Studs is a New York-based ear piercing and earrings brand that pairs licensed, needle-based piercing studios with a large e-commerce and in-store catalog of flatback studs, hoops, huggies and clickers. Founded in 2019 by Anna Harman and Lisa Bubbers, the company coined the idea of 'Earscaping' - curating a personalized stack of piercings and jewelry - and positions itself as a modern, hygienic alternative to mall piercing-gun kiosks and tattoo-shop counters. It operates a fleet of profitable studios across the U.S. alongside a direct-to-consumer online store.
Dipti Desai is the co-founder and CEO of Crstl, a San Francisco startup rebuilding B2B commerce around the decades-old EDI standard that quietly governs how brands sell to retailers. A Virginia Tech electrical engineer and Uber data-platform veteran, she stumbled into the problem while volunteering to sell PPE online during the pandemic and discovering that the plumbing of wholesale was stuck in the 1980s. She has raised over $10 million from Target, Shopify Ventures, Cohen Circle, and Village Global to make EDI usable by people who are not developers.
Louisa Serene Schneider is the founder and CEO of Rowan, the ear-piercing company that hires registered nurses to do the piercing and runs its own medical advisory board. She started it from her attic in 2017 after a career in M&A and retail trading at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, and built it into a chain doing roughly $70-100 million a year with dozens of studios and hundreds of employees, more than half of them nurses.
Nell Diamond is the founder and CEO of Hill House Home, the New York lifestyle brand she launched in 2016 from her dorm at Yale School of Management. She built it on luxury bedding and turned it into a cultural phenomenon with the Nap Dress, a smocked, sleep-soft dress that went viral during the pandemic and once sold $1 million of inventory in 12 minutes. A Princeton English major and daughter of former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, she traded a finance career for a brand built on community, drops, and her own waist-length-haired, ruffle-forward aesthetic. Hill House raised $20 million in 2022 at a reported $150 million valuation.
Bobby Farahi is the co-founder and CEO of Dolls Kill, the San Francisco alternative-fashion brand he built with his wife and co-founder Shaudi 'Shoddy' Lynn after the two met at a Los Angeles rave. A serial operator who earlier founded and sold the broadcast-monitoring company Multivision, Farahi turned a stack of foxtail keychains in an apartment into a Sequoia- and Maveron-backed e-commerce label for self-described 'misfits and miss legits.' He also invests as an angel in e-commerce and lifestyle companies.
FeedbackNow is a New York-based real-time customer experience company best known for the Smiley Box - the push-button terminals that ask travelers, patients and shoppers how their visit went and route that sentiment to operations teams within minutes. Founded in Switzerland in 2012, acquired by Forrester in 2018, and spun back out as an independent, venture-backed company in 2024, it pairs physical feedback devices and environmental sensors with AI analytics to help airports, hospitals and retailers fix problems before they show up in a survey.
SparkPlug is a San Francisco-based incentive management platform that turns frontline retail and restaurant employees into a brand's most effective sales force. By integrating directly with point-of-sale systems, it automates sales contests, goals, and commissions - often funded by the brands and vendors whose products those employees sell - and pays rewards out automatically. The company works with thousands of retail locations and hundreds of brand partners, betting that the people closest to the customer are the most underused influence in physical commerce.
Shauna Drumright runs Savage X Fenty, the inclusive lingerie brand Rihanna built. A subscription-commerce operator who cut her teeth at Procter & Gamble before spending years scaling TechStyle's JustFab and FabKids, she stepped into the CEO seat to turn a celebrity launch into a durable, data-driven retail machine. Her brief: keep the body-positive swagger that made the brand famous while making the math work across membership, stores, and a sprawling product range.
eBay is one of the original internet marketplaces, a global platform where roughly 136 million buyers shop across hundreds of millions of listings in about 190 markets. Born in 1995 as a hobby site called AuctionWeb, it pioneered the idea that strangers could trust strangers enough to trade online. Three decades later it has reinvented itself around enthusiast categories, certified collectibles, and recommerce - selling the new, the rare, and the gloriously second-hand.
a.k.a. Brands is a portfolio operator of next-generation, digitally native fashion brands, including Princess Polly, Culture Kings, Petal & Pup and mnml. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, it reaches Gen Z and millennial shoppers who discover fashion on social media and primarily buy online. A data-driven 'test and repeat' merchandising model lets its brands launch fresh, exclusive styles weekly. The company trades on the NYSE under the ticker AKA and reported net sales of $600.2 million in fiscal 2025.
