customer-loyalty
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Bold Orange Bet That Loyalty Points Were Broken - Then Built the Customer-Experience Shop Enterprise Brands Actually Hire
Most agencies sell campaigns. Bold Orange sells the plumbing, the message, and the measurement - a useful model for brands tired of stitching customer experience together one vendor at a time.
THE ICONIC Is Building the Wardrobe Behind the Buy Button
Australia's online fashion fixture is no longer just a very large shop. Its next act connects inventory, logistics, loyalty, retail media and circular services into one regional operating system.
The Company Behind the Checkout Button
Digital Planet began selling computers online before South Africa was ready. Twenty-seven years later, it runs the quiet machinery that helps banks and telcos turn customer relationships into delivered devices, learning products and repeat business.
The Company Keeping 1.9 Billion Shoppers From Becoming Strangers
Every purchase leaves a clue. Capillary Technologies turns billions of those scattered signals into loyalty programs that can recognize a shopper, choose a reward and act before the relationship goes cold.
Lauren Mannetti Built GNC's Marketing From the Inside Out
After learning the media business in Pittsburgh agencies, Lauren Mannetti moved inside an established retailer and rebuilt the marketing engine around customers, creative ownership and measurable growth.
The Coffee Chain That Grew by Giving Up Its Stores
BIGGBY built a 460-plus-cafe system without keeping a portfolio of company stores. Its wager is that local owners, playful drinks and a traceable supply chain can make a regional brand feel personal at scale.
Slim Chickens Built a 300-Store Flock on One Surprisingly Sticky Idea: Choice
The Fayetteville chain turned garage-tested tenders, 14 sauces and table-side hospitality into a mostly franchised global business. Its next test is harder: preserving that sense of choice and care while opening in more formats, markets and countries.
The Riverboat Casino That Became a $1.7 Billion Shortcut
Before casino consolidation became a corporate arms race, Bernard Goldstein put gambling on a boat and aimed it at the drive-in customer. Isle of Capri's reward was a regional footprint that Eldorado Resorts bought for $1.7 billion.
The $1.5 Million Scoop: How Chicken Salad Chick Turned a Picnic Staple Into a Franchise Machine
Chicken Salad Chick took a dish associated with picnics and church lunches, gave it 12 personalities, and built a fast-casual growth story around the humble scoop. Its real product is not novelty alone - it is repeatable choice served with a neighborhood touch.
Papa Johns
Papa Johns sells pizza, but the bigger machine sells consistency - fresh dough, franchise support, digital ordering and a familiar garlic-sauce ritual across nearly 6,000 restaurants. Now that machine is being rebuilt while North American diners pull back.
Potbelly Sandwich Works
Potbelly turned an antique shop's lunch counter into a repeatable neighborhood ritual. Now, under RaceTrac ownership, the question is whether its stove, hot peppers and lunch-hour warmth can travel to 2,000 shops without losing the odd little details that made the first one work.
Pet Supplies Plus
Pet Supplies Plus built a national pet-retail network around an intentionally small idea: make the weekly food run feel local, fast and useful. The result is a franchise system where dog washes, delivery routes and adoption events do as much work as the shelves.
Lou Malnati's Pizzeria
Lou Malnati's has spent 55 years turning one stubbornly local recipe into restaurants, delivery kitchens and a nationwide cold-chain business. Its next challenge is expansion without sanding away the family ritual that made the pizza travel in the first place.
Ray Harrison
After three decades in retail, Ray Harrison still begins with the same question: what will make the next stop easier, friendlier and worth repeating? His route from store director to Yesway's senior team explains why the answer lives in both the data and the aisle.
Arcos Dorados
Behind Latin America’s Big Macs sits a Montevideo company running 2,520 restaurants, a 115-million-user data engine and one of the region’s largest first-job machines. Its real product is consistency at continental scale.
American Express
American Express began by moving parcels, gold and cash. Today, its most valuable cargo may be the information flowing between cardholders, merchants and a network it controls end to end.
Rob Chumley
At Murphy USA, the former 7-Eleven innovation chief is turning millions of hurried fuel stops into a practical laboratory for loyalty, payments and customer experience.
The Contact Center Is a Cost Center. Make It an Experience Center.
Every metric inside the contact center measures less — shorter calls, fewer tickets, cheaper interactions. That made sense while support was overhead. It stops making sense when support is the last human moment before a customer decides whether to stay.
Bonat
The Riyadh startup that turns a coffee-shop punch card into a data engine - and just raised $6 million to teach every merchant in the Gulf how to keep a customer.
Frank Berman
Frank Berman is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Bloomingdale's, where he has spent his entire 30-plus year career - starting in 1991 as a housewares business manager and rising through buying and loyalty roles to lead marketing for the 150-plus-year-old luxury department store. He built his reputation on keeping the brand 'fun,' framing Bloomingdale's as a place to buy wants not needs, and steering high-profile experiential campaigns from rotating themed pop-ups to the Wicked-themed holiday takeover and the retailer's 150th anniversary gala.
