Susan Selle Built a Career Making Everyday Products Mean More

The useful things in a house rarely introduce themselves. A coffee maker waits on the counter. A slow cooker gets dinner through a busy Tuesday. Windows hold back weather while letting the afternoon in. Siding stands outside and takes the punishment. Susan S. Selle has made a career of noticing what these quiet products mean to the people who live with them. Her résumé moves from food to appliances to the building envelope, but its real subject is continuity: how an ordinary object earns a place in ordinary life.

Selle is chief marketing officer at Cornerstone Building Brands, the company formed from the combination of NCI Building Systems and Ply Gem Building Products. She has held that job since November 2018. Before it, she was Ply Gem’s CMO. Before building products, she spent sixteen years in senior marketing and brand roles at Jarden Consumer Solutions, formerly Sunbeam Products. Earlier still came retail product marketing at Tyson Foods and sales and regional marketing at Nestlé Foods.

On paper, that is a march across categories. In practice, it is an education in the humble object. Food, countertop appliances, alarms, windows and siding are bought differently. They travel through different channels and invite different levels of consideration. Yet all of them become part of routines people barely name. The marketer’s task is to notice the routine before reaching for the slogan.

The portfolio was the classroom

At Jarden, Selle’s remit was not one neat logo. It covered global marketing, customer marketing, advertising strategy, category management, digital and social marketing, shopper marketing and portfolio management. The names included Mr. Coffee, Crock-Pot, Oster, Sunbeam, FoodSaver, First Alert, Holmes, Margaritaville Products and Healthometer. It is a list that sounds like a particularly well-equipped kitchen, with a smoke alarm keeping watch.

Managing that range asks for two opposed skills. Each brand needs a specific reason to exist, but the operator cannot afford nine unrelated systems. A useful portfolio has distinctions customers can feel and shared disciplines the organization can repeat. Selle’s former colleague Glen Waisner described her as a professional marketer who seemed to “live and breathe” consumer centricity, crediting her leadership through global questions of positioning, messaging and packaging.

One older example is wonderfully concrete. When Crock-Pot worked with country music, Selle explained that internal research showed the brand’s consumers engaged closely with the genre and were also strongly interested in food and fashion. The connection was not the result of a brainstorming room tossing celebrities at cookware. It began with observed affinity. Find the audience’s existing world; let the product enter with manners.

“We continue to invest in building our brand through a mix of traditional and non-traditional marketing approaches.”Susan Selle, on Ply Gem’s 2016 recognition

That habit of combining old and new methods followed her to Ply Gem. In 2016, the company was named Marketer of the Year in Hanley Wood’s Brand Builder Awards. The recognition pointed to traditional work, progressive data-driven methods and solutions shaped by industry and consumer demand. Awards can make marketing sound like theater. Selle’s quoted response was more workmanlike: keep investing in the mix and keep providing useful product solutions.

A name sturdy enough for a merger

Then came a more peculiar product: a corporate identity for a combined business. NCI and Ply Gem fit together on spreadsheets before they fit together in anyone’s vocabulary. The organization needed a name that could make sense to employees, customers and channel partners across residential and commercial building products. Selle led the new-name task force.

The team listened. In conversations with employees, customers and stakeholders, one theme kept surfacing: pride in products that help construct the world around them. Homes, schools, hospitals and stadiums are not abstractions to the people making windows, panels, siding and roofing. They are visible evidence of labor. The name “Cornerstone Building Brands” condensed that pride into an architectural word everyone already understood.

This is the unsentimental value of a good corporate name. It shortens an explanation. It gives thousands of employees a common sentence without erasing the product brands customers know. It can hold a merger together while the operational bolts are still being tightened. In 2019, Selle wrote that she was proud to be part of the team launching the new identity. The interesting part is not pride alone. It is how the name was reached: begin with the meaning already present inside the business.

When the window changed jobs

In 2020, a window suddenly had more to do. People separated from friends, relatives and neighbors began communicating through glass. Cornerstone responded with Connecting Communities, a collection of printable signs, games, exercise prompts, thank-you messages and coloring sheets. Families could place them in windows and share the result. Selle said the company had realized its windows were serving “a much greater purpose.”

The observation was small enough to miss and human enough to matter. A manufacturer did not have to pretend its product could solve separation. It could help people use a surface already available to them. The campaign reframed a window without inventing a fantasy about it. Protection, light and a view remained. Communication joined the list.

“We wanted to find a meaningful way to help people stay connected, even while they’re apart.”Susan Selle, 2020

Selle’s approach to purpose also appeared in print. With Christopher K. Bailey, she co-authored a Journal of Brand Strategy article arguing that purpose has to be identified, embraced and practiced across an organization’s touchpoints. That final verb is the expensive one. A brand can announce almost anything. Practice demands repetition, budgets, partners and people willing to show up.

From message to material

In June 2024, Selle was an onsite volunteer at a home repair in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Cornerstone employees, Habitat for Humanity and the members of Lady A worked on the home, replacing siding and windows. Selle connected the materials to a plain promise: communities should have safe, well-maintained homes. She was excited, she said, that Lady A had come not only to help but to widen awareness through its ambassador role.

Later that year, after hurricanes damaged communities in Tennessee and Georgia, Cornerstone and LadyAID pledged a $50,000 donation of exterior building products for rebuilding. Selle’s language was direct: community was the cornerstone of the company’s work, and the products could help restore safe homes. The wordplay was available, but so were windows and siding. Material is what kept the statement from floating away.

By 2026, Cornerstone reported that the Home for Good project had helped build or remodel more than 930 homes in over 175 communities since 2016, with nearly $4.5 million in products and resources donated. For the partnership’s tenth year, the company named country artist Jordan Davis ambassador and pledged building products valued at $500,000 to Habitat for Humanity. These are program results across a large organization and its partners, not the possession of a single executive. Their relevance to Selle’s story is the bridge between what marketing says and what a manufacturer can physically supply.

The lesson inside the ordinary

Selle’s career offers no need for a grand reinvention myth. Its interest lies in accumulation. Nestlé and Tyson taught routes from product to shopper. Jarden demanded range across household names and marketing disciplines. Ply Gem brought the long consideration cycles and channels of home improvement. Cornerstone added the difficult work of making a merged enterprise legible.

Across it all, the products kept getting physically larger, from the appliance on a counter to the wall around a room. The human scale stayed remarkably stable. Who is using this? What are they trying to accomplish? What pride does an employee take in making it? What can a brand truthfully help a community do?

Those questions are portable. They work in consumer goods and business-to-business markets because people remain present on both sides of the acronym. They also resist the occupational temptation to make marketing the hero. In Selle’s public work, the more durable protagonist is the connection: a slow cooker and a music audience, two merged companies and a shared identity, a window and the message taped to it, a product donation and a home repaired.

There is wit in spending a career around products designed to be taken for granted. Success means dinner happened, the coffee arrived, the alarm stayed quiet and the rain remained outside. The object disappears into the life it supports. Selle’s work has been to bring that life back into view, long enough for a customer, colleague or community to recognize why the object matters.