🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.

RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem. ⬇️ SEE EXAMPLE ⬇️

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TODAY’S TEARDOWN: Leslie’s was founded in 1963 when a guy named Phil Leslie, Jr. started selling pool chemicals out of a backyard shed in North Hollywood, California. Over six decades, that backyard shed became the largest direct-to-consumer brand in the U.S. pool and spa care industry — a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: LESL) that at its peak operated over 1,000 retail locations across 35+ states, along with a growing ecommerce platform, manufacturing and distribution divisions, and a backyard service and repair business.

After closing 80 underperforming stores in Q1 FY2026 as part of a deliberate portfolio optimization, the company still operates approximately 950 locations — a retail network larger than its 20 next-largest competitors combined. When people say “category leader,” this is what they mean.

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Now here’s the part that should change how you think about this opportunity:

The U.S. pool supply aftermarket is an approximately $15 billion domestic market, growing at roughly 7% annually. There are roughly 5.5 million in-ground residential pools in the United States (closer to 8.8 million total if you include above-ground). Pool ownership skews heavily toward households earning $100K+ per year — affluent homeowners in sunbelt states like Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas.

And get this:

Approximately 80% of what Leslie’s sells is non-discretionary. You don’t skip chlorine. Algae, bacteria, and equipment damage are what happen when you do. This is a recurring, consumable-product model — think AutoZone for pools. The pool is the razor; the chemicals, filters, and maintenance supplies are the blades. Customers buy 4 to 12+ times per year. That is structurally attractive unit economics.

Leslie’s competitive moat is built on something no competitor has replicated at scale: the AccuBlue® water testing platform. Every Leslie’s store offers a free, 10-point computerized water analysis that tells the customer exactly what their pool needs and in what quantities. It generates a customized shopping list on the spot. Home Depot can’t do this. Amazon can’t do this. Walmart can’t do this.

AccuBlue is simultaneously the best lead generation tool in the pool supply industry (near-zero marginal acquisition cost), the best conversion tool (the test produces an immediate purchase occasion), and the best retention tool (customers come back every 2-3 weeks during swim season for retesting).

More than 55% of Leslie’s SKUs are proprietary or exclusive to the brand, which limits direct price comparison with big box competitors. The loyalty program — Pool Perks — captures over 85% of all transactions, giving Leslie’s one of the richest first-party consumer data assets in all of specialty retail.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™

So why is this role open, and why should a talented CMO pay attention?

Because Leslie’s is in the middle of a high-stakes transformation, and the marketing leader who walks in the door is going to have more strategic leverage than most CMOs get in a career. Here’s the honest story: Leslie’s maintained premium pricing too long while Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart undercut them on commodity pool chemicals. They lost approximately 160,000 residential customers in FY2025.

The stock price declined significantly.

Google it. Leslie’s closed 80 underperforming stores as part of a Q1 FY2026 portfolio rightsizing. New CEO Jason McDonell — who comes from the ecommerce and digital growth world — has launched a transformation plan built on four pillars: customer centricity, convenience, asset utilization, and cost optimization. A new pricing strategy (“New Low Prices, Same Great Quality”) has launched for the 2026 pool season as a direct response to the competitive pricing gap.

The brand equity is intact. The physical footprint is intact. The AccuBlue technology is intact. The Pool Perks loyalty database — millions of customers with full purchase history — is intact. What Leslie’s needs now is a CMO who can take those assets and turn them into a working growth engine again.

The CEO’s background should give a serious candidate real confidence. McDonell thinks about this business the way a DTC operator thinks about customer acquisition funnels — which is exactly right, because at its core, that’s what Leslie’s is. The free water test is the top of the funnel.

The in-store consultation is the conversion event. Pool Perks is the retention mechanism. The ecommerce platform is the scale lever. The professional pool technician channel — which grew 9% last quarter and is the company’s only segment currently in growth mode — is the expansion play. A CMO who understands these mechanics already understands 80% of what this business requires.

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About the Role

Leslie’s is seeking a Senior Vice President / Chief Marketing Officer to lead the vision, strategy, and execution of all marketing, ecommerce, and marketplace functions across a ~$1.2 billion integrated retail and digital platform. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will own the marketing P&L, the ecommerce P&L (with a management target to scale digital from ~8% toward approaching 20% of total sales), the Pool Perks loyalty program, marketplace channels including Amazon, and the full analytics stack (Snowflake + Power BI).

