merchandising
(23)
Marc MacRae Built a Retail Career Like a Coach Builds a Team
Across four decades in sporting-goods retail, Marc MacRae has treated merchandising, mentoring and football coaching as versions of the same job: put people in the right position, then help them win.
The Company Behind the Shelf Is Building Retail's Operating System
Most shoppers never see Acosta Group. They see the shelf it reset, the sample it served, the product page it repaired and the promotion its data helped price.
The Finnish Engine Trying to Make Every Online Store Feel Like It Remembers You
Founded in 2013 by three Finns tired of impersonal online shopping, Nosto now decides what millions of shoppers see the moment a page loads - and it is betting its next chapter on AI agents that run the store for you.
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.
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.
Constructor
Constructor is an AI-powered product discovery and search platform for enterprise ecommerce. Its clickstream-trained models run search, browse, recommendations, autosuggest, quizzes, and agentic shopping experiences for retailers like Sephora, Petco, Under Armour, Birkenstock, and The Very Group - tying every result back to KPIs like revenue per visitor.
Dimitrios Lessen
Dimitrios "Jimmy" Lessen is the Chief Merchandising Officer of SNIPES USA, appointed in February 2024. A 30-year veteran of the sneaker business, he built his career at Foot Locker in Europe and North America, running product strategy, buying, assortment planning and e-commerce before joining the German-founded, community-first streetwear retailer to lead its merchandising in the United States.
Elizabeth Melley
Elizabeth Melley is the Chief Merchandising Officer at Gerber Childrenswear LLC, a New York-based apparel executive who has spent three decades designing and building product lines in retail. She started as a designer at Abercrombie & Fitch in 1993 and went on to lead product design and development at Mervyns, Sprockets Kids Clothing, and JCPenney before joining Gerber in 2022. At Gerber she oversees merchandising and product for a portfolio of baby and toddler brands, and has driven launches like the Livaeco-based 'Our Softest Edit' conscious clothing line and the expansion of the modern moments line.
Jenna Woodhull
Jenna Woodhull is Chief Merchandising Officer at Sendero Provisions Co., the Waco, Texas apparel brand that started with a single hat in 2014 and now sells a full Western-meets-outdoor line. She has spent close to three decades in apparel, beginning as a Volcom sales rep in the late 1990s, moving through Hurley as National Sales Manager and Director of Retail Marketing, returning to Volcom as global VP of design and merchandising from 2010 to 2013, then co-founding the Newport Beach brand agency and showroom Band of Martians. She spent roughly ten years at Brixton, rising to Senior Vice President of Design & Merchandising and later Chief Merchandising Officer, before a stint as global head of women's product at Liberated Brands overseeing Volcom, Billabong and RVCA. She joined Sendero in February 2025 to run merchandising strategy, product vision and category expansion. She is known in the industry for balancing creative instinct with commercial discipline, and she describes her own style as vintage classic, usually finished with boots.
Jordan Hauser
Jordan Hauser is a New York-based retail marketing and merchandising executive who leads marketing and creative at Paul Fredrick, the Pennsylvania menswear company founded in 1986 that built its name on dress shirts sold with exact sleeve lengths and a fit guarantee. Listed publicly as Senior Vice President of Marketing & Creative (and as Chief Marketing Officer in some directory listings), he sits at the junction of two disciplines that rarely share an office: the merchandising side that decides what gets made, and the marketing side that decides how it gets told. His track record runs through department-store scale and startup scrappiness alike - director-level digital and merchandising roles across Macy's men's business and Market by Macy's, then VP of Merchandising & Marketing at Offe Market, the off-price marketplace for brand overstock. At Paul Fredrick he inherited a brand with roughly 88 employees, around $21 million in annual revenue, a Shopify Plus storefront, and forty years of accumulated customer trust in a category that has spent the last decade being told it was dying.
Krista Dalton
Krista Dalton is Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Tecovas, the Austin-based western wear brand built on handmade cowboy boots that has grown into a lifestyle label with more than 50 US stores. She spent nine years at Target, where she moved from allocating plus-size and maternity apparel to becoming the first person the company shifted from stores to Target.com in 2013, then seven years at Overstock.com (now Beyond Inc), ending as Chief Customer and Merchandising Officer with a team of over 1,300 and an $800M-plus P&L. At Tecovas she has pushed the brand into work boots and women's workwear, run TV blackout tests to prove what awareness actually buys, sent her team into customers' closets, and built a custom AI agent to chew through the roughly 16 reports she used to read by hand. Footwear News named her to its Women Who Rock class of 2026, where she argued that authenticity is the new competitive advantage.
Belk
Belk is a privately held American department store chain founded in 1888 by William Henry Belk in Monroe, North Carolina. Headquartered in Charlotte, it operates roughly 290 stores across about 16 Southeastern states plus belk.com, selling mid-priced national and private-label apparel, shoes, cosmetics, jewelry, accessories and home goods. Marketed under the tagline 'Modern. Southern. Style.,' Belk blends a 130-plus-year Southern retail heritage with an omnichannel model and a portfolio of exclusive private brands.
Melissa Haynes
Melissa Haynes is the Chief Marketing Officer of Glik's, one of the oldest family-owned fashion retailers in the United States, founded in 1897. A digital commerce and merchandising leader who cut her teeth as a shoe buyer at Zappos and later ran merchandising at eBags, Shane Co. and Scrubs & Beyond, she now steers marketing and customer experience for the roughly 70-store Midwest chain. Her calling card is hyper-local: she believes Glik's wins by tailoring each store's assortment to the community around it, backed by modern unified-commerce technology.
