
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.
Michael DeSimone is the Chief Executive Officer of NewStore, the Boston-based unified commerce platform for global retail brands. He took the role in April 2024 after a career leading commerce-technology companies through IPOs, acquisitions, and scale-ups, including Borderfree (IPO on NASDAQ, sold to Pitney Bowes), ShopKeep (acquired by Lightspeed for a reported $750 million), and SmartRecruiters, where he was CEO.