Your mission will be to:

• ✅ Rebuild and reactivate a lapsed residential customer base through a credible brand repositioning and data-driven win-back strategy.
• ✅ Accelerate ecommerce revenue growth while defending average order values of $300–$325.
• ✅ Build the measurement infrastructure that lets Leslie’s Board see — for the first time — which marketing dollars are actually generating incremental customers.

This is a Board-facing, enterprise leadership role in a publicly traded environment.

Areas of Oversight

Brand Strategy & Customer Reacquisition

• Lead the strategic repositioning of Leslie’s brand messaging to credibly communicate the “New Low Prices, Same Great Quality” value proposition without commoditizing the premium brand equity that drives Pool Perks MVP customers ($800+/year annual spend) to pay more for expertise, exclusive products, and the AccuBlue service experience.
• Design and execute a tiered customer win-back program targeting the ~160,000 lapsed residential customers identified in the Pool Perks database — segmented by recency of lapse, prior spend tier, pool type, and geographic market — using CRM automation to deliver differentiated messaging at each stage of re-engagement.
• Own the brand narrative for all external communications — Board presentations, investor-facing materials, press, social — ensuring that Leslie’s transformation story is told with the same transparency and conviction internally and externally.
• Manage Leslie’s agency relationships (including the social media agency of record) and evaluate performance against measurable KPIs tied to customer acquisition, brand consideration lift, and NPS recovery — not vanity metrics.

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Ecommerce P&L Ownership & Digital Experience

• Own and optimize the ecommerce P&L for lesliespool.com, with a mandate to scale digital revenue from approximately $90 million (~8% of total sales) toward management’s stated aspiration of approaching 20% — a near-tripling that requires simultaneous improvement in traffic acquisition, on-site conversion rate (currently ~1.5-2.0%), and average order value defense ($300-$325).
• Define and lead the digital and ecommerce roadmap — prioritizing initiatives including guest checkout optimization, express payment (Apple Pay / Google Pay), exit-intent cart recovery, post-AccuBlue product bundling, and A/B testing of checkout reassurance messaging — to reduce friction and improve purchase completion rates.
• Oversee the Leslie’s mobile app experience, ensuring Pool Perks integration, AccuBlue appointment scheduling, and in-app purchase flows are seamless and contribute to omnichannel revenue attribution.
• Build and execute a content-driven organic acquisition strategy using topic clusters and seasonal pillar pages (“How to open your pool,” “Green pool rescue,” “Pool chemical guide”) optimized for both Google search and AI Overviews, with each cluster funneling to AccuBlue booking or product purchase.
• Develop and launch interactive tools — Pool Chemical Dose Calculator, Water Treatment Cost Estimator, Pool Size Gallon Calculator — as top-of-funnel lead generation assets that capture high-intent traffic at near-zero marginal cost and feed into Pool Perks enrollment.

Pool Perks Loyalty Program & CRM

• Serve as the enterprise owner of the Pool Perks loyalty program — currently the company’s most powerful marketing asset, capturing 85%+ of all transactions across three tiers (Perks, Perks Elite, Perks MVP) — with direct accountability for enrollment growth, tier-upgrade conversion rates, and program-attributed revenue.
• Build predictive churn models within Snowflake (using RFM segmentation: Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) to identify at-risk Pool Perks members before they lapse — triggering automated win-back sequences via email and SMS when early warning indicators (declining visit frequency, shrinking basket size) are detected.
• Architect a parallel loyalty program or integrated Pro tier for Professional Pool customers — the company’s only growing segment (+9% YoY) — who are currently excluded from Pool Perks entirely, leaving the CMO with no first-party data, no behavioral analytics, and no CRM-driven retention mechanism for the growth engine.
• Optimize Pool Perks tier-up incentives by modeling whether increased rewards at the MVP threshold (e.g., equipment discounts, free AccuBlue Home device) materially improve customer lifetime value without destroying margin — using the Pool Perks database as a controlled testing environment.

