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HARRY’S COMMENTS: We’re working with a southeast-based furniture manufacturer in their search for a Chief Digital Officer. The job requires relocation, but the town you’ll be moving to is amazing, and the comp package is EXCELLENT. I’ve been there many times, and it’s a very popular vacation destination.

I guarantee you it doesn’t suck.

My client is a family-owned, vertically integrated solid-wood furniture manufacturer and ecommerce retailer that designs, produces, and sells high-quality, consumer-first home furnishings across DTC Shopify sites, major marketplaces, and B2B/wholesale channels.

The firm has built a dominant position in the kids/youth segment (especially configurable beds and bedroom furniture) and is now scaling rapidly into adult bedroom and living categories, delivering furniture-store quality at strong value prices through full supply-chain control and a key overseas manufacturing partnership.

At a 9-figure run-rate and growing well ahead of category, it is at an exciting inflection point—needing a seasoned digital leader to own profitable D2C growth, performance marketing at scale, analytics transformation, retention, and team structure in a fast-moving, founder-led environment that rewards ownership, tenacity, and visible impact.

My kick-off call with the co-founders ran 90 minutes, but it felt much shorter.

The firm was founded more than two decades ago selling furniture to furniture stores, then went consumer-direct and became — by their own account — among the largest online sellers of children’s beds in the country. They design their own product, source it, import it, warehouse it, run their own customer service, and they own their overseas factory — a large, vertically integrated solid-wood operation the founders built from almost nothing.

That vertical integration is the whole game. It’s why they’ve never had a down year, and (they’ll tell you) never an unprofitable one — they make money on the first order while most DTC brands bleed out waiting on lifetime value.

This is not a commodity play.

They sell furniture-store-quality solid wood at a value price — knot-free hardwood, not particleboard, not paper veneer. The customer is a design-conscious parent — and, increasingly, the grandparent — who wants a kid’s bed that survives childhood and doesn’t look like it came flat-packed from a dorm catalog.

The brand’s real job is to make that buyer feel like the kind of parent who buys solid wood, not plastic. On the adult side, the company’s fastest-growing brand is the rocket: same factory, same solid-wood story, aimed at young households furnishing their first real home — with a clear runway to keep scaling fast.

That said, the firm is excellent at the first sale and almost absent on the second one.

Most customers buy a bed and the company never hears from them again. There’s no loyalty program, and the founders themselves call the email program outdated. So you have a profitable, founder-built, DTC engine that has barely touched retention, lifecycle, or the natural “graduation curve” of a child who needs a first bed, then a bunk, then a teen room, then a dorm. That gap is the opportunity.

This is not a turnaround! It’s a high-margin platform with an obvious, un-pulled lever.

ABOUT THE MARKET

This role sits where two big, established categories meet: beds and mattresses, and children’s and youth furniture. Both are mature and grow slowly — and the more important story is that the old-line specialty retailers are steadily losing ground to ecommerce. My client is the reverse: It’s growing far faster than its categories, and it’s winning precisely because it’s digital-first and owns its own factory — a cost advantage the typical retailer, who buys finished goods from someone else, simply can’t match.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As my client’s new Chief Digital Officer, you will own the company’s pure-play direct-to-consumer business — a portfolio of kids’ and adult solid-wood brands across the company’s owned sites. This role does not own Amazon, Walmart, or Wayfair — those marketplaces sit with a separate executive. This is a clean DTC mandate.

Your mission is to: 1.) convert a first-order machine into a repeat-purchase machine (retention, lifecycle, loyalty); 2.) install senior operating structure — analytics as a single source of truth, profit-based decisioning, disciplined agency management — that the founders can finally step behind; and 3.) keep profitable growth compounding while meaningfully lifting conversion.

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. I did the math with them for all brands, and I know exactly what they want to accomplish with 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.

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 Harry Joiner at (404) 281-2025 for this info. Or simply use the email link when you apply for the role below.