Katherine Beede
Katherine Godfrey Beede is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of The TJX Companies, the Framingham, Massachusetts off-price retail group behind T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Homesense, Sierra, Winners and TK Maxx. She stepped into the top marketing seat in February 2024 after roughly a quarter-century inside the company, having previously run marketing for HomeGoods, then T.J.Maxx, then the combined T.J.Maxx and Marshalls division known internally as MarMaxx. Before TJX she spent a decade on the agency side in Boston and Philadelphia, at shops including Hill Holliday, LevLane, Arnold Worldwide and Holland Mark Martin. Her remit now covers marketing for a roughly $60 billion retailer with more than 5,200 stores across nine countries, built on a business model that sells a shopping trip nobody can fully predict - the so-called treasure hunt. She keeps an unusually low public profile for a Fortune 100 CMO.
Bealls, Inc.
Bealls, Inc. is a privately held, family-owned off-price retailer founded in Bradenton, Florida in 1915. Now in its fourth generation of Beall family leadership, the company operates more than 650 stores across roughly 23 states under the bealls, Bealls Florida and Home Centric banners, along with e-commerce sites. It employs about 14,000 people and generates annual sales of roughly $2-3 billion by outfitting value-minded families with branded apparel, footwear, accessories and home merchandise at prices marked well below traditional retail.
Bloomingdale's
Bloomingdale's is an American upscale department store founded in New York City in 1861 and now a division of Macy's, Inc. It sells designer fashion, beauty, accessories, and home goods across a national fleet of full-line stores, small-format Bloomie's locations, outlets, and bloomingdales.com. Known for its flagship at 59th and Lexington, the Little Brown Bag, and Forty Carrots frozen yogurt, it positions itself as America's only nationwide full-line luxury department store and has been Macy's fastest-growing banner through the mid-2020s.
Torrid
Torrid is a California-based direct-to-consumer retailer of plus-size women's apparel and intimates, designing trend-driven clothing in sizes 10 to 30. Launched in 2001 as a Hot Topic concept and public on the NYSE since 2021 under ticker CURV, the brand pairs a digitally led e-commerce business with a fleet of specialty stores, and builds fit authority by developing garments on live plus-size fit models rather than grading up smaller patterns.
Leana Less
Leana Less is a global marketing leader who in 2024 became the first-ever Chief Marketing Officer in the 111-year history of Bealls, Inc., the family-owned Florida off-price retailer. A South African who built a 27-year career spanning MediaCom Africa, nearly 13 years at The Coca-Cola Company, global consumer marketing at Estee Lauder's Aveda, and a marketing transformation at Chico's FAS, she is known for turning marketing from a cost center into a growth engine across brand, ecommerce and loyalty. She describes herself as 'an activator' who refuses to wait for the green light.
Vivian Alhorn
Vivian Alhorn is Chief Marketing Officer at Torrid, the plus-size apparel retailer serving women in sizes 10 to 30. She joined Torrid in 2021 as VP of Digital Experience, was promoted to Chief Digital Officer in 2022, and stepped into the CMO seat in March 2023. Her career has moved through some of the country's most recognizable specialty retailers, including Gap Inc., Banana Republic, Pottery Barn, Sephora and Gymboree, giving her a rare mix of merchandising, ecommerce and brand fluency.
William White
William White is the Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart, a role he has held since May 2020. He leads customer insights, brand strategy, and full-funnel marketing for the world's largest retailer, and is credited with steering Walmart's marketing through the pandemic, launching Walmart+, and building the retailer into a more culturally and emotionally connected brand. Before Walmart he spent seven years at Target and nearly nine years at Coca-Cola, where he scaled Coke Zero into a billion-dollar brand. He ranked #4 on Forbes' 2024 list of the World's Most Influential CMOs.
Accrue
Accrue is a New York fintech that powers modern customer loyalty at the payment layer. Its brandable, stored-value digital wallet lets merchants take control of their payments and refunds, reward repeat customers, and reduce reliance on traditional card networks. Founded in 2021 by Michael Hershfield as a 'save now, buy later' alternative to BNPL, the company has expanded into a full-stack wallet, reward engine, pay-by-bank payments and closed-loop refunds used to lift order value and shopper frequency.
Hang
Hang is a New York-based software company building an AI-powered marketing and loyalty platform for consumer brands. Marketed as 'the autonomous marketing system,' Hang replaces static points programs with personalized, gamified rewards - branded minigames, dynamic quests and 1:1 offers - alongside self-cleaning customer data, smart segments and AI-driven campaigns. It launched in 2022 as an NFT-powered membership platform backed by a $16M Series A from Paradigm, then repositioned around AI and now serves restaurant, beauty, apparel and e-commerce brands such as Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Hattie B's.
Snappy
Snappy is a New York-based corporate gifting platform that flips the traditional gift on its head: instead of shipping one preselected item, a sender picks a budget and a curated collection, and the recipient chooses the gift they actually want. Founded in 2015 by Hani Goldstein and Dvir Cohen, Snappy started in personal gifting before pivoting to enterprise, and now powers employee recognition, customer loyalty, and sales incentives for thousands of companies. Its recipient-choice model, digital 'unwrapping' experience, thank-you loop, and deep HRIS integrations have made it a favorite of HR and people teams, with more than 6 million gifts delivered across 170+ countries.