Consider the resume of Philip Auerbach and you will notice a small problem: it does not sit still. Casino floors in Las Vegas. Expedition ships bound for Antarctica. A coffee-and-donut empire. A dating app. A dental-implant company. And, as of May 2025, a business that prints your softball team's name on 24 matching hoodies. Most executives spend a career defending a single category. Auerbach seems to have spent his politely declining the invitation.
The through-line is not the product, which changes with almost comic regularity. It is the customer, who does not. Whether someone is booking a suite, ordering a latte through an app, swiping on a Tuesday night, or uploading a logo for a charity 5K, the underlying question Auerbach keeps answering is the same one: why do people come back, and what is it worth to make them?
The Cornell . to McKinsey pipeline
The story starts, sensibly enough, in hospitality. Auerbach earned a degree in hospitality administration from Cornell University, home of the famous hotel school, an education in the fine art of making a stranger feel looked after. It is a discipline that turns out to be portable. Hospitality is really just customer experience wearing a bellhop's uniform, and customer experience is the thread he would pull for the next two and a half decades.
From there he spent nearly 15 years in management consulting, most of it at McKinsey & Company, where he rose to Partner in the Sales & Marketing practice. This is the part of the biography that quietly explains all the rest. At McKinsey he co-founded the firm's Loyalty service, focused on hospitality and retail financial services, back when "loyalty program" still meant a punch card and a stamp, not an algorithm that knows your coffee order. He was, in other words, thinking professionally about customer retention before most companies had a word for it.
The operator years
Consulting teaches you to advise. At some point Auerbach decided he would rather be the one holding the pager. He crossed the aisle from advisor to operator, a move that sounds tidy on paper and is nerve-racking in practice, and never really looked back.
At Caesars Entertainment he served as Senior Vice President and Regional Chief Marketing Officer for Las Vegas, with enterprise-wide responsibility for digital product development, third-party distribution, strategic partnerships, and international marketing. Running marketing on the Strip is a peculiar assignment: the product is, essentially, a feeling, and the competition is every other bright light in the desert. Then came Lindblad Expeditions, the global expedition-travel company, where as Chief Commercial Officer he sold a very different fantasy, one involving penguins and parkas rather than poker chips.
In August 2020, in the strange stillness of that particular year, he joined Dunkin' Brands in a newly created role: Chief Digital and Strategy Officer, reporting to CEO Dave Hoffmann. He took charge of the US digital engagement team, spanning consumer insights, digital marketing, media, and customer care, plus global strategy and IT. Translation: he was handed the job of turning a beloved analog habit, the morning coffee run, into a frictionless digital one. America runs on Dunkin'; Auerbach's assignment was to make sure it could do so from its phone.
Scaling Bumble .
His next act was the one that shows up in bold on the highlight reel. As Chief Commercial Officer at Bumble, Auerbach led marketing and partnerships globally across the company's app portfolio, most notably its flagship apps Bumble and Badoo. There he played a central role in scaling the business profitably by more than 50%, a run that helped push annual revenue past $900 million. The word doing the heavy lifting in that sentence is "profitably." Growth is easy to buy and hard to keep; doing both at once is the entire job.
He also served as Chief Commercial Officer at ClearChoice Management Services, adding healthcare to a list of sectors that, at this point, reads less like a career and more like a scavenger hunt. Gaming, travel, food, technology, dental, consulting. If there is a customer at the end of it, Auerbach has probably marketed to them.
Why custom t-shirts .
Which brings us to the plot twist. In May 2025, Custom Ink named Auerbach its Chief Marketing Officer, reporting to CEO David Doctorow, one of three senior appointments the company announced as it sharpened its next chapter. On the surface it is an odd landing. You spend years in unicorns and Strip-side glamour, and then you go sell screen-printed tees to bowling leagues?
Look closer and the logic is almost stubbornly consistent. Custom Ink is an ecommerce business whose entire promise is a personal, frictionless experience, someone uploads a design, a group rallies around it, and a box of matching gear shows up in time for the big day. That is a customer-experience problem and a loyalty problem wearing a t-shirt. It is, more or less, everything Auerbach has been practicing for since the hotel school.
His mandate is unglamorous in the best way: expand the customer base and deepen engagement, while keeping a rigorous grip on customer experience, measurement, and economics. Note the order. Experience first, measurement second, economics third, and never one without the others. It is the philosophy of a man who co-founded a loyalty practice and has spent twenty-five years watching what happens when companies chase growth without minding the math.
In February 2026, during his tenure, Custom Ink rolled out its first major brand refresh in 15 years, the kind of move that tends to accompany a marketer who likes making legacy brands feel new again. The ink, as it were, is still drying on this chapter. But the pattern is easy to read: find the company where a great customer experience has not quite been built yet, then go build it. He has done it on the Strip, at sea, in the app store, and behind the counter. A t-shirt is just the next canvas.