Taryn
Rayment

A marketer who follows the customer, not the category

Most marketing resumes read like a straight line down a single aisle. Taryn Rayment's reads like a walk through an entire department store.

She has sold sympathy bouquets and wedding-day orchids at FTD. She has sold the leather carry-on you drag through an airport at TUMI, and the loafers you wear once you land at Cole Haan. She has even sold the phone you forgot in a drawer, running marketing at ecoATM Gazelle, the company that turns old handsets back into cash. Since April 2024, she has been selling something quieter and more durable: the polished, timeless American style of J.McLaughlin, where she serves as Chief Marketing Officer.

It would be easy to mistake all that movement for restlessness. It is closer to the opposite. Rayment is not chasing products. She is chasing a single question that happens to travel well across industries: what makes a person come back and buy again? Flowers, footwear, luggage, electronics, apparel - the merchandise changes, the human behavior does not.

The foundation is unglamorous by design. A Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Rutgers Business School, then a climb through the least photogenic corners of the discipline: customer relationship management, email strategy, data-driven acquisition, retention, and the profit-and-loss math that decides whether any of it worked. She learned the trade at TUMI as Director of Online Marketing, running digital and CRM. She sharpened it at Cole Haan, where as Senior Director of Data Driven Marketing she built a team from the ground up and taught it to track customers in cohorts rather than crowds.

Then came the test that most marketing plans never survive. In 2020, as Chief Marketing Officer and consumer division head at FTD, Rayment sat on top of a carefully built, pre-pandemic media plan. Within weeks it was worthless. Consumer behavior lurched. The old assumptions about who bought flowers, and when, and why, stopped holding. So the plan got blown up and rebuilt on the fly - new digital channels, new customer segments including living-plant buyers and DIY gardeners who had suddenly found their windowsills interesting. She owned the P&L for both FTD and ProFlowers through it, across B2C and B2B. It is the kind of episode that either ends a marketing career or defines it. For Rayment it did the second thing.

The J.McLaughlin job is, in some ways, her hardest brief yet, precisely because it is so calm. Heritage apparel does not want to trend. It wants to endure. The brand has been making versatile, well-cut American sportswear since 1977, and its whole promise is that it will look right in five years, not five seconds. Marketing that in a feed engineered for the next fifteen seconds is a genuine paradox, and it is exactly the sort of problem a retention-minded, data-literate marketer is built to enjoy.

Quiet by method

There is a certain kind of marketing executive who becomes the story. Rayment is the other kind - the one who lets the customer data do the talking and stays out of the frame. It is a preference, not a limitation. The whole point of a retention-first philosophy is that it works slowly and invisibly, showing up in repeat-purchase curves rather than in press releases.

That temperament suits J.McLaughlin, a brand that has never confused loud with lasting. The label built its name on clothes you reach for again and again - the crewneck, the turtleneck, the wear-to-work dress, the cashmere sweater that outlives the season. Marketing that requires patience and a very long memory for what individual customers actually do. It is, in other words, the exact problem a category-hopping, data-driven marketer spent twenty years learning how to solve.