Levi Strauss & Co. is the San Francisco apparel company that invented the blue jean in 1873 and has spent 170-plus years turning a piece of workwear into a global wardrobe staple. Today it owns the Levi's, Dockers, Beyond Yoga and Denizen brands, sells in more than 110 countries, and is reinventing itself under CEO Michelle Gass as a direct-to-consumer denim lifestyle brand while pushing water-saving manufacturing across its supply chain.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. is a San Francisco-based, vertically integrated specialty retailer of premium home furnishings and cookware. From a single 1956 cookware shop in Sonoma, California, it grew into a portfolio of in-house-designed brands - Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Pottery Barn Teen, West Elm, Williams Sonoma Home, Rejuvenation, Mark and Graham, and GreenRow - sold through e-commerce, catalogs, retail stores, and a growing B2B business. It is one of the largest digital-first home retailers in the United States, with roughly $7.7-7.9 billion in annual revenue.
Imma Calvo is VP of Sales, US Commerce at Google Customer Solutions, leading commerce innovation for brands across the Americas. Originally from Barcelona, she spent a decade in California before relocating to New York and has worked at Google since 2007 across EMEA and US markets in roles spanning retail, apps, and agency. A passionate mentor to startups and women in tech, she speaks at major industry conferences and brings fluency in Spanish, Catalan, and the language of disruption.
Jennifer Burke is an Area Vice President for Digital Experience in the Media & Entertainment vertical at Adobe, where she leads enterprise sales and customer engagement for one of the company's most competitive industry segments. Based in Gainesville, Georgia, she brings over three decades of high-stakes commercial experience spanning retail, CPG, and enterprise technology - from rising through Catalina USA's brand development ranks to closing strategic accounts at Microsoft before joining Adobe's go-to-market machine. She is currently at the sharp edge of Adobe's push into agentic AI, championing AI-driven customer experience products to some of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world.
Barry Friedman is the President and CEO of Friedman's Home Improvement, a third-generation family-owned hardware and home improvement retailer based in Petaluma, California. Named CEO in 2013 by his father Bill Friedman, Barry has led the company through digital transformation, e-commerce expansion, and a new 72,000-square-foot distribution center, all while steering the business toward its 80th anniversary in 2026. Under his leadership, Friedman's operates four locations across Sonoma County with approximately 600 employees, and remains deeply embedded in the North Bay community through philanthropy and civic engagement.
Beth Gerstein co-founded Brilliant Earth in 2005 after a personal search for an ethically sourced engagement ring turned up nothing worth buying. An engineer by training (Duke BS at 19, MIT MS, Stanford MBA), she built a company that now generates $422 million in annual revenue and trades on Nasdaq (BRLT). Brilliant Earth is the rare luxury brand that treats supply chain transparency as a marketing advantage rather than a compliance headache - offering Beyond Conflict Free diamonds with traceable origins, lab-grown stones, and recycled metals. Under Gerstein's leadership, the company has donated over $2 million through the Brilliant Earth Foundation, partnered with Dr. Jane Goodall on conservation collections, and expanded to 28+ showrooms while maintaining 14 consecutive quarters of profitability as a public company.
Ciaran Long is the CEO of a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. (NYSE: AKA), a portfolio of next-generation fashion brands targeting Gen Z and millennial consumers. A qualified Irish Chartered Accountant with 25-plus years of financial and strategic leadership, Long joined a.k.a. Brands as CFO in 2021, stepped into an interim CEO role in 2023, and was named permanent CEO in January 2025. Under his leadership the company returned to net sales growth with three consecutive quarters of double-digit U.S. sales expansion, repositioning the portfolio around a demand-driven 'test-and-learn' merchandising model and a major bet on physical retail expansion. He previously served as CFO of Samsclub.com and held senior roles across Walmart's e-commerce division, and earlier in his career he co-founded CleanGrow, a water quality sensor technology startup.
Eric Hunter is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Member of World Market (Cost Plus World Market), the specialty retail chain known for globally sourced furniture, home decor, artisanal foods, and international gifts. Based in Alameda, California, Hunter joined World Market in May 2021 as Chief Commercial Officer, was elevated to President in June 2022, and became CEO in July 2023. He brings deep retail marketing expertise from executive roles at Pier 1 Imports, JCPenney, Kellwood Company, and Ascena Retail Group's plus-size division (Lane Bryant, Cacique, Catherines). Under his leadership, World Market has pursued digital transformation, flexible payment solutions, and continued its mission of delivering unique, globally inspired products across nearly 250 stores and online.
