Chief Marketing Officer / Fabletics
Ryan Heller
The marketer who treats an activewear brand like a club worth joining, and keeps the members coming back.
The marketer who treats an activewear brand like a club worth joining, and keeps the members coming back.
There is a particular kind of marketer who does not chase the viral moment. They chase the second purchase. And the third. Ryan Heller has built his entire career around that unglamorous, deeply profitable idea, and it happens to be the exact idea that Fabletics is built on. The company does not simply sell leggings and sports bras. It sells a membership, and a membership only works if members stay. Keeping them there is, more or less, Heller's job description.
As Chief Marketing Officer of Fabletics, Heller oversees a sprawling remit: creative, media and acquisition, CRM, brand partnerships and PR. It is not one job so much as a dozen held together with the same thread, the customer relationship. Fabletics, headquartered in El Segundo, California, sits inside the TechStyle Fashion Group ecosystem, a house of brands that has spent a decade trying to prove that fashion and data belong in the same sentence. Heller has spent that same decade proving it from the inside.
His route to the top marketing seat was not a series of dramatic leaps between logos. It was a climb up a single ladder. Vice President of Marketing. Then Senior Vice President. Then, in February 2021, Chief Marketing Officer of Fabletics. In an industry that treats job-hopping as a personality trait, staying put long enough to actually see the results of your own decisions is almost a radical act.
Leading customer acquisition campaigns at TechStyle Fashion Group, managing multiple departments and setting the creative vision for how new customers were won.
Promoted into a broader marketing mandate across the group's family of fashion brands.
Led customer acquisition for Rihanna's lingerie brand as it entered a crowded market, and holds a Senior Vice President role there.
Took the top marketing seat, overseeing creative, media, CRM, partnerships and PR.
Illustrative weighting of the functions under Heller's marketing organization, based on his publicly described responsibilities.
Heller's reputation is built on data-driven marketing, the kind that treats a wardrobe like a series of experiments and a customer funnel like something you can actually improve rather than merely admire.
More than a decade of winning new customers, optimizing paid traffic and A/B testing the way most people breathe. Growth here is a discipline, not a lucky campaign.
In a membership business, the repeat purchase beats the impression count. Heller's CRM focus is the quiet engine behind the louder brand moments.
A specialty in ambassador and partnership programs, turning real people and named partners into reach that ordinary media buying cannot replicate.
Years spent inside TechStyle and its predecessor Intelligent Beauty mean he knows where the levers are, because he helped install several of them.
He sits at the seam where creative vision and performance data meet, the place most marketing organizations either love or quietly avoid.
Everything points back to the member. Acquisition brings them in, CRM keeps them, partnerships give them reasons to stay interested.
Some people collect job titles across a dozen companies. Heller collected them at one, which tells you something about both loyalty and patience.
Keep growing the Fabletics membership base by blending performance marketing, CRM and brand-building, and keep making the case that an activewear label can be more than the sum of its leggings. It is a modest-sounding goal that happens to be extraordinarily hard, which is rather the point.