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Nalini Parthiban and the business of missing home
Sweet Karam Coffee began with family recipes and ₹2,000. Nalini Parthiban’s task is to carry that familiarity across borders - while letting customers have the final word on the crunch.
Atul Mehta and the promise after checkout
From Unilever’s brands to Amazon Pantry and Shiprocket, Atul Mehta has followed the customer beyond the sale. His work now begins where a shopping cart’s apparent victory ends.
Lokesh Kumar Is Selling the Part of Shopping Nobody Wants to Think About
At ClickPost, Lokesh Kumar has built a career around the awkward interval between “buy now” and “delivered.” His wager is simple: the parcel is carrying a customer relationship, not merely a product.
Joanna Lord and the Strange Luxury of Starting Small
After five CMO seats and two decades scaling other people's companies, Joanna Lord is building one careful black jumpsuit in Miami. The smaller canvas has made her ambition more exact, not less.
Jason Chen Put the Cabinet Shop on a Software Clock
After two decades in luxury home furnishings, the Ronbow founder made an unfashionable bet: custom cabinets could move at the speed of software without losing the touch of a craft business.
Claire Fang Built a Consumer Brand Around the Part of the Oat Everyone Else Ignored
She did not invent oat bran. She made it legible - as porridge, a drink, a daily ritual and, eventually, a consumer company spanning continents.
Nina George
She started as a software engineer, detoured through Wall Street, and now runs marketing at one of the most recognized names in consumer wellness. Nina George has spent a career walking companies through their reinventions.
David Gallon
David Gallon is a marketing executive who leads brand and integrated marketing for Tory Burch, the New York luxury fashion house. He joined the company in 2016 and rose through digital, social, and brand roles to Chief Marketing Officer, North America. His path runs from local TV newsrooms to teen retail at Aeropostale and into luxury fashion, giving him a storyteller's instinct for how a brand shows up across social, e-commerce, and physical stores.
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.
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.
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.
Drew Eakins
Drew Eakins is a marketing leader in the outdoor industry and the marketing chief for Reima's North America business, the 80-year-old Finnish children's outdoor clothing and footwear brand. Based in Colorado, he has spent more than a decade building outdoor brands, with earlier stops at Cotopaxi, Hestra Gloves, and Great Trango Holdings. He is known for connecting technical outdoor products with the audiences who actually use them, and for leaning into brand storytelling, wholesale partnerships, and channel strategy.
Emily Sly
Emily Sly is a Denver-based marketing executive who became Chief Marketing Officer of TRUEWERK, the performance workwear brand, in late 2025. She spent 13 years at Crocs, rising from a regional account services rep to VP of Global Marketing during the brand's global comeback, then led brand and marketing at Funko and headed marketing at PopSockets before joining TRUEWERK. She is known for helping consumer brands articulate why they matter and for translating brand purpose into consistent experiences across every customer touchpoint.
Harriet Lee
Harriet Lee is a New York-based marketing leader at ONDO, the direct-to-consumer apparel brand known for its no-slip, no-show socks made from Woolmark-certified Australian merino wool and organic cotton. She describes her work as 'data-driven brand innovation,' pairing a creative fashion background from 3.1 Phillip Lim with the analytics-first playbook of a Shopify-native e-commerce brand. She helps ONDO turn a mundane product - socks - into a category built on a no-slip guarantee, sustainability, and a loyal 20,000-plus five-star review community.
Jens Nicolaysen
Jens Nicolaysen is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Shinesty, the Boulder, Colorado apparel brand whose stated mission is to force the world to take itself less seriously. A 2010 marketing graduate of CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business, he spent his early career doing brand strategy and innovation consulting for large consumer companies before launching Shinesty in mid-2014 with fellow Leeds alum Chris White. The company began as a vintage-clothing resale operation with buyers scouring thrift shops in college and ski towns, pivoted to original designs in 2015, and grew into a direct-to-consumer underwear and loungewear business best known for its trademarked Ball Hammock pouch underwear, its holiday and theme-party outfits, and a joke-first marketing voice that Nicolaysen oversees across email, paid media, catalogues and video. Shinesty's story became a six-episode MTV2 series in 2017, the company was named an Inc. 5000 honoree in 2022, and it has raised roughly $8.2 million through a Series A.
Jonathan Bottomley
Jonathan Bottomley is EVP and Global Chief Marketing Officer of Calvin Klein and, since May 2026, EVP of Group Consumer & Brand Strategy at parent company PVH Corp. Oxford-educated in modern languages, he spent roughly two decades in advertising - most notably eleven years at BBH London, where he rose to joint chief strategy officer and worked on Axe/Lynx, Google, Audi and Samsung - before crossing to the client side as Ralph Lauren's first-ever CMO in 2017 and later CMO of Boll & Branch. Since joining Calvin Klein in June 2022 he has rebuilt the brand's marketing around what he calls an 'entertainment mentality': casting talent with 'cultural velocity' rather than raw follower counts, and pairing archival brand DNA with modern CRM and first-party data. The results have been loud - the January 2024 Jeremy Allen White underwear campaign generated an estimated $74 million in media impact value and roughly 30% year-over-year growth in underwear sales the week it launched, followed by Bad Bunny in 2025 and Dakota Johnson in 2026.