AREAS OF OVERSIGHT

DTC P&L & Profitable Growth

• Own the direct-to-consumer P&L across the company’s owned sites.
• Run the business on contribution margin and return-on-investment, not revenue vanity — the founders decide on evidence, not opinions.
• Set the profitable-growth plan that scales the fastest-growing adult brand toward its next major milestone without breaking unit economics.

Retention, Lifecycle & Loyalty (the priority hire reason)

• Build the “furniture graduation curve”: capture the child’s birthdate at first purchase and trigger anniversary-driven upgrade campaigns (first bed → bunk → twin/full → teen → dorm).
• Rebuild Klaviyo welcome and post-purchase flow architecture; stand up the loyalty/referral program that does not exist today.
• Lift lifetime value — frequency, cross-sell, and continuity are wide open.

Performance Marketing

• Own a substantial media budget across Google, Meta, TikTok, and streaming/CTV, holding total ad-cost-of-sale in a disciplined range.
• Manage the in-house-plus-agency model (including a global media agency) with real gravitas — hold partners accountable to return on ad spend and payback discipline.
• Defend and diversify the paid position (the company ranks near the very top of paid search in its core categories, behind only the category’s dominant marketplace) toward owned and retained demand.

Conversion & Site Experience

• Lift conversion meaningfully with a real CRO program: GA4 funnel analysis, heatmaps, session review, and FUD reduction on the product page.
• Be a credible, hands-on partner to dev and IT — headless decisions, PIM/DAM architecture, tagging, and “is our content readable by an LLM” are your problems, not just someone else’s.

Analytics & a Single Source of Truth

• Consolidate the existing data-lake reporting into one trusted dashboard; end the “call one person for the spreadsheet” habit.
• Define the leading and lagging KPIs that score the business, and keep the dashboard lean enough to drive decisions.

AI-Powered Operating Systems

• Build compounding AI systems — voice-of-customer review mining, content generation, agentic workflows — not one-off prompts or prettier slides.
• Set the quality standard for AI output and tie every use to a revenue or margin outcome; push the organization to operate AI-native.

Team Leadership & Org Design

• Lead a sizable, multi-department team across creative, social, SEO, UI/UX, analytics, and retention, plus the VP layer that runs brand/creative and performance.
• Restructure where needed, recruit A-players you’ve worked with before, develop the team, and move the right people into the right seats.

QUALIFICATIONS

Education & Certification

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field, or equivalent operating experience.

Functional Competencies — Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• A decade or more in digital/e-commerce leadership with a deep performance-marketing foundation.
• Has personally owned a substantial paid-media budget (Google and Meta primary) and can hold agencies’ feet to the fire on the mechanics.
• Has led a large, multi-department team — real team leadership, not a tiny skunkworks tucked in a corner.
• Shopify (or close-comparable) fluency, with the technical depth to be a true partner to developers and IT.
• Owns analytics as a single source of truth — comfortable building the dashboard and the attribution view, not just reading it.
• Demonstrated, outcome-tied AI application — has actually built or deployed AI in the workflow, not used it to decorate decks.
• Exposure to operating models meaningfully larger than this business, so the founders can learn from you (nice-to-have, but explicitly desired).
• Home, furniture, or related consumer category experience is a plus, not a requirement.

Leadership & Management

• Leads through influence across in-house teams and agencies; can restructure an org and recruit senior talent.
• Has the gravitas to be the “boss” a fast-grown, founder-led team is asking for — and the maturity to manage founder dynamics without ego.

Personal Characteristics

• High integrity, self-directed, and a strong communicator.
• Entrepreneurial and resilient — comfortable with a founder pace that throws spaghetti at the wall and keeps what sticks.
• Data-first by instinct (“nothing’s as devastating to an opinion as a number”).
• A builder who wants to own outcomes — and willing to relocate to the company’s Southeast headquarters.

Apply for This Role

Applications for this position are being coordinated by Harry Joiner. To apply, CLICK HERE. Candidates, please be sure to email Harry 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.