consumer-brand
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The Founder Who Learned to Let Fresh Food Spoil
Neka Lac began with a tiny San Rafael kitchen, a stubborn standard for fresh food and no idea what a KPI was. The company grew; the standard stayed put.
Danielle Duboise and the $700 Dinner That Became Sakara Life
A seventh-grade friendship, a Soho apartment and $700 from a dinner party became a nationwide business. Fifteen years later, Danielle Duboise is learning that a founder's most consequential move may be stepping back without stepping away.
John Oram Put a Lab Coat on California Cannabis - Then Built the Store Around It
Before California cannabis had a dependable rulebook, John Oram was buying used lab equipment and asking unfashionably precise questions. His next experiment was larger: turn quality control, manufacturing and retail into one coherent company.
Blaine Butler Put a Saucer Under a Big Idea
She began with concrete, paint and a garage. More than two million designs later, Blaine Butler’s real product may be a reason to notice what is growing beside you.
Gwen Hurt Built a Wine Company From One Pair of Shoes
A layoff closed Gwen Hurt's 15-year chapter in global tech. A pair of gold kitten heels, a wine-making hobby and one formidable daughter supplied the next act.
Lex Corwin Built a Cannabis Brand on One Scrappy Rule: Make the Farm the Marketing
Stone Road began with a teenage grow on a Connecticut lane and matured into a lean, design-forward company rooted on 57 off-grid acres. Corwin’s wager is simple: careful cultivation, frank branding and a small team can still matter in a brutally consolidated market.
Jiachun Li Built a Boba Shop Like an Engineer - Then Added a Bunny
She left mechanical engineering for milk tea, turned store operations into a systems problem, and learned that the smallest object in the cup could carry the biggest part of the brand.
Dennis Seydel
Dennis Seydel is the Chief Marketing Officer of The North Face, appointed in January 2025 after joining the outdoor brand in 2023 to lead global brand management. A marketing executive who spent 17 years building brands at Nike, he went on to run marketing at YouTube Music and Uber Eats, serve as Chief Brand Officer at healthcare-apparel disruptor FIGS, and lead North America marketing and communications at Tommy Hilfiger. He is known for working at the intersection of culture, sport, and consumer storytelling.
Sarah O'Leary
Sarah O'Leary is the CEO of Willow Innovations, the Mountain View company that built the first fully in-bra wearable breast pump. She joined Willow in 2019 as VP of Growth, climbed through CMO and Chief Commercial Officer roles, and was named CEO in December 2023. Under her, Willow moved from an e-commerce breakthrough to an omnichannel maternal-health brand, and in 2025 acquired UK femtech rival Elvie to build a scaled global platform. A mother of two who started her career in consulting, she is known for a 'mothers first' philosophy that treats the new mother as the person products should be built around.
Kelly Olmstead
Kelly Olmstead is the Chief Marketing Officer of Allbirds, the San Francisco sustainable footwear and apparel brand. She brings more than 25 years across sporting goods, footwear and apparel, including nearly two decades at Adidas leading brand, retail and digital marketing for North America, and a stint as CMO of children's clothing brand Hanna Andersson. Since taking the top marketing seat at Allbirds in December 2023, she has anchored the company's turnaround on brand building over pure performance marketing, launching the 'Allbirds by Nature' platform and betting that consistency, storytelling and a beloved product can lift the brand's awareness the way it lifts its Net Promoter Score.
MacCoy Merkley
MacCoy Merkley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Portland Leather Goods, the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. A former wedding photographer, he answered a Craigslist ad for a digital media specialist in 2018 and went on to help scale the company from roughly $3.5M to more than $100M in annual revenue. He is known in direct-to-consumer circles for a product-first, no-nonsense approach to marketing, heavy use of Meta advertising, strategic discounting, and a very active personal presence on LinkedIn and X.
Michael Diaz
Michael Diaz is the CEO of Palm Tree Crew Holdings, the diversified lifestyle, live-events, and investment company Kygo and Myles Shear founded in 2020. A former Duke undergrad who spent his early career in investment banking at UBS and as a Managing Director at LionTree, Diaz now runs a business that in 2025 raised a $20M Series B led by WME Group at a $215M valuation, opened four Palm Tree Club hospitality venues in under a year, and expanded its festival footprint from Oahu and West Palm Beach to Saint-Tropez and Sardinia.
