🟥 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 BRIEF: R.G. Barry Brands — the parent company behind Dearfoams, Baggallini, and a growing portfolio of comfort and lifestyle brands — is looking for a Director, Global Brand.com Ecommerce & Revenue to own the entire DTC customer journey across their brand.com sites. Let me unpack why this matters.

First, some history. R.G. Barry was founded in 1947 by Florence Melton, who co-invented the foam-soled washable slipper. That product became Dearfoams — which is still the #1 slipper brand in the United States today, nearly 80 years later. They sell significantly more slippers annually than the next closest competitor across every major retailer. That is a dominant consumer franchise, full stop.

The footwear wholesaling industry in the US is a $46.7 billion market. Women’s and girls’ non-athletic footwear — R.G. Barry’s core — represents 66.2% of that, or roughly $30.9 billion. And the broader comfort footwear category is being turbocharged by the post-pandemic casualization of everyday life. People are not going back to hard-soled shoes when they work from home. Slippers have gone from an occasional gift item to a daily-use product category that now occupies real estate in the closet that didn’t exist five years ago.

But here’s where it gets really interesting.

In June 2024, R.G. Barry was acquired by Marubeni Growth Capital US — a subsidiary of Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese trading conglomerate with revenue in the tens of billions and approximately 8–9% owned by Berkshire Hathaway. This ended years of ownership under private equity firms that, by all accounts, declined to invest in growth. The Marubeni acquisition gave CEO Bob Mullaney — who previously served as President of ShoeBuy.com and President of the Americas for Rockport — the green light to build. The mandate is to grow the company 4–6x in 5–7 years. That is not a hope; that is a plan backed by deep-pocketed, patient, long-horizon Japanese capital.

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The company has already moved. Since the acquisition, R.G. Barry has added Fireside by Dearfoams (shearling-lined, affordable luxury slippers), Planet A (eco-footwear made with proprietary biodegradable foam), Clarks and Timberland slipper licenses (acquired via asset deal with Green Market Services, agreement reached late 2025, finalized in 2026), and the Gola/Jacobson Group — a UK-based sports-lifestyle footwear brand acquired in January 2026 that gives R.G. Barry its first European operating base.

Under Mullaney’s leadership since approximately 2017, the company has doubled revenue at a ~15% CAGR while actually *reducing* the number of wholesale customers by eliminating low-margin accounts. That is a CEO who understands profitable growth.

So who is the customer? Two universes —

On the B2B/wholesale side, R.G. Barry sells through Walmart, Costco, Kohl’s, J.C. Penney, specialty retailers, home shopping networks, and catalogs. Walmart and Costco are the volume engines.

On the DTC/brand.com side — which is the entire reason this role exists — the core consumer is a woman, age 35–65, comfort-driven, value-conscious, and fiercely loyal once converted. Dearfoams’ positioning is premium comfort at an accessible price point — typically $30–$100 — delivering on quality without the luxury-brand markup. Baggallini’s buyer is an active, travel-loving woman who discovered the brand online or while traveling, bought one bag, and then came back again and again — the brand reports customer satisfaction and retention north of 90%.

Now here is the honest strategic picture:

R.G. Barry is predominantly a wholesale company. DTC brand.com revenue today is roughly $12–15 million combined across Dearfoams.com and Baggallini.com — which is sub-5% of total company revenue. Both sites experienced meaningful year-over-year declines before showing strong signs of rebound (Baggallini in particular has been surging in recent months). Conversion rates on both sites are below best-in-class benchmarks. This is a turnaround-within-a-growth-story role. The company is growing aggressively through acquisition and channel optimization — but the brand.com channel specifically needs a builder.

🟥 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™

Why should a talented person want this job?

Because the whitespace is enormous. Industry advertising spend in footwear wholesaling is just 0.8% of revenue — nearly nothing. R.G. Barry’s move into brand.com DTC is essentially a bet that they can capture the spread between that 0.8% and the 15–25% that a well-run DTC brand typically reinvests in growth marketing.

