A personalized necklace begins with a set of small decisions. Metal. Stone. Name. Date. A word short enough to fit. On an ordinary ecommerce site, the product is finished before the shopper arrives. At Jewlr, the shopper helps finish it. That makes the marketing problem more interesting: the company is not simply selling an object. It is building a digital path from a blank field to something a person plans to keep.
Miriam Shanahan works in that path. As chief marketing officer of Safyre Labs, the Toronto company behind Jewlr, Lee Fiori and ONE+ONLY, she operates at the meeting point of desire and machinery. The desire is intimate - a gift, a milestone, an inside joke rendered in metal. The machinery includes acquisition, creative, attribution, merchandising, customer experience and the operational reality of making customized goods at scale.
Her résumé reads like an education in how those pieces became one job. There was mobile product marketing at lululemon, social media at Hudson's Bay, digital agency work at Weber Shandwick, communications at Bravado Designs, leadership roles at Ellie Mae Studios and Sheertex, independent DTC consulting, and a vice-presidency at oral-care startup Brüush. The stops move between platform and product, agency and operator, established retailer and startup. The through-line is not a channel. It is the customer experience around a product.
The customer enters the workshop
Jewlr's proposition can be stated without advertising language: customers select a style, metal, stones and engraving. The choices are both interface elements and emotional prompts. A name changes a pendant from inventory into a message. A birthstone turns a color into a person. The marketer's raw material is not just demographic data; it is the reason behind the choice.
This is why personalization is more than a conversion trick. It moves part of the creative act from the company to the customer. In conventional retail, a brand presents taste and asks the shopper to recognize herself in it. In personalized retail, the brand supplies a grammar and asks the shopper to write a line. The product page becomes a tiny studio.
The personalized-commerce loop
For Shanahan, this terrain is a natural extension of earlier work. A former colleague wrote publicly that she helped move Topshop on thebay.com from “a brand on a site” toward a fuller brand experience. That distinction is easy to overlook. Distribution puts a product in front of someone. Experience gives the person a reason to stay, explore and understand what the product is doing there.
“My passion is products, people and identifying opportunities in the marketing space.”Miriam Shanahan, public professional profile
A career built across the seams
Shanahan studied English language and literature at Western University from 2005 to 2009, then public relations and communications at Simon Fraser University. She later completed finance training for non-financial managers at the University of Toronto. Seen together, the subjects form a plausible CMO toolkit: language for the story, communications for the audience, finance for the consequence. Her public record does not suggest she planned that neat combination from the start. Careers are usually clearer in reverse.
The useful detail is the movement between disciplines. Social teaches cadence and response. Product teaches that the interface can make or break the promise. Agency work teaches translation across clients and specialists. A startup teaches the cost of a decision. Portfolio leadership asks a marketer to keep distinct brands legible while sharing an operating system underneath.
Public recommendations from people who worked with Shanahan describe her as unusually comfortable with ambiguity and able to mobilize groups around a goal. Those are flattering words, but they point to a concrete requirement of digital retail: no single function owns the result. A campaign can produce traffic that the site fails to convert. A beautiful product can arrive after the occasion it was meant to mark. A low acquisition cost can conceal customers who never return. Marketing inherits all of it.
The arithmetic behind the mood board
A public growth exercise Shanahan posted in 2025 shows the analytical side of the work. Given a target of 5,000 net new active customers, she worked backward through assumed churn, activation and site conversion. Her model called for roughly 5,900 new customers before churn, about 14,750 signups at a 40 percent activation rate, and nearly 295,000 incremental qualified visits at a 5 percent landing-page conversion rate.
The numbers are less revealing than the guardrails around them. She argued for learning which audience segments represented the real near-term opportunity instead of throwing experiments against the wall. She looked for low-effort, high-impact supplements to the larger plan. And she warned that cheap digital tactics which fail to demonstrate category leadership do not make a sustainable business.
That is the tension inside modern performance marketing. The spreadsheet rewards what can be observed quickly. The brand compounds through impressions that are harder to assign. Shanahan's framework refuses to choose one or the other. Work backward from the economic outcome, test the scrappy channel, and keep asking whether the tactic strengthens the reputation that will make tomorrow's acquisition cheaper.
What the hallway knows
In February 2026, Shanahan spoke at eTail Palm Springs in sessions about younger shoppers, omnichannel experiences and short-form content. The agenda was full of retail's current vocabulary: Gen Z, Gen Alpha, immersive content, platform-specific video, data and AI. Her reflection afterward landed somewhere less technical.
“The most valuable ideas rarely come from the stage.”Miriam Shanahan, reflecting on eTail Palm Springs 2026
She wrote about the honest conversations between sessions, the challenges people were willing to share and the unexpected connection that shifts how someone thinks about a problem. She also described the marketer's daily remit as extending beyond marketing into finance, attribution and growth. The conference mattered because it briefly made the invisible team around the job visible: operators comparing the difficult parts, not just presenting the polished answer.
This preference for conversation over ceremony fits the public fragments around Shanahan. A recommendation praises her ability to understand what motivates individuals and then bring a larger group toward one goal. Her volunteer history includes communications work for Canucks Autism Network and social media strategy for Trips for Kids Vancouver. An old Twitter bio supplies the human footnote: strong cappuccinos, rap, country music and a sense of adventure.
There is a pleasing mismatch in that music pairing: rap beside country, two traditions built around voice, detail and the memorable line. It would be too neat to turn a social bio into a marketing philosophy. Still, the combination makes sense beside a career that has resisted a single lane. Shanahan moved from editorial instincts to finance training, from social posts to product flows, and from individual brands to a portfolio. Curiosity, in this version of the job, is less a personality badge than a way to cross a boundary without pretending the boundary is not there.
None of those details is a grand theory of leadership. Together, they suggest someone interested in the connective tissue - between people, between a product and its story, between a metric and what caused it. That is also where ecommerce becomes operational. The campaign does not end at the click. It continues through the configuration tool, payment, production, delivery, opening and, sometimes, the photograph sent back to the person who gave the gift.
The small object and the large system
Jewlr says it has shipped more than two million orders. The achievement is scale; the marketing challenge is to prevent scale from becoming the customer's experience. Nobody orders “unit 2,000,001.” They order a ring with two names, a pendant with a child's birthstone or an engraving that would mean nothing to a stranger. The company has to repeat the process without making the meaning feel repeated.
Shanahan's career has prepared her for that contradiction. Literature pays attention to the precise word. Product marketing pays attention to the path. Social media pays attention to response. Finance pays attention to the limit. DTC operations force all four into the same week.
The result is a grounded view of the CMO's role. Make the product legible. Give the customer room to participate. Build an acquisition model that survives contact with unit economics. Protect the brand while testing channels. And step away from the dashboard often enough to hear what another operator is willing to say in the hallway.
It is also an argument for range. Shanahan's path does not elevate one channel as the answer. It treats each role as another window onto the same exchange: a person gives a company attention and money; the company has to return usefulness, delight or meaning. In jewelry, that exchange becomes unusually visible. The object may be tiny, but the expectation attached to it is not.
A piece of personalized jewelry is a small object produced by a large system. Good marketing keeps both truths in view.