Richard McLeod

A brand builder who keeps changing aisles

Consider the peculiar resume of Richard McLeod. In one chapter he is persuading the world that a bottle of French vodka belongs at the center of the party. In the next he is convincing a teenager that a certain sneaker is the only acceptable footwear for existence. Then it is thousand-dollar parkas built for the Arctic, then heavyweight sweatshirts with a century of pedigree, and now, most improbably, hiking shoes and the entire outdoors. Few marketers have wandered so far across the department store and arrived, each time, looking as though they belonged.

McLeod took over as Global Chief Marketing Officer of Merrell in February 2025, reporting to Global Brand President Janice Tennant. Merrell, the hiking and outdoor footwear label owned by Wolverine Worldwide, hired him to do something the 45-year-old brand had never quite managed: reach beyond the serious hiker and speak to a younger, broader consumer without insulting the loyalists who got the brand this far. It is a delicate assignment, roughly the marketing equivalent of remodeling a beloved cabin while the family is still asleep inside it.

What makes him a plausible choice is not a single industry but the pattern beneath all of them. Earlier in his career he held senior brand and marketing roles at spirits houses Hennessy and Bacardi USA, working on Grey Goose, Bombay Sapphire and D'usse Cognac. Selling premium liquor teaches you that people almost never buy the liquid. They buy the feeling around it, the story of the evening, the small performance of taste. That lesson followed him everywhere else.

From spirits he moved into sportswear retail, becoming VP of U.S. marketing for Footaction and then VP of North America marketing for Foot Locker. He was later promoted to Vice President and General Manager of Foot Locker Canada, a role that handed him a profit-and-loss statement and made him responsible not just for the story but for the till. Marketers who have run a business tend to argue differently in meetings. They have felt the weight of a slow quarter.

Next came Canada Goose, where he served as Senior Vice President of Brand, steering the evolution and growth of one of fashion's more improbable success stories - a maker of extreme-cold outerwear that somehow became a fixture on temperate city sidewalks. Then, in December 2023, HanesBrands named him Vice President and Global Chief Marketing Officer of Champion, charging him with the global brand strategy for one of America's most-copied logos.

At Champion he showed his hand on sustainability, launching the "Eco Future" product pipeline that put environmental and community impact near the front of the pitch, including an Eco Future Reverse Weave built on patented CiCLO technology, which coaxes synthetic textiles into breaking down more like natural fibers. It was, by his own logic, the right kind of innovation - not novelty for the sake of a press release, but a genuine answer to something consumers actually worried about.

Innovation should solve a real problem. Otherwise, why bother?

Ask McLeod about innovation and he will gently deflate it. He argues that it should solve a genuine consumer problem rather than exist for its own sake, and that storytelling only works when it carries authenticity, emotional connection and real audience engagement. It is a refreshingly unglamorous creed in an industry that loves to mistake motion for progress.

His leadership style runs in the same direction. Colleagues describe a humble, collaborative operator who prefers removing obstacles and empowering his team to dictating from the front, and who actually means it when he tells staff to protect their work-life balance. This is, one suspects, easier to preach when you grew up around people who understood that performance and recovery are the same conversation.

Which brings us to his current project. In March 2026, to mark Merrell's 45 years on the trail, McLeod led the launch of "It Starts Outside," the brand's first global brand platform. The ambition is to move Merrell from a hiking-first identity toward a broader outdoor lifestyle - to, as he puts it, help people "unlock clarity, connection and momentum, simply by stepping outside." The trick, he insists, is to broaden the aperture of who can feel invited outdoors "without alienating your core consumer." It is the same balancing act he has performed his whole career, only now the product happens to be the horizon itself.

Raised on scoreboards

The competitive streak is not an accident. McLeod is a former college basketball player and a graduate of Brunel University London, and he has built a household that could field its own relay team. His wife earned a Youth Olympic silver medal in the 200 meters, and his children compete across multiple sports. He has said that this family of competitors is part of what drew him to Champion, a brand stitched into the history of American athletics. When someone who lives among medalists tells you a brand is about performance, he is not reaching for a metaphor.

It also explains the ease with which he crosses categories. A scoreboard is a scoreboard whether the arena is a liquor shelf, a sneaker wall, a parka rack or a trailhead. The scoreboard is the consumer's attention, and McLeod has spent two decades learning that you win it by connection, not volume - that a brand's job is not to shout but to make someone feel understood.

If there is a joke buried in all of this, it is that a man who once helped make luxury vodka feel essential is now asking a distracted, screen-lit generation to rediscover something free that has been outside the whole time. The product costs nothing. The marketing, apparently, is the hard part. On current form, McLeod seems to like it that way.