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ALLAN’S COMMENTS: We are working with a confidential client in their search for a Chief Marketing Officer to lead one of the most quietly impressive consumer brands we’ve worked with in years.

The firm was founded over a decade ago by a founding team who bootstrapped it with no outside capital. Today they are a category leader in what we’d describe broadly as the family memory-and-storytelling economy – products and services that help everyday people preserve, organize, surface, and share the memories, stories, and nostalgia that matter most to their families.

Think of the universe of brands occupied by AuraFrame, Skylight Frame, StoryWorth, Remento, Shutterfly, Ancestry, and MyHeritage. It’s a massive consumer category that almost nobody outside the industry realizes is as large as it is.

At first glance, it can sound like a sleepy generational category. Every family has a lifetime of stories, milestones, and memories that aren’t being passed on.

But there are three things to really love about this opportunity.

First, this is a profitable, bootstrapped, debt-free, founder-controlled business operating at meaningful scale.

Second, they run an eight-figure annual media program across an unusually diverse channel mix – including traditional channels with structural exclusivity that competitors literally cannot buy their way into.

Third, every year millions of new households cross the emotional threshold of “our family stories won’t be passed down to the next generation if we don’t retell and share them” – and our client has spent over a decade building the operational muscle, brand trust, and storytelling craft to be the place those households turn when that moment hits.

Bottom line: this is a well-established consumer brand sitting at the inflection point between a transactional service model and a deeper, longer-term relationship with the customer’s family story.

Broadly speaking, the typical customer is a 45- to 60-year-old Gen Xer or younger Boomer with discretionary income and a genuine connection to family history. But the persona is broader than that demographic suggests: The economic buyer (the person who pays) is rarely the person whose story is being preserved – the hero of the story is usually a parent, a grandparent, a deceased family member whose voice, face, and memories are at risk of being lost.

The buyer is the family historian. The one who finally takes the box of old stuff out of the attic and decides to act before it’s too late.

Once you understand that persona, you understand why this brand can sustain a premium, considered-purchase price point – and why every attempt to hyper-target a narrow persona has underperformed broad-reach buys against the same broad demographics. Some products are bought. This product is entrusted.

About the Role

The firm’s next phase requires a CMO who has lived inside a brand at the size this company wants to become, who has built a marketing organization that survives the founders’ exit from day-to-day execution, and who knows how to elevate a brand without breaking the performance engine that funds the growth.

As the firm’s new CMO, here’s what you’ll inherit:

The marketing organization today is lean. It has held the line on a substantial media program, but does not yet include the designers, PR muscle, influencer program, or senior brand owner the business needs at its next size.

The flagship website has not been meaningfully redesigned in roughly four years. The company is operating at real scale and presents itself – online, in creative, on the page – more conservatively than its actual size would suggest. Leadership wants the next CMO to close that gap and put the brand on a clear path to its next major milestone.

The role is fully remote, with a cadence of roughly bi-monthly travel to the company’s headquarters – which, the first time you walk through it, will probably change how you think about the business.

The client runs an eight-figure annual media program across a notably diverse channel mix that the business has assembled and refined over fifteen years. As the firm’s new CMO, you will own the full marketing P&L, manage the team and agency roster, and lead the brand evolution from a convenience-positioned service into an identity-positioned category leader.

Your mission will be to: 1.) protect and scale the existing performance marketing engine without breaking the cash flow that funds growth; 2.) elevate the brand and the customer-facing experience so the company looks like the brand it intends to become; and 3.) rebuild the marketing organization – in-house, agency-leveraged, or both – so that no critical channel is unmanaged and no single person is irreplaceable.

If you are a senior marketing executive at a respected consumer brand who has run a real P&L, owned a real team, and shipped real brand transformations inside a performance-first culture – this is one of the coolest CMO opportunities in the market right now. The category is bigger than it looks. The product is better than people think. The cash flow is real. And ownership is exactly the kind of operators great marketers want to spend the next chapter of their career with.

