santa-monica
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Iris Yen
Iris Yen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cupshe, the California-founded swimwear and beachwear brand that grew from a single-category bet into a global direct-to-consumer business with roughly $420 million in annual revenue. She joined in February 2025 after a run through some of the loudest brand-building rooms in the business: Head of Media, Content and Partnerships at Nike; VP and Head of Media, Strategy and Audiences at Red Bull; VP and Head of Communications at GUESS?, Inc.; VP of Communications at American Eagle Outfitters; and VP of Global Marketing and PR at Quiksilver. She started in music, running marketing and PR at Universal Records in the early 2000s, and has built campaigns around names including Britney Spears, Nelly, Kelly Slater, Tony Hawk and Torah Bright. A Washington University in St. Louis graduate who studied anthropology alongside marketing, Yen tends to treat brands as cultures rather than catalogs - a habit visible in Cupshe's 10th-anniversary work, its fourth Miami Swim Week runway show, and its 2026 Casa del Sol collaboration with Jessie James Decker.
Kevin Mitchael
Kevin Mitchael is the Chief Marketing Officer of Careismatic Brands, the Los Angeles-based healthcare apparel group behind Cherokee, Dickies Medical, Heartsoul, Med Couture, Healing Hands, Infinity, Medelita, allheart, Scrubstar, Classroom and Real School. He announced the appointment on LinkedIn in February 2024, weeks after the company entered Chapter 11 restructuring, and stayed through its emergence that June under new ownership. His earlier career was built in apparel brand, product, digital and retail marketing, with work across Carter's, OshKosh B'gosh, Adidas, Carhartt, Lee, Fruit of the Loom, French Toast and Healthtex, according to a 2019 Connecticut newspaper notice announcing his appointment to the board of Flanders Nature Center and Land Trust. He keeps a notably quiet public profile for a CMO: no published interviews, no podcast circuit, and a single LinkedIn account doing most of the talking.
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.
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.
Johnny Monsarrat
Johnny Monsarrat co-invented the MMO genre at Turbine in 1994 - the studio behind Asheron's Call, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online before Warner Bros. acquired it for $160M. Now as founder and CEO of Monsarrat, he is building Landing Party, the world's first outdoor AR roleplaying game, with 7 patents, $2.7M raised, and advisors including the former CEOs of PlayStation and Blizzard.
Daniel Medvene
Daniel Medvene is the CEO and co-founder of Quantum Energy Squares, a Santa Monica plant-based energy bar company he started in 2019 with partner Leah Marquez. After years of relying on pre-workout powders and gallons of coffee that left him 'wired but tired,' Medvene set out to engineer a cleaner source of all-day energy. He and Marquez ran more than 200 recipe iterations with a sports dietitian, food scientist, and pastry chef before landing on a bar powered by organic green coffee and balanced plant-based macros. The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2021 from a roster of pro athletes, became the official energy bar of the IRONMAN and Rock 'n' Roll Marathon series, and now sells nationally through Whole Foods and Sprouts.
Alex Bradford
Alex Bradford is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a Santa Monica fintech that lets hourly and frontline workers tap wages they have already earned before payday instead of turning to payday loans or overdrafts. A former McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and SAC Capital analyst with a Stanford degree and a Harvard MBA, Bradford launched Rain in 2019 after spotting that payroll and timekeeping systems had finally opened their APIs. The company plugs into employers' payroll and HCM systems (including a native Workday integration), has connected millions of workers and distributed more than $2 billion in earned wages, and has raised capital from investors including QED, Invus and Prosus. Bradford's pitch is personal: he grew up with a single mother in the 1980s and built Rain to kill predatory lending and give workers control over their own money.
Frederic Dijols
Frederic Dijols is the co-founder and CEO of Mixlab, a veterinary-exclusive pet pharmacy that compounds custom medications and delivers them fast and free to pet parents and the vets who prescribe them. A French-trained engineer with degrees from Ecole Polytechnique, Stanford, and Harvard Business School, he traded a healthcare-banking seat at J.P. Morgan for a pharmacy floor after a miserable experience getting meds for his aging pug, Bob. Since 2017 he has raised roughly $46.5M and built Mixlab into a multi-state operation pairing pharmacist-grade compounding with consumer-grade delight.
Stephen Chao
Stephen Chao is the co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, the Santa Monica how-to video network he launched in 2008 after a combustible career in television. He created the reality formats America's Most Wanted and Cops at Fox, rose to president of Fox Television Stations, and was fired ten weeks later for hiring a model to strip during a speech about censorship in front of Rupert Murdoch. He later ran programming at USA Network. A Harvard classics major and former National Enquirer reporter, Chao built a second act around free, searchable tutorials covering everything from food hacks to augmented reality.