Marketing & Ecommerce Analytics

• Oversee the full marketing analytics stack (Snowflake data warehouse + Power BI visualization), ensuring all first-party data sources — POS from ~950 stores, ecommerce orders, AccuBlue water test records, Pool Perks transactions, marketing platform APIs, and mobile app events — are unified in a single Customer 360 schema that powers every downstream marketing decision.
• Implement incrementality measurement as the primary framework for marketing spend allocation — replacing platform-reported ROAS (which systematically overstates true causal lift) with geographic hold-out studies, server-side tagging (CAPI Gateway / GTM-SS), offline conversion import via Pool Perks email matching, and three-method attribution triangulation (multi-touch attribution, post-purchase surveys, and media mix modeling).
• Establish and report on a KPI hierarchy to the Board of Directors — including active customer file size (90-day Pool Perks transactors), comparable store sales growth, ecommerce revenue as a percentage of total sales, incrementality-adjusted ROAS by channel, blended CAC (residential and Pro), and Net Promoter Score — anchored to unit volume and customer count baselines (not just revenue dollars) to account for the pricing reset.
• Conduct a branded search cannibalization audit within the first 90 days — pausing branded paid search in a test DMA to measure the organic cannibalization rate — and reallocate wasted spend to net-new customer acquisition channels.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™

Paid Media & Performance Marketing

• Lead paid media strategy across Google Performance Max (with offline conversion import linking ad clicks to in-store POS transactions via Pool Perks email matching), Meta Advantage+ (catalog ads targeting sunbelt homeowners with HHI $100K+ using property ownership signals and Pool Perks lookalike audiences), YouTube in-stream and mid-roll (running against pool maintenance tutorial channels), and emerging channels including podcast sponsorships and affiliate partnerships with pool care content creators.
• Deploy the two-campaign Meta framework: 10% of budget in a pure test campaign (exclude all previous engagers; rotate 3-5 fresh concepts weekly; track incremental new buyers only) and 90% in a scale campaign (inject winning creative IDs; archive losers at 2× CPA) — specifically validating whether the “New Low Prices” repositioning creative is winning net-new customers or recycling existing ones.
• Manage shared direct mail campaigns (Valpak/Postie) targeting ZIP codes with the highest residential pool ownership density during pool opening season (March-April), with QR code tracking linking mailer exposure to in-store AccuBlue water test appointments and Pool Perks enrollment.

Marketplace & Pro Channel Expansion

• Oversee Leslie’s marketplace strategy on Amazon and third-party channels — currently a small but strategically important revenue stream — ensuring product listing optimization, catalog completeness, advertising spend efficiency, and brand protection against unauthorized resellers.
• Partner with the merchandising team to develop the go-to-market strategy for the Professional Pool segment across Leslie’s entire retail network (not just designated Pro stores), positioning same-day product availability and physical proximity as Leslie’s key differentiation against B2B wholesale distributor PoolCorp.
• Execute account-based marketing (ABM) for professional pool technicians — targeting pool service companies with 5-50 residential accounts — through trade publications (Pool & Spa News, AQUA Magazine), a dedicated “Leslie’s Pro Account” landing page with commercial pricing and dedicated service lines, and Pro-specific content marketing.

Email, SMS & Lifecycle Marketing

• Build a full-lifecycle email automation architecture: welcome/nurture sequences for new Pool Perks enrollees (3-5 emails driving first purchase within 30 days via AccuBlue education and chemical starter bundle cross-sell), post-purchase journeys (shipping confirmation → product tutorial → AccuBlue retest reminder → cross-sell → review request), and seasonal editorial newsletters (“Pool Season Insider”) segmented by climate zone.
• Launch opt-in SMS reactivation sequences via Attentive or Postscript — seasonal messaging timed to pool opening (“Bring in your water sample for a free AccuBlue test this weekend!”) sent to Pool Perks members who haven’t visited in 60+ days — with strict TCPA compliance across all messaging.
• Implement BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) to display the Leslie’s logo in Gmail and Apple Mail inboxes — a high-ROI trust signal during a period of active brand trust recovery.
• Segment the Pool Perks email database by pool type (chlorine, saltwater, biguanide), pool size/gallon range (from AccuBlue test history), loyalty tier, purchase recency, and residential vs. Professional — delivering differentiated content, product recommendations, and offer thresholds to each segment.

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Social Media, Content & Video

• Lead social media strategy across TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, and Facebook — building Leslie’s into the definitive content authority on residential pool ownership through a “Pool SOS” short-form video series (problem pool → Leslie’s fix → 48-hour transformation), UGC campaigns (#LesliesPoolSeason with Pool Perks bonus points for social shares), and micro-influencer partnerships with pool owner/lifestyle creators in sunbelt markets.
• Oversee YouTube channel optimization — keyword-rich titles, transcripts, video schema markup, and geo-tagged links to store finder — to capture Google video carousel placement for high-volume queries like “how to shock your pool” and “how to fix green pool water.”
• Ensure social channels function as a customer service and community hub where pool care questions receive expert answers within hours — turning social engagement into a measurable retention mechanism.

