brand-storytelling
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Jen Porter Built a Retail Career Across Every Place a Customer Can Look
From the merchant floor to a billion-dollar furniture brand, Porter learned to treat catalogs, screens and showrooms as one conversation. Her Arhaus chapter ended in July 2026, but the operating lesson is still useful: the channel is never the whole customer journey.
Ryan Asdourian Learned Strategy in a Mascot Suit
Before Ryan Asdourian became Lumen's chief storyteller, he learned to read 90,000 people without saying a word. Now he is applying that education to a harder crowd: companies deciding how to rebuild their networks for AI.
The Marketer Turning Anthropologie's Feeling Into a Formula
She spent two decades learning how brands make people feel something. Now she runs the marketing for one of retail's most feeling-driven brands - and she wants the data to prove the feeling is working.
Dan Clifford
Dan Clifford is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cotopaxi, the Salt Lake City B Corp that builds outdoor gear and directs 1% of revenue toward fighting global poverty. He leads the brand's full marketing function - creative, brand storytelling, growth, performance, and e-commerce - after two decades scaling specialty, outdoor, and luxury retail brands. Before Cotopaxi he was CMO at the lingerie brand Pepper, and earlier held senior marketing roles at Victoria's Secret, Express, and J.Jill, where he helped transform multibillion-dollar names for the digital era.
Davide Mattucci
Davide Mattucci is the Chief Marketing Officer of BYLT Basics, the Irvine, California premium essentials label known for its structured tees and loyalty-driven direct-to-consumer model. He has spent more than 20 years across global apparel brands - prAna, Brixton, adidas, Under Armour and Fanatics - moving fluidly from design and product creation into brand marketing and digital commerce. At BYLT he is helping steer the company's shift from an online seller of product into a full lifestyle brand with physical stores, bringing a 360-degree view of how product, storytelling and marketplace strategy connect with real customers.
Gian Luca Bersezio
Gian Luca Bersezio is the Chief Marketing Officer of Max Mara Fashion Group, the Italian luxury house behind Max Mara and Max&Co. A marketing and brand-communication leader with more than 15 years across global fashion and lifestyle brands, he built his reputation as director of global brand and communication at Timberland - where he led campaigns like the 50th-anniversary 'This Is Not A Boot' and high-profile collaborations - before moving into the Max Mara group. He is known for blending creative instinct with commercial strategy across brand positioning, campaigns, retail and omnichannel growth.
Liam McKessar
Liam McKessar is a fashion and lifestyle brand marketer who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at ANINE BING, the Los Angeles-based, Scandinavian-inspired label. An Australian who studied economics at the University of Sydney before crossing into fashion media, he has built brand and communications strategy for Vogue, Diane von Furstenberg, LoveShackFancy and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. He is known for blending editorial instinct with a commercial, omnichannel mindset - the kind of marketer who cares as much about how a customer is greeted in a fitting room as about the campaign that got them through the door.
Leland Kass
Leland Kass is a New York based marketing executive and the Chief Marketing Officer of Lafayette 148 New York, the Brooklyn Navy Yard luxury womenswear house led by Deirdre Quinn. Kass built a career at the intersection of luxury retail and storytelling, with senior roles at Maria Tash, rag & bone, Saks Fifth Avenue and Conde Nast, plus an independent consulting practice, LKK Advisory. The through line is brand narrative, digital and e-commerce growth, and customer engagement for premium consumer brands.
Liz Capitani
Liz Capitani is the Global Chief Marketing Officer at Hello Molly, the Australian-born, globally shipping women's fashion e-commerce brand. A marketing leader with roughly two decades in retail and apparel, she has built brand vision, run global campaigns, and led customer and user experience work for fast-growing fashion companies including Petal & Pup, Lulus, and her own fine-jewelry venture, Stay Goldee. She is known for culturally resonant, storytelling-led campaigns and for building brands with loyal, devoted followings across the US and Australian markets.
Michelle Peterson
Michelle Peterson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Kendra Scott, the Austin-based fashion and fine jewelry brand. A chemical engineer turned marketer, she spent 18 years at General Mills before leading marketing at Life Time, Holiday Inn Express, and the juice brand Pressed. At Kendra Scott she unified the brand and performance teams into a single 'brand builder' organization, driving record direct-to-consumer traffic, customer growth and loyalty around a 'connection before transaction' philosophy. She was named a 2023 Adweek Marketing Vanguard.
AJ Herrera
AJ Herrera is the VP of Corporate Marketing at Cloudflare, where he leads the brand narrative that recast a CDN company into the world's connectivity cloud. With over 30 years in high-tech marketing spanning Silicon Graphics, a decade running his own agency, and seven years shaping VMware's global brand, he brings both the craftsman's instinct and the operator's eye to one of the internet's most consequential infrastructure companies.
Tom Phillips
Tom Phillips spent 18 years at Microsoft rising to VP of Communications, where he led PR strategy for the company's advertising business, managed media around major acquisitions, guided CEO communications, and drove narratives through cultural transformations. With over four decades of total PR experience, he left Microsoft in late 2024 to launch Upstream Communications, a Seattle-based strategic communications firm focused on helping clients tell their stories with precision and purpose.
Shawn Heide
Shawn Heide is a Boston-based entrepreneur who blends culinary creativity with digital storytelling and enterprise AI. As co-founder of 9muse Creative Studio, he crafts cinematic brand films for companies across New England. His culinary arc spans founding Wagwan Jerk Bar in 2017 — a Caribbean-meets-New England pop-up launched at Boston farmers markets — to directing culinary operations at The Kitchen at White Barn, a Neapolitan pizza restaurant grown from a working farm. Pursuing his MBA at Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, Shawn is also connected to Upstage AI, the enterprise AI company known for document intelligence and large language models that raised a $120M Series C in early 2026.
Sam Wong
Sam Wong is Chief Business Officer at ChatLabs - the LVMH Innovation Award-winning AI social commerce platform serving luxury and consumer brands - and CEO of FundableStartups.com, a startup training academy. A five-time startup executive with 30+ years in the trenches and three successful exits under his belt, Wong has turned serial entrepreneurship into a second act: coaching founders and investing through Band of Angels, Silicon Valley's oldest angel group. He's also the author of '21 Secrets of Successful Startups' and a regular fixture at TechCrunch Disrupt, Fortune, and the startup conference circuit.
Ryan Hollander
Ryan Hollander is the CEO of Glimmer (formerly Storyhunter), the all-in-one creator management platform connecting enterprises with 50,000+ vetted creators, production companies, and agencies across 192 countries. Headquartered in New York, Glimmer manages billions in corporate content spending and has produced content for clients including Meta, CNN, Bloomberg, Hearst, and Airbnb. Hollander leads the company through its evolution from a video production marketplace into a full-stack creative workforce platform backed by $11.9M in total funding.