About
I make the brand clear enough that a whole company can act on it.
That has been the job for more than twenty years. Inside $2B portfolios and inside twelve-person startups. It looks the same from both ends. Brand vision and marketing execution, end to end. I connect both with the rest of the business around one vision, so the company can grow without losing what made it work.
The story
I did not set out to be a marketer.
The reason it was hard to pick a path is that my brain fires on a lot of cylinders at once. Right brain and left brain. I went to a science and tech high school, and I also danced and played piano. I like seeing the whole picture. I am allergic to silos. A singular function never appealed to me.
I picked business because it kept my options open. My first job was in HR at an insurance company. A rotation program, more options. It was pleasant, and it was not hard enough. Somewhere in there I got curious about brand management, went to Columbia University for it, and got recruited into a food company that became part of Unilever.
That turned out to be the right accident. Brand management is the one seat where you have to hold everything at once. The consumer, the product, the P&L, the factory, the retailer, the ad. It ticks both sides of the brain, in a leadership seat that actually has impact in the market. Not fluffy. Not theoretical. You can see the results of what you did. Science and artistry at the same time.
The right mix of logic and magic.
That is still the work. Connecting the dots. Seeing the whole picture. Commercially minded and creatively minded, without splitting them into two jobs. I have been doing a version of that ever since.
Where it was learned
Two very different educations, and I use both.
The first was Unilever and PepsiCo. Two decades of large portfolios. Roughly $1B in spreads, $1.5B in ready-to-drink tea, a $2B North America foods business. That is where I learned rigor. How you test a positioning before you bet the business on it. What a real brief looks like. How an innovation funnel actually works. How you move an organization that does not report to you.
The second was founder-led. ZENB, where I built a plant-based brand across the US and UK from a blank page. Mr. Bing, a chilli crisp company with almost no budget, where the research was Google surveys and friends of friends, and the freelancers gave us the startup rate. HexClad, which went from $70M to over $500M in three years while I was there.
The useful part is having both. I know what the playbook says. I also know when to shut it and do the scrappy thing. And I have been wrong often enough to know the difference.
How the work actually goes
The clearest example I have is a margarine business nobody wanted.
At Unilever Spreads, a dying category had an answer no one was using. The work was getting the whole organization to act on it together. That is still the work.
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At Unilever I got rotated onto Spreads. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, Country Crock, Promise. Profitable, unglamorous, quietly declining. People had decided margarine was one molecule away from plastic, and the category was becoming a punchline.
In a technical meeting in Rotterdam, the R&D team walked through a new processing method. They were excited because it significantly cut costs. Almost as an afterthought, someone mentioned it could also make the product stable without artificial emulsifiers or preservatives.
That was the whole thing. The exact objection killing the category, and the answer to it was sitting in a cost-savings slide.
What followed was walking that case around a business that did not report to me. R&D, supply chain, packaging, finance, sales, the US team and the global team. We got a $350M capital investment approved to rebuild the category end to end. New formulations, new lines, new packaging, new positioning, new advertising. Walmart pushed the whole category toward a super shelf-efficient tub. They wanted a perfectly square shape, which would have shortened our brand block on shelf. We held our position. We were bringing a lot of investment into the category, and we were keeping our presence. Instead we moved from a round tub, which wasted space, to a rectangular one. They got material efficiencies. We kept the brand block. Retailer conscious, with the strength to stand our ground.
The clean-label relaunch of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! regained meaningful household penetration, much of it from people who had already given up on the category.
That is the work, and I want to be precise about it: the idea was not mine. It was sitting in someone else's slide. What I did was recognize what it was, and get an organization to act on it together.
What I keep seeing
Product gets you to a number. It does not get you past it.
Every brand I have worked with hit the same wall wearing a different outfit. Sales are real, the product is loved, and then growth gets harder for reasons nobody can quite name. Almost always it is one of three things:
- The brand lives in the founder's head, so five people tell five versions of the story. Retailers, investors, new hires and your consumers each get a different company.
- Ideas arrive without a brief and leave without a decision.
- Marketing runs as a queue of urgent requests instead of a plan.
None of that is a product problem. It is a clarity problem, and it compounds quietly until it looks like a growth problem.
The through-line
One vision. One story. A company that can actually run it.
What I am for
I connect the organization.
Brand work fails when it lives in a deck, or in one person's head. The vision has to be clear enough that product, marketing, sales, finance and the agencies can all act on it. That join-up is the job I am best at.
I am not the person who arrives with the wild creative idea. I will hire that person, and I will brief them properly. Good agencies like working with me because I can tell them why something is not landing, instead of just that it is not.
What I do is see the gaps. Where one function is saying ABC and another is hearing XYZ. Where the good idea is sitting in the wrong department. Where nobody has actually decided. I connect the dots, get everyone pointed the same direction, and make sure it ships.
From a brand and marketing seat, that means translating the founder's intent into something the whole business can run. Positioning that sales can sell. Briefs product can build against. A story investors and retailers recognize as the same company. One vision, not five versions of it.
And because I have carried the P&L, the filter is always practical: can this business actually run it, and will it pay for itself.
Teams I have led have called me tough but fair. I listen to every voice in the room. I make the call when it is mine to make. I tell people why. And we leave the room together.
Experience
Roles that shaped how I work
HexClad
Chief Brand Officer
Brought in fractionally and built the role from scratch. Brand foundation and messaging system, including a brand book by channel so Paid, Owned and Earned each had clear do's and don'ts. Led the innovation roadmap and international go-to-market, and built the marketing organization while the business grew from around $70M to over $500M.
ZENB (Mizkan)
CMO, US & UK
Turned a food technology with no product attached into a brand across two markets. Category assessment, identity, launch, and the team.
Unilever
VP, Brand Development · Senior Marketing Director
Led a $2B North America foods portfolio through the shift to clean label. Earlier, secured a $350M investment to reinvent the US spreads business end to end.
PepsiCo
Senior Marketing Director, Pepsi-Lipton
Ran the $1.5B ready-to-drink tea portfolio. Lipton, Pure Leaf, Brisk, Tazo.
Outside the work
Also true.
Languages, classical piano, martial arts, competitive ballroom. I like structure you can stop counting. That is how I think about brand.
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I grew up speaking German, and my French will come back if you give me a month in the country. I played classical piano for years. I spent about fifteen years in martial arts and trained Muay Thai until a ruptured disc ended that chapter. That is how I found competitive ballroom dance, which I now take more seriously than a hobby requires.
There is a through-line if you want one. I like things with a lot of structure underneath that only work once you stop counting the steps. That is more or less my view of brand, too.
Next step
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