subscription-commerce
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Cindy Gustafson Built Her Career in the Space Between the Product and the Person
Before she ran Nutrafol, Cindy Gustafson spent two decades learning how brands earn attention. Her CEO chapter is a study in restraint: fewer products, closer listening and growth built around what customers actually need.
Thad Tarkington Found a Business Hiding in the Air Filter
A ruined Saturday suggested a subscription. The stranger clue came later: customers ordering filters for dozens of homes, pointing two college founders toward a much larger problem.
Michael Flynn and the Sixth Try That Kept the Bags Unpacked
Before Recharge became the machinery behind billions in recurring commerce, its technical co-founder was nearly packed for home. Six product experiments, one useful problem, and five bootstrapped years changed the itinerary.
Nicolas Capuono and the Business of the Moment After Buy
The DAILYLOOK chief executive built his career in the unglamorous minutes after checkout - where a return, a late parcel or one useful conversation can decide whether a customer ever comes back.
Greg Alvo Bet on the Purchase You Never Have to Remember
In 2010, three major online retailers offered product subscriptions. Greg Alvo built Ordergroove for the day the rest of commerce would catch up - and spent the next 16 years turning convenience into infrastructure.
Daniel Broukhim Put the Gift Bag on a Balance Sheet
FabFitFun began as a newsletter, found its business model in the event gift bag, and grew by treating surprise as an operating system. Daniel Broukhim’s career is a study in pivots, partnership, and the unglamorous math behind a delightful box.
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.
Gina Perrelli
Gina Perrelli is the co-founder and CEO of Stay AI, a subscription and retention platform for Shopify brands that treats subscriptions as a performance channel rather than a payment mechanism. A self-described 'retention girlie' with over a decade in lifecycle marketing, she previously co-founded the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group and now leads a company that helps hundreds of DTC brands - including Olipop, Vita Coco, and Momofuku - reduce churn and grow subscriber revenue. Stay AI raised $15.1M in Series A funding and has expanded through acquisitions of RetentionEngine and Bellwethr.
Katie Spies
Katie Spies is the founder and CEO of Maev, the direct-to-consumer brand that made human-grade raw food for dogs a subscription. An MIT-trained engineer who quit tech to spend nearly a year as a full-time dog walker, she built Maev after her rescue dog's health turned around on a raw diet. Since launching in 2020 she has shipped millions of meals, raised roughly $19 million in venture funding, and grown the company by wheat-pasting posters across New York before scaling to paid channels.
Daniel Saks
Daniel Saks is the co-founder and CEO of Landbase, a San Francisco agentic-AI company building GTM-1 Omni, an action model purpose-built to automate B2B go-to-market work. He previously co-founded and co-led AppDirect, the subscription-commerce platform that became a unicorn. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and McGill graduate, Saks traces his obsession with helping small businesses survive to his family's century-old furniture store in Niagara Falls, which closed during the Great Recession.
Shauna Drumright
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.
Nicolas Desmarais
Nicolas Desmarais is the chairman and co-CEO of AppDirect, the San Francisco-based B2B subscription commerce platform he co-founded with Daniel Saks in 2009 out of an apartment at age 23. AppDirect now powers digital marketplaces for thousands of providers across software, telecom, energy, hardware and AI, has raised roughly $750M, and most recently unveiled an AI-led 'everything store' for B2B procurement.
Hayley Barna
Hayley Barna is a General Partner at First Round Capital and co-founder of Birchbox, the subscription beauty pioneer that invented an entirely new retail category. After growing Birchbox from a Harvard Business School idea to a 200-person company with over a million monthly subscribers, she joined First Round Capital in 2016 as its first female partner and was promoted to General Partner in 2017. She brings a rare founder-operator lens to early-stage investing, with a portfolio spanning healthcare, consumer, and commerce companies including Alma, Thirty Madison, Studs, Mirror, and Clare. A finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search who once worked at IBM's research lab at age 16, Barna is equal parts scientist, builder, and storyteller - one of the most distinctive investor voices in New York's startup ecosystem.