Katherine Brodie
Katherine Brodie is the Chief Marketing Officer of Frances Valentine, the New York fashion house co-founded by Elyce Arons with her best friend, the late Kate Spade, and Andy Spade. Brodie joined in January 2025 after roughly two decades spent building direct-to-consumer engines for design-led brands: eCommerce at Kate Spade, digital marketing at C. Wonder and Club Monaco, eCommerce at Reese Witherspoon's Draper James, and VP of Marketing & eCommerce at Rifle Paper Co., followed by a VP of Marketing post at CAKE. At Frances Valentine she runs a marketing operation that behaves less like a department and more like a production studio - video-first storytelling, creator-style content, and a community organized around color and joy. The strategic bet is contrarian by industry standards: while most fashion brands chase shoppers under 35, Brodie's team has built a viral social presence around women 50 and up, with Arons herself as the on-camera personality. The approach has coincided with rapid growth for the brand across e-commerce, its expanding retail fleet, and wholesale.
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.
Mike Kelly
Mike Kelly is a marketing and innovation executive best known for more than two decades at PVH Corp., the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. He built PVH's first in-house marketing and media group from the ground up, later served as Chief Marketing Officer of the company's Heritage Brands and as Global Chief Innovation Officer, and pushed the apparel giant into connected textiles, AR/VR, digital fit and sustainability. Since leaving PVH he has turned entrepreneur and advisor, co-founding the automotive SaaS startup Fob Depot and mentoring brands and founders.
Shaye Vercollone
Shaye Vercollone is a New York-based brand marketing leader who became Chief Marketing Officer of TWP, the womenswear label founded by Trish Wescoat Pound. She built a career at the sharp end of luxury fashion marketing, holding senior brand, communications, and social strategy roles at Helmut Lang and Theory before a run as an independent brand marketing consultant. Her work sits at the intersection of storytelling, social, and the quiet, menswear-inspired tailoring that defines TWP.
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.
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.
Mark Bietz
Mark Bietz is a marketing and ecommerce executive best known for helping build HalloweenCostumes.com and FUN.com into one of the largest online costume and pop-culture merchandise retailers in the world. As Chief Marketing Officer of the Mankato, Minnesota-based company, he led digital growth that scaled revenue roughly 10x-20x, championing data-driven email personalization and short-form video. A self-described curious operator who learned the business from brand to CRM to operations, he now also works as a fractional CMO and advisor to venture-backed and private-equity-backed brands, and speaks widely on modern ecommerce and the rise of agentic commerce.
O'Neal Rowe
O'Neal Rowe is the Chief Marketing Officer at Mixbook, the Redwood City photo-book and personalized-goods company. A Cornell-trained mechanical engineer who traded the drawing board for the marketing whiteboard, he has spent his career running growth, revenue and brand at consumer and e-commerce companies including NOBULL, Qapital, Invaluable and Rugs USA. Based in the Boston area, he specializes in turning engineering rigor into measurable demand.
Renee Halvorsen
Renee Halvorsen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Marine Layer, the San Francisco apparel brand known for absurdly soft t-shirts and a laid-back California outlook. A Yale-trained economist who began her career in finance and investment banking, she has spent the better part of a decade at Marine Layer, helping grow the business more than tenfold by treating marketing as a blend of art and science and treating customer lifetime value as the metric that matters most. Before Marine Layer she sharpened her craft in strategy and analytics roles at Gap Inc. and Athleta.
Ryan Heller
Ryan Heller is the Chief Marketing Officer of Fabletics, the membership-based activewear brand headquartered in El Segundo, California. He leads the company's creative, media and acquisition, CRM, brand partnerships and PR functions. A data-driven marketer with more than a decade inside the TechStyle Fashion Group family of brands, he rose from Vice President to Senior Vice President of Marketing and helped launch customer acquisition for Savage X Fenty before taking the top marketing seat at Fabletics in early 2021.
Sabrina Cherubini
Sabrina Cherubini is the Chief Marketing Officer of FULLBEAUTY Brands, the plus-size and big-and-tall apparel group behind names like Catherines, ellos, Swimsuits for All, Jessica London and Brylane Home. A French-born marketer who began at Leo Burnett and Havas in Europe, she has spent two decades moving between advertising agencies, startups and Fortune 500 retailers including Kmart, Sears, Ann Taylor and Loft. Before FULLBEAUTY she spent nearly four years at lingerie brand Hanky Panky, where she helped grow the direct-to-consumer share of revenue from under 20% to roughly half. She is a Women in Retail Leadership Circle member, a nonprofit board member, and an advocate for women's leadership communities.
Taryn Rayment
Taryn Rayment is the Chief Marketing Officer of J.McLaughlin, the New York heritage apparel brand, a role she took in April 2024. Over roughly two decades she has run marketing and ecommerce for consumer brands across fashion, footwear, travel goods, and floral delivery - including a stretch as CMO and consumer division head at FTD during the pandemic, CMO at ecoATM Gazelle, and senior digital and CRM leadership at Cole Haan and TUMI. She is known for a data-driven, retention-focused approach to direct-to-consumer marketing and for steering omnichannel and e-commerce growth.
Taylor Capuano
Taylor Capuano is the co-founder and chief creative officer of CAKES body, a viral direct-to-consumer apparel brand she launched in 2022 with her twin sister, Casey Sarai. Starting with $5,000 each in personal savings and no marketing budget, the sisters bootstrapped the company from a side hustle into a business that reported roughly $95 million in net sales in its fiscal year ending June 2025. A December 2023 appearance on ABC's Shark Tank, where they landed a deal with Emma Grede, accelerated the brand's rise. Capuano leads creative and marketing, and has become a public voice for bootstrapped, digital-first growth and family-friendly workplace policies.
Vanessa Wallace
Vanessa Wallace is the Chief Marketing Officer of GLD, the Miami-based lifestyle jewelry brand known for its ties to sport, music and street culture. A former CMO of Savage X Fenty and a 19-year Nike veteran who led Jordan Brand marketing in North America, Wallace built a career on storytelling, cultural relevance and championing overlooked communities. She joined GLD's board in August 2025 and stepped into the CMO seat in early 2026.