Team Leadership & Organizational Development

• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing marketing and ecommerce organization across brand, performance marketing, CRM/email, social, analytics, and ecommerce functions — fostering a culture of accountability, data-driven decision-making, and creative ambition.
• Partner closely with merchandising, stores, and technology teams to ensure alignment across product launches, seasonal campaigns, pricing strategies, and omnichannel customer experiences — serving as the connective tissue between Leslie’s physical and digital operations.
• Navigate the tension between the company’s SG&A cost reduction mandate ($5-10M+ in annualized savings) and the need to invest in analytics headcount, data engineering, and measurement infrastructure — making the case (with incrementality data and ROAS reallocation evidence) that smart marketing investment is self-funding.

Qualifications

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATION

Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, or a related field required; MBA or advanced degree preferred.

FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCIES — SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE

• 10-15+ years of progressive marketing leadership experience, with at least 5 years in a senior executive role (VP, SVP, CMO, CDO) — ideally within a publicly traded company, high-growth omnichannel retailer, or DTC brand with significant physical retail operations.
• Proven track record owning an ecommerce P&L of $50M+ and scaling digital revenue as a percentage of total company sales within an omnichannel environment — not just a pure-play ecommerce background.
• Deep, hands-on expertise across the full digital marketing stack: paid search (Google Performance Max with offline conversion import), paid social (Meta Advantage+, TikTok), SEO (technical, content, and local), email/SMS lifecycle marketing, CRM automation, and affiliate/influencer programs.
• Demonstrated success building and optimizing customer loyalty programs with multi-tier structures, predictive churn models, and CRM-driven segmentation — ideally in specialty retail or a recurring-purchase consumer business.
• Strong command of modern marketing analytics infrastructure — specifically experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake preferred), BI tools (Power BI preferred), incrementality measurement (geo-based hold-out studies, media mix modeling), and server-side tagging/attribution (CAPI Gateway, GTM-SS).
• Experience presenting marketing strategy, performance, and growth initiatives to a Board of Directors and investor audiences — including the ability to translate complex analytics into executive-level narratives.
• Working knowledge of marketing, advertising, and customer data compliance regulations (TCPA, CCPA, CAN-SPAM) in a public company environment.
• Experience managing marketing budgets under cost-reduction mandates while defending high-ROI investments with incrementality data — the ability to self-fund marketing through spend reallocation is a genuine differentiator for this role.
• Prior experience in a brand turnaround, pricing repositioning, or customer reacquisition campaign at scale is strongly preferred — this is not a steady-state marketing leadership role.

🟥 JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES

• Ability to build, lead, and retain a high-performing marketing and digital organization during a period of significant company transformation — including attracting talent in a compensation environment where equity upside is uncertain.
• Proven ability to partner cross-functionally with merchandising, stores, technology, and finance leadership — serving as the enterprise connective tissue between physical retail operations and digital/ecommerce strategy.
• Strong executive presence and influencing skills — including experience navigating Board dynamics, investor communications, and C-suite collaboration in a publicly traded environment under performance pressure.
• Comfort operating at both the strategic level (Board presentations, 3-year brand strategy) and the operational level (reviewing weekly campaign dashboards, optimizing email segmentation, debugging analytics pipelines) — this role requires a player-coach who leads from the front.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

• High integrity and intellectual honesty — willing to present accurate data to the Board even when the numbers are uncomfortable, and to defend long-term brand investment against short-term pressure for bottom-funnel ROAS optimization.
• Self-directed and decisive — this transformation will not wait for consensus; the CMO must be able to identify the highest-leverage action, move quickly, and course-correct based on data.
• Entrepreneurial orientation and resilience — this is a $1.2 billion company going through a defining moment; the right candidate sees a career-defining opportunity where others see risk.
• Genuine customer empathy — the ability to think like a residential pool owner in Phoenix who just wants their pool to be clean and safe for their kids, and like a pool technician running a small business who needs reliable, competitively-priced supplies available the same day.
• Strong communicator who can translate complex data, analytics, and strategy into clear narratives for audiences ranging from in-store associates to the Board of Directors.
• Curiosity and fluency with modern AI-powered marketing tools and workflows — not as a technology fetish, but as an operational advantage for moving faster and making better decisions with smaller teams.
• Thrives in ambiguity and can build systems and processes where none currently exist — particularly in analytics infrastructure, measurement frameworks, and Pro-segment CRM.

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🟥 EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it.

RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem.