The useful thing about a pawn-shop website is not that it makes a neighborhood store feel futuristic. It is that it can answer a very old retail question before a customer spends the gas money: Do you have the thing I need? At EZPAWN, the answer now begins with a searchable screen. A shopper enters a ZIP code, chooses a distance and browses photographs of the tools, electronics, shoes or handbags sitting in nearby stores. The purchase still happens in person. The uncertainty starts disappearing at home.
Scott Sundheim, EZCORP’s chief marketing officer, describes that arrangement in the language of convenience and confidence. He also manages customer experience, a detail that makes the language more than a campaign brief. The message must survive the trip from an ad or a browser tab to a counter, an item and a conversation. Marketing can create the expectation. Operations have to keep it.
His route to this particular challenge runs through the American pantry, the coupon internet and one bright piece of Times Square theater. It is a career that looks eclectic by category and coherent by habit. Each stop asked him to translate a familiar transaction into a reason to choose one brand: a cracker from the shelf, an offer from a phone, a pre-owned laptop from the store across town.
A brand manager grows up in public
Sundheim studied sport marketing and management at Indiana University Bloomington, then earned an MBA from Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business. By 1998 he was at Kellogg, where brand management is an apprenticeship conducted in full view of grocery shoppers. His progression included Nutri-Grain, Cheez-It, Keebler Cookies, wholesome snacks and Pop-Tarts. These were not blank-slate products. They arrived with mascots, habits, shelf positions and millions of existing opinions.
The work taught the discipline of building on what people already recognize. In Kellogg’s 2004 annual report, Sundheim appears with the team behind Cheez-It Twisterz, a two-flavor cracker whose unusual swirled shape created a production problem. The team reached production ahead of schedule. The anecdote is small but revealing: a new product is not merely a clever line on a whiteboard. It is manufacturing, packaging, timing and the coordination required to make an idea physically repeatable.
Six years later, the Pop-Tarts assignment escaped the aisle. Pop-Tarts World opened in Times Square in 2010 as a temporary store, performance and content engine. Visitors could eat improbable pastry constructions, post photographs and participate in the joke. The brand’s Facebook audience grew from 1.8 million to 2 million within two weeks of opening, while the store drew roughly 1,500 to 2,000 visitors a day. Sundheim, then the brand’s associate marketing director, said they were looking for “a really fun experience.”
The activation later collected Gold Reggie awards and a Gold PRO Award. The durable lesson was not that every snack needs a Manhattan attraction. It was that a familiar product can acquire a new role when people are invited to do something with it. The store produced participation, and participation produced stories that customers carried elsewhere.
“It’s all about meeting our customers where they are and making their experience as convenient as possible.”Scott Sundheim on EZPAWN’s Online Shop
Coupons become a product
In 2012, Sundheim joined RetailMeNot. He moved from director of brand marketing to senior director, then vice president and, in February 2019, senior vice president of North America marketing. The promotion announcement placed his seven years of digital-commerce work directly beside his Kellogg history. The connection mattered. Coupons used to arrive in newspapers and on packaging; RetailMeNot made the offer itself a digital product, something to search, test and carry into a checkout flow.
The marketer’s job changed with it. Packaged-goods training begins with a stable object and a competitive shelf. Digital savings involve a shifting inventory of codes, merchants, devices and moments of intent. The customer is not admiring the campaign. The customer is trying to make a code work before paying.
Sundheim’s public projects from the period make that practical streak visible. At the 2014 Ad Age Digital Conference, he spoke about mobile as a marketing channel and real results. In 2019, RetailMeNot advertised for a “shopping specialist” who would buy from at least five stores and report on the smoothness and effectiveness of the offers. Sundheim explained that the position was meant to improve the shopping experience. The stunt generated attention, but its stated purpose was gloriously unglamorous: test the journey.
Colleagues’ recommendations add texture to the operator behind those jobs. One Kellogg peer remembered him as generous with his time and able to cut to the core of a problem. A RetailMeNot colleague described a strategic and creative thinker who could gather data and ideas, then establish a process for moving forward. These are useful traits in a profession that often treats inspiration as the whole job. Inspiration without a process is a meeting.
Putting the pawn shelf online
After a short period leading marketing at Nulo Pet Food, Sundheim joined EZCORP in 2022. The company operates pawn businesses in the United States and Latin America, providing loans secured by personal property and selling pre-owned merchandise. Its two customer needs often arrive together: access to short-term cash and access to useful goods at lower prices. That makes the experience unusually sensitive to clarity, dignity and trust.
It also creates a peculiar ecommerce problem. A conventional retailer may have a distribution center stacked with interchangeable units. A pawn store has a local stream of one-off objects, each with its own condition, description and price. The inventory changes because the neighborhood changes it. Digitizing that shelf requires photographs, descriptions and tracking that stay close enough to reality to justify a visit.
EZPAWN’s Online Shop, announced in August 2025 and introduced across nearly all of its greater San Antonio locations, reflects that constraint. Shoppers can filter nearby stores, browse current merchandise and inspect listings. Hundreds of items are added each week. The site does not pretend the store has vanished. It makes the trip more informed.
Four months later, the digital front door widened again. EZPAWN launched Instant Quote across all of its U.S. stores, offering estimate ranges for 15 categories of electronics in under three seconds. A customer supplies details such as brand, model and condition, receives a range by email, then visits a store for the final evaluation. Sundheim described it as a way to save time and make the process easier from beginning to end. Once again, software handles the first uncertainty while the store completes the consequential part.
- KelloggBrand building across Nutri-Grain, Cheez-It, Keebler and Pop-Tarts.
- RetailMeNotFour marketing leadership roles as savings moved deeper into mobile commerce.
- Nulo Pet FoodA brief return to packaged consumer goods as senior vice president of marketing.
- EZCORPMarketing and customer experience across pawn services and pre-owned retail.
Sundheim’s description of the launch does two jobs. First, it emphasizes certainty: the item is nearby, pickup happens in a staffed location, and the price is visible. Then it expands the frame. “Each item that comes through our doors has a story,” he said, connecting resale to the neighborhoods the stores serve. The merchandise is not just inventory; it is an object passing from one local use to another.
That idea sits comfortably beside the practical economics. Secondhand retail can extend an item’s life, give a budget-conscious buyer more choice and produce a margin for the store. The language of circularity can become abstract very quickly. A used drill with another job to do is concrete.
Make the promise visible, test the journey, and preserve the human part that earns trust. It works as a summary of Sundheim’s path from branded food to digital offers and local pre-owned retail.
The marketer as translator
Sundheim’s recent LinkedIn learning offers one more clue about how he approaches a changing toolkit. In June and July 2025, he completed courses in artificial intelligence, generative AI for product managers, AI marketing foundations and business with AI agents. The certificates do not tell us what systems EZCORP will deploy. They do show an executive updating his vocabulary while the field is moving.
That instinct has appeared before. In 2004, he wrote and marketed an ebook about fantasy football. A decade later he was speaking about mobile marketing. His career repeatedly arrives at the border where an established consumer behavior meets a new interface. The useful role is translator: protect what people value, explain what has changed and remove enough friction for them to take the next step.
There is no single dramatic pivot in that story. There is accumulation. The Kellogg years supplied brand discipline and the mechanics of launches. Pop-Tarts World showed how participation can turn an ordinary product into an event. RetailMeNot forced marketing closer to the transaction. EZCORP adds local operations, customer experience and inventory whose uniqueness is the point.
The pawn shop is a revealing assignment because it resists clean abstraction. It is finance and retail, need and discovery, an urgent loan and an unplanned bargain under one roof. A digital layer can organize some of that complexity. It cannot do the whole job. Sundheim’s stated ambition is appropriately grounded: make the experience convenient, give customers confidence and keep the business connected to the community.
That is less like inventing the future than doing the next useful thing. For a customer looking for an affordable laptop, a tool or a little breathing room, the distinction hardly matters.