The revealing thing about Rob Long’s career is not that he worked in e-commerce before everyone called it direct-to-consumer. It is how often his work escaped the screen. He helped launch an eyeglasses business online, moved across the Pacific to rebuild a digital brand, opened a physical store for a company famous for engineering, and later crossed Canada by air often enough for the commute to become part of his leadership story. Each move took him nearer to the moment when a customer decides whether a promise is real.
Long is now the chief marketing officer at Phoenix, based in Montreal while the company is headquartered in Toronto. Phoenix announced the appointment in January 2026, after his nearly six years at KITS, and it continued a pattern that began with his first role out of university: work on consumer businesses where convenience, confidence and delivery matter as much as the advertisement.
His résumé can be read as a tour of changing marketing orthodoxy. Coastal Contacts represented the early wager that a familiar retail purchase could move online. EyeBuyDirect was a lesson in brand transformation across markets. Dyson connected direct commerce with physical experience. KITS put product, price, technology and word of mouth into one operating loop. At several points, Long’s title widened beyond marketing entirely.
Before DTC had a uniform
Long joined Coastal in 2007, after completing a business degree at Simon Fraser University. He started in digital marketing and worked on the 2008 launch of the company’s eyeglasses business. Over the years that followed, he moved through loyalty and marketing roles, eventually taking responsibility for the United States, the United Kingdom and global marketing.
This was not a tidy category. Glasses carry fit, taste and practical uncertainty. Online retail could make them cheaper and easier to browse, but it also removed the reassuring rituals of a store. The marketer’s task therefore reached beyond traffic. The site, selection, service and arrival experience all had to answer the hesitation created by distance.
When Essilor acquired Coastal in 2014, Long moved to Shanghai to lead EyeBuyDirect’s e-commerce operation. The assignment included a complete brand transformation, a rebrand and a site redesign. It also made his career unusually geographic. Vancouver had taught him the early online-eyewear playbook; Shanghai placed that playbook inside a different company and market.
The store inside the channel
Dyson recruited Long in 2016 to build and lead its Canadian direct-to-consumer division. The move looks logical in hindsight: a company with a strong product story wanted a direct relationship with the people buying it. Yet Long’s most tangible contribution there was made of doors, floors and shelves. In 2017, he launched Dyson’s first Canadian retail store at Toronto’s Yorkdale Mall.
A physical store might appear to reverse an online operator’s trajectory. It actually completed it. Direct commerce is not synonymous with a checkout page. It means controlling more of the encounter - the demonstration, the explanation, the transaction and the feedback. Long had spent years reducing the uncertainty of a physical product online. At Dyson, he could design a place where a technical product explained itself in person.
He returned to the eyewear business in January 2020 as KITS’ chief marketing officer. It was also a reunion with Roger Hardy, the entrepreneur he had worked with at Coastal. Hardy later described it as their second effort to scale something together. The sequel carried an advantage: shared history had already answered the question of whether they could build side by side.
“Momentum is a funny thing. You work for years to build it and then one day you feel it carrying you forward on its own.”Rob Long, reflecting on his KITS years
The free-pair flywheel
The cleanest expression of Long’s KITS philosophy was First Pair Free. New customers could try a pair of KITS glasses without paying for the frame or standard prescription lenses. Long described the offer as a response to intimidation: if buying glasses online feels risky, remove enough risk for the customer to experience the product.
The giveaway was the opening move, not the full play. KITS still had to deliver fit, finish and service that justified a return. Long argued that money invested in the product experience could turn customers into advocates. People shared the surprise on Reddit and TikTok. Paid acquisition started the conversation; an unexpectedly good first order gave the conversation legs.
There is a useful distinction here. A discount trains customers to notice a lower number. A designed trial can teach them something about the object and the company. First Pair Free bundled an offer with a story compact enough to repeat: I tried glasses online because the first pair was free, and they were good. The customer became the media plan.
The company changed around that idea. In June 2021, KITS appointed Long to a newly created chief information officer role, crediting his earlier contribution with record revenues and new-customer growth. He went on to combine chief commercial officer and CIO responsibilities, then returned to the CMO role in late 2023.
Those titles make a quiet argument about the modern marketing job. Brand, media, e-commerce, data, sales, merchandising and retention may sit in different boxes on an organization chart. The customer receives one experience. Long’s movement among those functions suggested that the person shaping demand also needed fluency in the systems that caught it.
That range also complicates the familiar split between brand builders and performance marketers. Long’s record contains both: a full visual and digital transformation at EyeBuyDirect, and the mechanics of acquisition, retention and direct commerce at KITS. He earned a brand-strategy certification in 2021, the same year he moved into information leadership. The pairing is almost too neat. A memorable promise needs a capable system behind it, while a capable system needs a promise people can understand. His career kept putting both obligations on the same desk.
The commute was the culture
Long lived in Montreal while KITS was based in Vancouver. In his farewell note, he counted hundreds of flights between the cities and wrote that he never minded them. Each trip offered time to reflect on the people, purpose and energy of the company. Hardy supplied the other side of the anecdote: Long was on a plane every week because he believed being together improved performance.
The distance was approximately the width of a continent, and the decision to keep crossing it turned a management preference into a recurring act. Leaders often talk about presence as a value. A boarding pass is presence with a cost attached.
When Long announced his departure in October 2025, he wrote less about campaigns than about people. He thanked Hardy for trust and mentorship. He praised his marketing team for taking ownership, finding its voice and pushing at the edge of what seemed possible. Colleagues returned the compliment with descriptions of energy, curiosity and tenacity. Hardy wrote that KITS had grown from roughly $50 million to north of $200 million over their years together.
Long said his next adventure would be closer to home. The geography changed first: Phoenix, headquartered in Toronto, announced him as chief marketing officer in January 2026. The role also kept him near the kind of work that has defined his career - a digital-first consumer business trying to make a complicated category feel simpler and more trustworthy.
“Rather than pour all our budget into paid ads, we invest in product experience, and customers turn into advocates.”Rob Long on the KITS acquisition strategy
What compounds
In early 2026, Long returned to Schulich as a guest speaker. He had studied in the joint Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA program and later mentored students in Schulich’s technology leadership MBA. This time, he spoke about taking ownership, doing more than the role narrowly requires and working inside a growing company. It was consistent with the professional record: his own roles kept spilling past their labels.
The through line is not a single channel. Long has moved from websites to stores, from marketing to information systems, from Vancouver to Shanghai to Toronto, and from a category he knew to companies that stretched the pattern. What stayed constant was his proximity to the customer’s doubt. Will glasses bought online feel right? Can a technical product make sense without a middleman? Will a free first order become a relationship?
His answer has usually been operational. Reduce the risk. Control more of the experience. Put the team close enough to the problem. Give the customer a story worth carrying. The media changes; the distance gets shorter.