You won’t believe how much we know about this search …

We spent a ton of time on the phone with this client teasing out exactly what you’ll need to KNOW and DO to hit the ground running in this role. Some of the things we can share with highly qualified candidates include …

• The “real” background requirements for this position, along with the top five things all resumes MUST have to be considered for the role.
• The top five problems that exist due to this position being open. These are the little brush fires you will be expected to put out during your first month on the job. Every job has these – and this one’s no different.
• What your average day / week will look like in this role. There’s what you read in the standard job posting … then there’s reality. We’ve got the reality.
• The leading and lagging KPI’s that will determine your success in this role. In a nutshell: How you keep score.
• The major projects you’ll need to complete by Day 100 to be considered a home-run in this position. We’ve got the lowdown on how you can plug-and-play and drive REAL value in this job.
• An honest read on the founder dynamic, the brand-pivot mandate, and the specific category data that will change the way you’d evaluate the real size of this opportunity.

We have a massive amount of proprietary intel to share with qualified candidates. Our industry research for this assignment exceeds 100 pages! Be sure to TEXT Allan Seibert at (706) 318-1196 for this info. Or simply use the email link when you apply for the role below.

Areas of Oversight

Brand Positioning & Category Reframe

• Lead the strategic evolution of the brand from a convenience-positioned service (“we’ll handle the project for you”) to an identity-positioned category leader (“I’m the person who saved my family’s story”) – framing, naming, and claiming the emotional and economic value of the category, not just the product
• Govern the brand standards across creative aesthetics, on-site copy, the founder voice, and the brand’s storytelling architecture – the visual and verbal craft that makes this brand feel like something customers want to be associated with, not just a service they bought
• Develop and ship the next generation of the brand’s lifecycle messaging architecture, ensuring top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel messaging are congruent across paid, organic, email, and post-purchase touchpoints

Multi-Channel Performance Marketing

• Own the company’s full annual paid media budget across the full mix of digital, broadcast, and direct-response channels the business has assembled over fifteen years
• Bring a modern paid social creative operating system to the company’s largest digital channel – real creative variety across look, message, structure, and proof; creator-led production; persona-aligned creative pods; fatigue guardrails; and a clean test-and-kill discipline
• Steward the company’s portfolio of long-term celebrity relationships – a structural moat that competitors literally cannot buy into – while opening up underutilized channels (certain visual platforms, podcast measurement done properly, celebrity endorsement, PR, and influencer)
• Maintain the company’s performance discipline on blended return-on-ad-spend while developing the analytic foundation that will eventually allow the business to model and underwrite long-term customer lifetime value against acquisition spend

Email, Lifecycle, and Considered-Purchase Conversion

• Decide – and execute – the right ownership model for email and lifecycle, with a bias toward in-house ownership given that the customer’s consideration window stretches from days into months and email is structurally the most leveraged channel in the funnel for that pattern
• Rebuild the lifecycle flow architecture end-to-end: welcome series, abandoned-cart flows for both prospects and existing customers, post-purchase flows for first-time and repeat buyers, the repeat-trigger that drives second-order revenue, win-back, and list hygiene
• Sequence the promotional calendar against the company’s “harvest season” – the holiday window that accounts for an outsized share of annual revenue – with explicit cross-channel handoffs during peak weeks
• Coordinate with the Head of Product on the customer-facing transition from the initial purchase into the brand’s deeper product ecosystem, ensuring the long-tail value of the brand is surfaced in top-of-funnel marketing

Conversion Rate Optimization & Site Experience

• Lead the first material redesign of the company’s flagship website in roughly four years – a site that currently surfaces almost none of the social proof, founder story, behind-the-scenes proof, or endorser quotes a first-time customer would need to entrust an irreplaceable family story to a brand
• Govern the conversion architecture of the purchase experience, with explicit attention to tier selection, considered-purchase upsells, and the trust signals that lift the site’s current conversion rate
• Bring brand cohesion to the entire on-site funnel – landing pages, product pages, checkout, post-purchase communication, and the product-ecosystem handoff – so the experience the customer encounters online matches the premium experience they have at every step of their product’s creation
• Partner with the in-house web developer and any agency partners to make the website ship at the cadence a modern consumer brand requires, not at the cadence that has produced the current backlog

