consumer-goods
(46)
Jonathan Halvorson Has Spent 20 Years Making Big Brands Feel Less Like Big Brands
From Oreo's real-time swagger to Kenvue's digital shelf, Jonathan Halvorson has built a career around one deceptively hard brief: make global marketing more personal without making it creepy, generic or needlessly complicated.
Elena Otero Built Brands Across 40 Countries. Now She Works on the Questions Behind Them.
An engineer by training and a marketer by practice, Elena Otero learned to make global brands feel local. Her second act moves the same discipline from the supermarket shelf to the boardroom.
Allen Chai Built a Business Around the Useful Upgrade
For more than two decades, the Horizon Brands founder has pursued a modest but durable idea: everyday products earn their place by giving people time, confidence or control back.
Christine Apple Drew No Blueprint for Grön - Then Built It to Last
An architect with a $50,000 bet turned a basement chocolate experiment into a nine-state brand. Eleven years later, selling Grön revealed a distinctly founder-like instinct: knowing when the thing you built needs a larger frame.
Andrew Vrbas Put a Soap Factory Inside an Argument About Business
A bus ride in Peru gave Andrew Vrbas an idea. A borrowed crockpot made it tangible. The more interesting work came later: turning a college experiment into a national brand without reducing purpose to a slogan.
Susan Irving Put Real Life on the Tissue Aisle
A former national-team sailor took over marketing at Kruger Products just as the tissue aisle became national news. Her response was to replace category polish with the useful, awkward truth of everyday life.
Corrie Mueller Is Taking a Global Marketing Playbook to the Snack Aisle
After senior Reckitt assignments across Canada, the United States and Asia, Corrie Mueller has moved into a different kind of consumer ritual: the everyday snack. Her new brief at Johnvince Foods joins brand craft to the machinery of sourcing, roasting, packing and retail scale.
Yanghee Paik Changed the Channel
She came to Los Angeles to move Korean culture through Hollywood. A chance conversation gave her a different vehicle - and turned a Disney distributor into the operator behind Rael.
Matthew Parry Put a Familiar Snack in a Better Can
The Australian marketer did not invent the canister chip. He noticed what families still wanted from it, rebuilt the proposition around simpler ingredients, and spent a decade earning shelf space one retailer at a time.
David Simnick Learned to Sell the Shampoo Before the Mission
Soapbox began with an aid worker's observation and a batch mixed in a college kitchen. Its survival depended on a harder lesson: purpose can deepen loyalty, but the product still has to win the shelf.
Tabata Gomez Knows the Brand Begins at the Table
From cosmetics to power tools to the spice rack, Tabata Gomez has carried one operating idea across categories: get close to the consumer, give teams a clear vision, and move while the moment is still alive.
Jennifer Burke Learned Customer Data at the Checkout. Now She Sells Its AI Future.
From consumer goods and checkout data to cloud platforms and media AI, Jennifer Burke has spent her career translating new technology into a business case people can trust.
Esi Eggleston Bracey Built Brands by Looking for Who Was Missing
An engineer by training and an accidental marketer by her own account, Esi Eggleston Bracey has spent 35 years finding the people brands overlook - then turning that attention into products, growth, representation, and durable change.
Anna Bell’s Quiet System for Making Brands Matter
From treasury desks to grocery aisles, the Central Garden & Pet executive has built a career on a deceptively simple idea: listen closely before asking a brand to speak.
Ana Maria Henao Is Teaching a Food Giant to Share the Brand
After a career spanning detergent, fragrance, beer, snacks and artificial intelligence, Sigma Foods' global CMO is applying one durable idea: understand people, act on what you learn, and give up a little control.
Marie Chollet Is Giving a Familiar Beauty Brand a New Face
At First Aid Beauty, Marie Chollet is updating the package, widening the product story, and testing how far a trusted name can travel without losing its point of view.
Stephan Czypionka Is Measuring Dumplings and Cataloging Palm Trees
The Austrian marketer has spent a career translating taste across borders. At CJ Foods, his playbook pairs hard measurement with cultural curiosity - the same instinct behind a side project cataloging hundreds of palm species.
Jeremy Shepherd Has Spent Two Decades Learning Where a Brand Meets the Buyer
Before Jeremy Shepherd became Brown-Forman's chief marketing officer, he spent two decades close to the places where strategy gets tested - markets, distributors, stores and teams. His route from Canada to London to Louisville explains the operator behind the title.
Edward Pilkington
Across three decades, five regions and a cabinet of familiar labels, Edward Pilkington learned that durable brands need both a fixed identity and the nerve to move with culture.
Frank Fleischman
A philosophy major who ended up selling sleep, Frank Fleischman runs sales and marketing for one of America's oldest mattress names - and does it from the same New Jersey mill town where Sealy has been making beds since 1907.
Alberto Cajiga
Across P&G, SCA and Essity, Alberto Cajiga built a career by treating brand strategy as an operating discipline - one that links customers, products, markets and the people asked to make change real.
