. A neighborhood idea had acquired a national budget.
The purchases suggested ambitions beyond the next discounted outing. DoodleDeals widened its presence; Chatterfly offered tools for keeping customers coming back. Gardner described a future in which consultants could help merchants choose among digital marketing options. A merchant might begin with a single promotion and eventually need advice about a continuing customer relationship. The consultant would have more to sell than tomorrow's voucher.
There was a practical employment proposal here, too. Some consultants had previously worked in public relations, marketing or sales. Flexible work could let them use those skills around family commitments. Gardner discussed mobile tools that could make the work portable. The attraction was intelligible: a professional life with room for a school schedule. The difficulty was making the arrangement support both an employee's earnings and a company's costs.
Plum District's engineers were working on an actual commerce system beneath that approachable pitch. Its development partner Railsware described work on architecture and scaling, alongside the regular business of building software. A friendly email still requires software that can handle purchases and customers. The word “community” can make those demands disappear from a company description. They remain very much present on the engineering team's calendar.
A handmade card beats Tiffany
Gardner's company had a definite view of its audience, and occasionally a rather entertaining way of testing it. In March 2012, Plum District surveyed 19,256 members about Mother's Day. Seventy-five percent preferred a handmade card to a Tiffany necklace. Eight in ten chose sleeping in over a sunrise breakfast with the children. The jewelry business had competition from construction paper and an uninterrupted morning.
Those findings described Plum District's members, rather than every mother in America. Within that boundary, they show the kind of detail the company wanted to understand. A customer could value her family and still decline an early start. She could enjoy a gift without wanting to select it herself. The audience was specific enough to have conflicting wishes, which is usually a sign that actual people have entered the marketing meeting.
The business said it had more than a million subscribers by then and was offering Mother's Day promotions across 28 metro markets. Gardner's work had grown into managing hundreds of employees and contractors, with commercial relationships involving retailers such as Target, Gap and Whole Foods and partnerships including Facebook, Google and Disney. A local consultant might bring the knowledge; delivering the offer increasingly depended on a much larger organization.
When the introduction goes wrong
One episode brought the distance between promotion and delivery sharply into view. At the end of 2011, Plum District offered discounted gift cards through a merchant called Digital Doorstep. Customers complained that orders were not being fulfilled. The merchant then filed for bankruptcy. Plum District announced refunds. Gardner said she spent 15-hour days working at the customer loyalty desk.
“I didn't think over-communicating would be harmful to the company,” she said. The detail is more revealing than a list of partnerships. A chief executive could help secure financing and still end up dealing with an angry customer's missing order. In a marketplace, another company's failure can arrive at your own front door with your logo attached. The customer has excellent reasons for ringing your bell.
Gardner said the company's screening procedures had been tightened. The episode illustrates the responsibilities bundled into a recommendation. Finding an attractive offer is one task; checking that a merchant can deliver it is another. Once a platform has made the introduction, its credibility is involved. A refund can return the purchase price. Restoring the customer's willingness to try again requires rather more conversation.
The growth years also included layoffs and a restructuring of the local operation in 2012. In March 2013, Susan Kim succeeded Gardner as CEO. That sequence gives the Plum District chapter its necessary edges. Funding, subscribers and partnerships describe scale; they cannot, on their own, settle whether a sales model will endure. Gardner's operating experience included building the network and confronting the limits of the arrangement that supported it.
“I didn’t think over-communicating would be harmful to the company.”
Megan Gardner, 2012
From running the company to advising the chief
In 2013, Gardner founded Independent & Co. Her work shifted toward helping technology companies with growth, fundraising and transactions. The client geography extended well beyond California. Moving into advisory work changed her relationship to the decisions: the executive still had to make them, while Gardner could bring financial experience and the memory of having occupied the operating seat herself.
Her board and advisory work has included Crown & Caliber, DoubleNet Pay and Apiary. In 2018 she joined the board of Tinybeans, the family photo-sharing company, as a non-executive director. These were different businesses with different customers. Their inclusion in her career resists the idea that a founder must remain professionally confined to the audience of her first company.
Tinybeans' 2020 account of her experience emphasized fundraising and mergers and acquisitions. It also described transactions completed by companies in her portfolio, including sales to Oracle, IKEA and Morgan Stanley Global Private Equity. Those outcomes belong to the companies and their teams. They give a more concrete account of the territory in which an adviser works than a promise to help businesses grow.
Board work has its own discipline. The distance from daily operations can make a question clearer, provided the director understands what the answer would require. Gardner's earlier career supplies several relevant vantage points: banker, corporate strategist and founder responsible for a distributed team. Her public work with YPO adds another setting in which chief executives exchange experience. The recurring product is judgment, offered to someone who must act on it.
The next person through the door
There is a quieter thread beneath the company names. Gardner grew up in North Dakota and attended Smith with financial aid. An alumna encouraged her to apply; Gardner still sends her a Christmas card. She now contributes to financial aid herself. In 2025, she described the ambition plainly: “I want to spend my money on women and children having access to the best education.”
That choice puts a useful ending on a career often introduced through venture funding. Money can enlarge a company, and it can also change who gets to enter a classroom. The person who once needed that second kind of investment now helps provide it. Gardner has spent years evaluating opportunities. Here, the opportunity belongs to someone she may never meet.