Team Architecture, Agency Governance, and Cross-Functional Coordination

• Audit the existing marketing team and produce a hire/agency plan that closes the obvious gaps – design, PR, influencer, and senior brand ownership are the most immediately visible
• Build the in-house or agency-leveraged structure that fits a bootstrapped, profit-disciplined culture – in-house versus agency is open, but no critical channel can be unmanaged and no team member should be irreplaceable
• Operationalize the weekly channel scorecard as a formal weekly business review, with named owners, leading and lagging KPIs, and a clear cadence for when missed numbers escalate
• Partner laterally with the Head of Innovation on the product/tech side of the business (peer relationship, not direct report), and partner upward with ownership on long-range brand, pricing, and category strategy

Qualifications

Education & Certification

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience

Functional Competencies – Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 10+ years of progressive direct-to-consumer marketing leadership at a respected consumer brand with a strong brand identity and a clear premium positioning – the aesthetic and discipline of category-defining DTC operators is the benchmark
• Demonstrated history of leading a meaningful marketing P&L at scale, with direct accountability for blended return-on-ad-spend, customer acquisition cost, and contribution margin
• Deep performance marketing fluency with primary depth in the major paid social platforms and full working command of paid search, programmatic display, and modern attribution methodology
• Practitioner-level command of enterprise-grade email and lifecycle marketing platforms, with specific experience designing flow architecture for considered-purchase products that have long decision windows
• Working command of the broader modern DTC tech stack: ecommerce platform, lifecycle automation, attribution/measurement, post-purchase survey methodology, and modern test-and-learn platforms
• Demonstrated experience leading a meaningful brand evolution at a previous role – moving a brand up the perceived-value ladder, reducing discount dependency, or executing a category reframe – while the performance engine continued to deliver against its KPI targets
• Experience with traditional and lifestyle channels (broadcast endorsement, programmatic TV, home-shopping, podcast, celebrity endorsement, influencer, PR) is a plus but not required – the right candidate can learn these channels in weeks
• AI fluency as an operator, not as a consumer: comfort using AI to ship creative variants faster, to interrogate analytics, and to articulate quality standards for AI-generated output that will not degrade brand equity

Leadership & Management

• Demonstrated experience rebuilding a marketing team from a thin or misaligned starting point – including the judgment to decide which functions belong in-house and which belong with agency partners
• Experience leading through influence in a flat, founder-led culture where the founders themselves built the marketing function from startup through meaningful scale and remain deeply involved in the business
• Cross-functional fluency with product, operations, finance, and customer experience peers – including a peer relationship with a Head of Innovation who runs the product/tech side of the business as a separate P&L
• Direct experience hiring and retaining A-players, with a clearly articulated point of view on the hire bar, the interview process, and the operating model that keeps top performers engaged

Personal Characteristics

• High personal integrity and a clearly demonstrated history of doing what you say you’ll do
• Self-directed and entrepreneurial – this role does not need another skilled manager; it needs someone who walks into meetings with ideas that change how ownership sees the business
• A strong communicator who can synthesize complex marketing systems into one-page narratives leadership can act on quickly
• Operationally disciplined and highly organized – this is a complex multi-channel business with a weekly channel scorecard and a multi-format media calendar where governance matters as much as strategy
• Genuinely connected to the mission of storytelling and memory recollection – this is a brand that customers entrust with their family stories that will be passed on forever; the marketing leader has to feel that responsibility personally
• Resilient and self-protective in a high-performance, doer-not-talker culture that values shipped work over planning meetings
• Comfortable as a remote-first executive with bi-monthly travel to the company’s production – in-person time with the operating team is essential to the role

Applications for this position are being coordinated by Allan Seibert. To apply, CLICK HERE. Candidates, please be sure to email Allan for a packet of market research and company / competitive intel that will differentiate you in your candidacy. Due to the intensely competitive nature of this search, thorough preparation for these interviews with this proprietary material is strongly recommended.