Dave Schneider
Dave Schneider is Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Red Wing Shoe Company, the family-owned, Minnesota-based maker of iconic American work boots founded in 1905. He leads the company's global marketing practice, spanning brand management, digital and traditional communications, ecommerce, retail experience, brand protection, and corporate communications, reporting directly to the CEO. After years in senior roles at leading agencies including Digitas, Tribal DDB, and BBDO, he brought an agency creative sensibility to an operator's job, championing a marketing model that balances long-term brand equity with performance-driven revenue while putting the skilled-trades workers who wear the boots at the center of the brand's story.
Kerry Konrady
Kerry Konrady is the Chief Marketing Officer of OluKai, the Hawaiian-inspired premium footwear brand. A former civil-engineering student and college pitcher who fell for baseball statistics before marketing, he has helped build OluKai from a niche label into a B-Corp certified, direct-to-consumer growth story rooted in the Aloha spirit. Over more than 20 years marketing premium consumer goods, he rose through OluKai from Director of Marketing to VP to CMO, oversees ecommerce and owned retail, and serves as a board director of the Ama OluKai Foundation supporting Hawaiian culture and communities.
Nicks Ericsson
Nicks Ericsson is the Chief Marketing Officer of KEEN Footwear, the Portland-based outdoor shoe company, a role he took on in 2024. A Swedish-trained brand marketer with more than 20 years across fashion, sport, and footwear, he spent over a decade at UGG, where he built the brand's first circular-economy program and pushed its regenerative-agriculture pledge across a million acres of farmland. Earlier he helped scale premium labels including J.Lindeberg and Justin Timberlake's William Rast, and he co-founded The AND Agency to advise companies on responsible brand and sustainability strategy. His stated aim at KEEN is to make it 'the most trusted brand in the world' through consistency and transparency rather than moonshot promises.
Shelly Wilson
Shelly Wilson is a C-level digital, eCommerce and marketing executive based in San Diego who now works as a fractional and interim leader for consumer brands. She is Fractional Chief Marketing Officer at the Australian bohemian-fashion label SPELL, Interim CEO and Chief Marketing Officer at fragrance brand Vitruvi, and a senior advisor to lifestyle brands including Nixon and tentree. Earlier she was SVP Digital at Saje Natural Wellness, where she is known for leading platform migrations and building high-growth direct-to-consumer operations. She pairs deep operational eCommerce experience with brand-building instincts across fashion, wellness and consumer goods.
Tricia Mahoney
Tricia Mahoney is the Chief Marketing Officer of Twisted X Global Brands, the Decatur, Texas footwear maker behind Twisted X, Twisted X Work, Black Star, CellSole and Wrangler Footwear. With more than three decades in marketing spanning agency and client roles, high-tech and western lifestyle, she is the only female member of the company's C-suite. Since joining in 2019 she has led the launches of collections such as Black Star, Zero-X, Tech X and Wrangler, earned more than 100 industry awards, and built a retailer-first brand strategy. She is also a two-time published author whose third manuscript, Trust the Path, is in development as a book and screenplay.
Matt Beaton
Matt Beaton is CEO of Mike's Hot Honey, the Brooklyn-based chili-infused honey brand he built with college friend Mike Kurtz. He joined in 2015 when the company was pulling in $100,000 a year, and grew a one-SKU business into a roughly $40 million operation stocked in more than 30,000 retail stores and 3,000 restaurants. He came out of brand-management jobs at Wrigley and PUR Water and an MBA from Kellogg, and now runs the classic case study for what happens when you refuse to launch a second product.
Russ Wallace
Russ Wallace is the co-founder and CEO of Freestyle, a Santa Monica baby-care brand rebuilding the diaper aisle for modern parents. A recovering NYU-trained lawyer who traded courtrooms for supply chains, he cut his operating teeth scaling Hello Bello past a $100M run rate before teaming up with Cameo co-founder Mike Constantiner. Freestyle's tree-free, bamboo-core diapers launched online in 2022 and now sit on shelves at Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods, riding roughly 400% year-over-year growth and a fresh $10M Series A.
Jarrod Jordan
Jarrod Jordan is a consumer-goods and technology marketing executive now serving as Chief Executive Officer of Rarebird, Inc., the specialty coffee company built around Px (paraxanthine). A Columbia University graduate based in New York, he built his reputation running data-driven, omnichannel marketing at scale: as Chief Marketing Officer of the smart-earbud pioneer Bragi, as Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at consumer brands company Iovate Health Sciences, and as a founding member and Executive Vice President of Thuzio, the marketing SaaS startup he helped grow from four people to nearly eighty across five cities. A frequent conference keynoter and on-camera business analyst, Jordan has become known for turning quantitative rigor into brand momentum.
Alex Abelin
Alex Abelin is the co-founder and CEO of PlantBaby, the Hawaii-based company behind Kiki Milk, a whole-food, organic plant-based milk built for kids. A three-time founder who spent seven years at Google and sold his smart-city startup LQD WiFi to Verizon in 2016, he traded payphone kiosks for pumpkin seeds after he and his wife Lauren couldn't find a clean plant milk for their son. PlantBaby has raised roughly $7M and hit $4.8M in revenue in 2024, selling through its own site plus Sprouts, Wegmans, Erewhon, Amazon and Thrive Market.