Fang Cheng is a serial founder who builds AI that actually answers the question. She co-founded Touchco (acquired by Amazon, became the Kindle), founded Linc (acquired by Capacity in 2024), served as SVP & GM of Retail CX Automation at Capacity, and is now building a stealth venture focused on agentic commerce for restricted wallets.
Jason Potter is the President and CEO of Grocery Outlet, the Emeryville-based bargain grocery chain known for its independent owner-operator model and treasure-hunt aisles. He took the top job on February 3, 2025, after nearly five years steering The Fresh Market and 26 years climbing through Sobeys, Canada's national grocery giant. He started bagging groceries at 13 in a small Alberta town and has been in the trade ever since.
Max Rhodes is co-founder and CEO of Faire, the online wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers with makers and brands. A Square alumnus from Oklahoma who studied history at Yale, he turned a side hustle importing British umbrellas into a thesis about the messy economics of small-town retail - and built a company that crossed a $12B valuation while courting the very shopkeepers Amazon ignores.
Laura Alber is the longest-tenured female CEO on the Fortune 500, running Williams-Sonoma, Inc. since 2010. She built Pottery Barn Kids from a business plan she wrote while pregnant, then doubled the parent company's revenue and turned a furniture catalog company into one of the largest digital-first home retailers in America.
Michelle Gass is the president and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., the first woman to lead the 172-year-old denim company. A chemical engineer by training, she built Starbucks' Frappuccino into a $2 billion brand, ran Kohl's for five years, and is now reshaping Levi's into a direct-to-consumer denim lifestyle retailer.
Rajendra Soni runs the United States arm of PNG Jewellers, the 190-plus-year-old Pune house famous for gold, diamonds and old-school karigari. He turned a single Sunnyvale storefront into the Bay Area's go-to address for South Asian wedding jewellery, then helped open Fremont, and keeps showing up at every ribbon cutting with the same line: customer first, then employees, then the bling.
Thomas (Tom) Moran is the former President and CEO of Goodwill Central Coast, the Salinas-based nonprofit that runs retail thrift stores, donation centers, and job-training programs across Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Luis Obispo counties. A physics major turned MBA turned retail-finance lifer, he came in as CFO in 2018 and was elevated to CEO in 2020 after stints at Conn's, West Marine, ARAMARK, Limited Brands, and CarMax.
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.
Cookies is a global cannabis and lifestyle brand co-founded in 2010 by Bay Area rapper-entrepreneur Berner and cultivator Jai. Built on proprietary genetics like the iconic Girl Scout Cookies strain, it has grown into a network of 70+ dispensaries across more than 20 markets in 6 countries, plus a streetwear arm (Cookies SF) that helped legitimize the brand long before federal legalization caught up.
Hint Inc. makes unsweetened, fruit-infused water with zero sugar, zero sweeteners, and zero calories. Founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Kara Goldin, Hint grew from a personal health experiment into the #1 unsweetened flavored still water brand in the U.S. The company sells over 25 flavors through major retailers like Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, and Costco, as well as directly through its website — where DTC now represents more than 50% of revenue. With $91M+ raised and an annual revenue of approximately $143M, Hint has quietly built one of the most compelling better-for-you beverage brands in America.
NUG is a vertically integrated California cannabis company founded in 2014 that operates the state's highest-volume extraction facility, multiple retail dispensaries, and one of California's largest wholesale distribution networks. Known for their premium flower, vapes, and edibles, NUG has pioneered Oakland's first equity-owned consumption lounge and is deeply committed to social equity programs that support entrepreneurs affected by prior cannabis criminalization.
OLIPOP is a prebiotic soda company that turned the soft drink industry on its head by proving that soda can be both delicious and good for your gut. Founded in 2018 by Ben Goodwin and David Lester, the Oakland-based company combines nostalgic flavors with functional ingredients - each can delivers 6-9 grams of prebiotic fiber from plant-based sources like cassava root, chicory root, and nopal cactus. After reaching $400 million in revenue and profitability in 2024, OLIPOP closed a $50 million Series C at a $1.85 billion valuation in 2025, making it the fastest-growing non-alcoholic beverage brand in the United States.