Catherine Magee
Catherine Magee is the co-founder and CEO of Playground, a sexual wellness brand she launched in 2022 with product developer Sandy Vukovic and pop star Christina Aguilera. After more than 15 years building aspirational beauty brands at companies like bareMinerals, Buxom, Rodan + Fields and theBalm Cosmetics, Magee set out to give intimate care the same skincare-grade performance and cosmetic-level joy that the beauty aisle had long enjoyed. Under her leadership Playground reached Target, Urban Outfitters and Amazon, raised roughly $2 million in seed funding, generated billions of social impressions, and landed Magee on Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Felipe Cortina
Felipe Cortina is the co-founder and co-CEO of Jimmy Lion, the colorful sock brand he launched in New York in 2014 with fellow ex-banker Alvaro Gomis. A Madrid native who traded an investment-banking career for an NYU Stern MBA and then for a single product nobody else seemed to take seriously, Cortina turned the most forgettable item in a wardrobe into a design object sold in more than 30 countries and on the shelves of El Corte Ingles, Galeries Lafayette and El Palacio de Hierro. He also chairs his family's Vallegarcia winery in Toledo.
Rebecca Alvarez Story
Rebecca Alvarez Story is a sexologist turned founder and CEO of Bloomi, the sexologist-led clean intimacy brand she launched in 2018. A first-generation daughter of Mexican immigrants, she built her own undergraduate major at UC Berkeley, earned a master's in Sexuality Studies, and turned a decade of clinical practice into a category-defining consumer company. In 2022 Bloomi became the first Latina-founded brand to land nationwide in the sexual wellness aisle at Target, and the company has since expanded to Saks Fifth Avenue and boutiques. She is among the few Latinas in the U.S. to raise multi-million-dollar venture capital, and her stated mission is to bring quality, shame-free intimacy education to a billion people.
Anna Harman
Anna Harman is the co-founder and CEO of Studs, the New York-based ear-piercing and earrings brand she launched with Lisa Bubbers in November 2019. A former mutual-fund lawyer and Bridgewater Associates operator turned consumer-retail entrepreneur, Harman built Studs to fill the gap between Claire's and the tattoo parlor: a clean, needle-piercing studio paired with curated 'Earscapes' of affordable jewelry. The store was profitable in its first month and has since grown to dozens of locations nationwide, raising a $20M Series B in 2021 and roughly $25.6M in total funding.
Brian Jeong
Brian Jeong is the CEO and cofounder of Hawthorne, a New York personalized men's personal care brand he launched in 2016 with his childhood best friend Phil Wong. Hawthorne built its business on a data-driven quiz that matches men to fragrances, skincare, hair care and grooming products tuned to their body chemistry and preferences. With no prior beauty experience, Jeong reverse-engineered the fragrance world through roughly 100 industry interviews in three weeks, growing Hawthorne from an online storefront into a Series B company stocked in thousands of retail doors, including the vast majority of Target stores.
Nathan Kondamuri
Nathan Kondamuri is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pair Eyewear, the customizable glasses company he started in a Stanford dorm room with classmate Sophia Edelstein. Pair sells base frames with magnetic, swappable 'Top Frames' that turn a medical necessity into a fashion accessory. Since pitching on Shark Tank in 2020, the company has raised about $148 million, including a $75 million Series C in 2023, sold millions of frames, and grown revenue more than 30x. A mechanical engineering graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree from Munster, Indiana, Kondamuri runs the business in an unusual two-CEO partnership.
Rashad Hossain
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Sarah Jahnke
Sarah Jahnke is the CEO and co-founder of Homecourt, the luxury fragrance and homecare brand she built with actress Courteney Cox. A former L'Oreal fragrance marketer turned operator, she treats dish soap and counter spray like fine perfume, and has doubled the company's revenue every year since its 2022 launch while keeping the core team famously tiny. Homecourt raised an $8M Series A led by CULT Capital and now sits in 300-plus retail doors including Nordstrom and Bluemercury.