Aaron Heiser
Aaron Heiser is the first-ever Chief Executive Officer of Malbon Golf, the Santa Monica streetwear-meets-golf brand founded by Stephen and Erica Malbon. Appointed in October 2024, he runs day-to-day operations while the founders steer creative as co-Chief Creative Officers. Heiser arrived after roughly 18 years at Nike, where he ran retail across Western Europe and Greater China before serving as Global VP of Apparel, Accessories and Licensing. A Cornell graduate and former varsity wrestler, he has built a career relocating across Amsterdam, Shanghai and Oregon, and now leads Malbon as it pushes toward roughly $100 million in revenue and deeper international expansion.
Toolio
Toolio is a New York-based retail technology company that builds cloud-based, AI-powered merchandising software. Its platform replaces spreadsheet-driven planning with connected workflows for merchandise financial planning, open-to-buy, assortment planning, demand forecasting, and allocation. Founded in 2019 by ex-Walmart engineers Eytan Daniyalzade and Berk Atikoglu, Toolio helps modern retailers and direct-to-consumer brands decide what to buy, how much, and where to place it - managing over a billion dollars of inventory across more than 100 retail customers.
Patrick Smith
Patrick Smith is a Boston-based software executive currently serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Onebeat, a retail inventory intelligence platform. A Providence College graduate with roots in enterprise supply-chain software, he has spent his career at the intersection of merchandising strategy and inventory optimization, with prior stops at ToolsGroup, antuit.ai, ESG, and Park City Group. He writes and speaks about the 'Retail Margin Spiral' and the 'Inventory Intelligence Loop,' arguing that softlines retailers must move from reactive planning to continuous, real-time decisioning.
Hetal Retail
Hetal Retail is a New York-based startup that helps consumer brands see what is actually happening on store shelves. A crowdsourced network of everyday shoppers - called Hetalites - films short videos of store aisles on a mobile app, and Hetal's computer vision and AI turn that footage into planogram-compliance diagnostics, prioritized issue lists with visual proof, and correlations between shelf execution and sales. The pitch: retail-level visibility for a fraction of the cost of traditional manual audits, and a system that helps coordinate the fix rather than just flagging the problem.
Mark Chrystal
Dr. Mark Chrystal is the CEO and co-founder of Profitmind, a Pittsburgh-based agentic AI startup that gives retailers a team of AI analysts for pricing, inventory, assortment, forecasting and competitive intelligence. A 25-year retail operator who ran analytics, supply chain and e-commerce at rue21, David's Bridal, American Eagle, Disney Store and Victoria's Secret, he was recruited by AI pioneer Andrew Ng to build software 'for retailers by retailers.' The company, formerly known as Netail, has raised roughly $14 million to date, including a $9 million Series A backed by Accenture Ventures, with partnerships spanning Accenture and Microsoft.
David Roger
David Roger is the cofounder and CEO of Hetal Retail, a New York-based startup that uses computer vision and a crowd of everyday shoppers to tell brands what is really happening on store shelves. Before Hetal, he co-founded and ran Felix Gray, the company that pushed blue light glasses into the mainstream and onto the shelves of Target, CVS and Best Buy before selling in 2023. A self-described generalist who lives at the intersection of analytical and creative, Roger turned the frustrations he felt as a brand operator - expensive, slow, unusable retail data - into the company he runs today.
Michelle Bacharach
Michelle Bacharach is the co-founder and CEO of FindMine, a New York AI company that teaches machines to style and merchandise like a brand's best human stylist - then runs that expertise across millions of products for retailers like Lululemon, Gap, Adidas and Anine Bing. A UC Berkeley grad and NYU Stern MBA who detoured through professional acting before building software, she turned a frustrating hunt for an outfit to match a pair of green waxed leggings into a venture-backed 'Complete the Look' platform that brands say lifts shopper spend dramatically.
MakerSights
MakerSights is a San Francisco software company that gives consumer brands a Voice-of-Consumer platform for testing product ideas before they are made. Founded in 2015, it lets apparel, footwear and accessories teams put concepts, line plans and assortments in front of thousands of real target shoppers in hours, helping them make fewer wrong bets and cut down on overproduction. Its newer MakerLabs offering uses AI-trained digital twins to deliver synthetic consumer readouts in under an hour. Brands including New Balance, Madewell, Champion, Ralph Lauren and Hoka use it to align what gets made with what people actually buy.
Profitmind
Profitmind (operated by Netail, Inc.) is a Pittsburgh-based retail decision-intelligence company that builds agentic AI to help merchandising teams make faster, more profitable pricing, assortment, inventory, promotion, and marketing decisions. Founded by retail veteran Dr. Mark Chrystal and incubated inside Andrew Ng's AI Fund/Landing AI ecosystem, its platform unifies a retailer's strategy, internal data, and external competitive signals into prioritized, explainable recommendations - serving retailers from $20M to $100B in revenue across three continents.
Lily AI
Lily AI is a Mountain View-based retail AI company that translates the language of the customer into the language of the catalog. Its platform uses computer vision, NLP and large language models to enrich product data with thousands of consumer-centric attributes - powering site search, recommendations, SEO/SEM and demand forecasting for retailers like Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Gap and thredUP.