Suzanne Serwatuk has marketed two products that sound as if they belong in different universes. One was soft-serve ice cream sold through a deliberately provocative Vancouver brand. The other is FME, a platform that helps organizations connect, transform and automate data, including the spatial data that describes where things happen. One product could be understood at a glance. The other can sit beneath utilities, transportation systems, government services and corporate data flows without most people ever seeing it.
Yet the marketing problem is recognizably similar. Attention has to be earned. The experience has to keep the promise. Customers need a story they can repeat. Serwatuk's career, from founder-led retail to Chief Marketing Officer at Safe Software, is best read as a long experiment in making those three things work together.
She did not arrive at enterprise technology through the usual staircase of software roles. Her public chronology includes blogging, retail operations at Whole Foods Market, independent social-media work, a juice venture and Perverted Brand, the company associated with Perverted Ice Cream. A 2019 podcast introduced her as an amateur photographer, a former actor and a self-described introverted-extrovert. The collection looks eclectic. It also explains her range: performance, visual instinct, service, operations and a willingness to try an idea in public.
“We fell in love with the potential that it gives us to give people an experience, not just ice cream.”Suzanne Serwatuk, on Perverted Ice Cream
The founder's laboratory
Perverted Ice Cream was designed to be noticed. The interiors were dark. The product names played with innuendo. Branded merchandise extended the joke beyond the cone. When a Victoria location was planned in 2019, Serwatuk explained that the name was meant to hold more than one meaning. The point was not merely provocation. It was to turn a familiar purchase into an experience with a distinct point of view.
That is a useful founder's education because the feedback is immediate. A customer walks in or keeps walking. A joke lands or does not. The service either carries the concept or exposes it as packaging. In retail, brand, operations and customer experience cannot retreat into separate departments. They meet at the counter.
Her earlier venture, Juice Caboose, adds another piece. Public career records place her as its owner and operator in 2011 and 2012, before several years in customer-facing and retail-program roles. By the time she entered Safe Software in October 2020, she had already spent years watching the distance between what a brand promises and what a person receives.
Learning the company from the audience inward
Serwatuk joined Safe as a social media specialist. Six months later, she became marketing communications lead. In January 2022, she became director of marketing. In September 2024, she moved into the CMO role. The sequence matters because social media is one of the few corporate functions where the audience talks back in public. It is a listening post disguised as a publishing job.
The move from listening to leadership also coincided with a broader translation challenge. Safe Software was founded in 1993 and built credibility around spatial-data interoperability. Its software helps organizations move information between formats and systems, automate workflows and make location data usable. That competence is valuable, but it produces a vocabulary crowded with connectors, schemas, transformations and platforms. A marketing leader has to preserve the substance while opening a door for people who do not speak the dialect.
At Big Data LDN in 2023, Serwatuk posted a playful question after being filmed discussing the category: “Who is this person talking about data?” She followed it with a straightforward declaration that she loved her work and making an impact with technology. The joke contains the career shift. The founder who once sold an intentionally theatrical cone had learned to make geolocation feel worth talking about.
Rebranding without an identity crisis
The FME:23 launch put that translation work on stage. Safe's co-founders, Don Murray and Dale Lutz, presented the product vision. Serwatuk handled the new corporate identity. The rebrand sought a simpler, fresher message for a company nearing its third decade, while retaining the logos and the technical authority customers already recognized.
This kind of assignment looks cosmetic only from a distance. An established software brand is a set of accumulated promises. Long-time users have terminology, habits and affection invested in it. New prospects need a clear explanation of why the company matters now. A useful rebrand has to address both groups without making either feel that the company has disappeared.
Serwatuk's founder background offered an advantage here. She had seen a brand operate as a total experience rather than a design layer. Safe's new story put its purpose around unlocking the value of the world's data and organized the company around collaboration, innovation, expertise and agility. The visual identity mattered, but the larger job was deciding which truths should become easier to see.
Give people a distinct reason to look, even when the underlying category is technical.
Make the next step clearer across content, customer experience and internal workflows.
Let customers learn from peers and feed useful ideas back into the product.
Use automation for repetition, then spend human time on strategy and creative choices.
Community is part of the product
Serwatuk's public comments about customer experience favor durable relationships over a narrow acquisition race. Safe's community lets users connect with peers, exchange technical knowledge, learn through a knowledge base and propose product enhancements. The marketing value is obvious, but describing it only as marketing misses the operating logic. The community can shorten a learning curve, surface a better workflow and tell the company where friction remains.
Safe has referred to a “restaurant model” for customer experience: pair a quality product with attentive service, then measure loyalty through repeat business and referrals as well as satisfaction scores. It is hard not to hear an echo of Serwatuk's retail years. A good meal does not rescue a cold welcome. A charming server does not rescue a poor meal. The elements are judged together.
“There's always opportunity for improvement.”Suzanne Serwatuk, on customer experience
That sentence is ordinary enough to be useful. Customer experience is not an initiative with a finish line. It is a habit of finding the next avoidable piece of friction. In a technical product, that might mean clearer education, a peer answer, a better handoff or a new tool. Serwatuk has specifically pointed to AI-assisted experiences as one part of that continuing work.
The useful place for AI
Her recent commentary on AI follows the same pattern. Safe is using it to reduce repetitive work and give marketers more room for valuable work. The distinction is important. Efficiency is not the final creative strategy. It is the space in which one can happen.
A model can draft a dozen headlines quickly. It cannot own the promise behind them. Automation can assemble campaign variants. It cannot decide which risk a brand should take, or recognize the customer memory an apparently clever change might erase. Those are judgment calls, and judgment grows through exposure to customers, products, constraints and consequences.
Serwatuk's own path is evidence for that broader view of marketing work. Acting taught performance. Photography trained a visual eye. Blogging built publishing muscle. Retail made service tangible. Founding forced decisions with immediate consequences. Social media brought direct audience feedback. None of those chapters alone explains a CMO. Together they form a practical curriculum in attention and trust.
In 2023, Serwatuk described a Safe content campaign whose original pace assumed roughly five months to generate 400 leads. It reached that mark in five weeks. Her response was revealing. She called the result an affirmation, but also talked openly about being new in the director role, working through a learning curve and repeatedly returning to a partner's nurture sequence as a “northern point.”
The metric made the case for more work. The process created capability. The team signed on for another campaign and gained a reason to pursue ideas it had previously only imagined. This is how a marketing function compounds: a result earns resources, a template becomes internal knowledge, and the next experiment begins from a stronger position.
The same question, at a different scale
Safe Software now serves more than 20,000 organizations around the world. Its marketing has to speak across sectors including government, utilities, transportation and architecture, engineering and construction. The audience is larger, the buying process is longer and the product is more intricate than anything sold across an ice-cream counter.
Still, the founder's question survives: what experience are we actually giving people? For a software company, the answer includes the first explanation, the demo, the documentation, the peer community, the support exchange and the results customers create with their own data. The brand lives across all of them.
Serwatuk's ambition, as expressed in recent conversations, is tied to Safe's long-term growth and to the role strategic creativity plays in it. The phrase “strategic creativity” does useful work. Creativity without strategy can become a stunt. Strategy without creativity can become invisible. Her career has included enough experiments to know the difference.
The memorable shop and the quiet data platform are not opposites after all. Both ask a person to cross a threshold into an unfamiliar experience. Serwatuk's work is to make that threshold inviting, then make sure what waits beyond it is worth returning to.