You will have Marubeni’s capital behind you, a CEO who has built and led ecommerce businesses at scale, a portfolio of brands with genuine consumer loyalty, and a multi-brand acquisition pipeline that will keep expanding the canvas. You will not be fighting for budget. You will be fighting for execution speed.

Every brand R.G. Barry acquires adds another brand.com site to the portfolio. The first site you optimize teaches you the playbook. The second site validates it. By the third or fourth, you’re deploying a proven system — and each deployment gets faster, cheaper, and more predictable than the last.

That’s why this isn’t just a Director role; it’s a platform role. And the person who builds the multi-brand DTC operating system at R.G. Barry also builds the company’s first-party data asset — the customer behavior, purchase intent, and lifecycle data that wholesale channels will never provide.

That data becomes the strategic advantage in every future acquisition integration, every pricing decision, and every new market entry. You’re not just building a DTC business. You’re building the intelligence layer that makes the entire portfolio smarter.

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ABOUT THE ROLE

As Director, Global Brand.com Ecommerce & Revenue, you will own the end-to-end customer journey and P&L for R.G. Barry’s portfolio of brand.com sites — currently Dearfoams.com, Baggallini.com, and expanding to include Fireside, Planet A, Gola, and future acquisitions. Your mission will be to:

1. Reverse the brand.com revenue decline and build a scalable, repeatable DTC playbook across a multi-brand portfolio;
2. Own conversion rate optimization, revenue per visit, and contribution margin as the commercial authority for all brand.com decisions; and
3. Build the team, systems, and operational infrastructure that will support a portfolio projected to grow 4–6x in 5–7 years.

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Areas of Oversight

Multi-Brand Brand.com Revenue & Commercial Strategy

• Own brand.com revenue, contribution margin, and sales growth targets across the entire R.G. Barry portfolio — including Dearfoams, Baggallini, Fireside by Dearfoams, Planet A, Gola, and future brands acquired under Marubeni’s growth mandate.
• Develop and own brand.com revenue plans and forecasts by brand, and partner with Finance and eCommerce leadership to build and defend investment proposals tied directly to brand.com performance metrics.
• Translate customer journey, merchandising, and marketing strategies into measurable commercial outcomes — balancing growth, profitability, and brand integrity across brands with fundamentally different price points, customer bases, and purchase cycles.
• Evaluate and prioritize growth opportunities across new brands (post-acquisition), new geographies (Europe via Gola/Jacobson), and new customer segments — building scalable playbooks that can be deployed to each new brand.com site without rebuilding from scratch.
• Act as the commercial authority and decision-maker for brand.com performance and prioritization — ensuring that experience, merchandising, and marketing decisions are informed by customer behavior data, conversion analytics, and revenue impact rather than internal politics or channel tradition.

End-to-End Customer Journey & Conversion Optimization

• Own the end-to-end customer journey across all R.G. Barry brand.com sites with direct accountability for conversion rate, revenue per visit, and checkout completion — the three KPIs that determine whether traffic investment produces revenue or waste.
• Identify and eliminate friction across navigation, search, PLPs, PDPs, cart, and checkout using a hypothesis-driven CRO framework: map the funnel quantitatively (Google Analytics, session recordings), identify the largest leak by stage (typically product view rate, not checkout), develop hypotheses, test, and iterate.
• Establish and lead a conversion optimization roadmap grounded in data, A/B testing, and customer behavior insights — including device-specific strategies (desktop users convert at 2x mobile rates but receive less optimization attention), and review mining to extract the specific language customers use to describe comfort, fit, and quality.
• Monitor and act on performance trends across devices, traffic sources, and customer segments — building real-time dashboards that surface anomalies (conversion drops, cart abandonment spikes, device-specific issues) before they become revenue problems.

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Onsite Merchandising & Product Storytelling

• Lead onsite merchandising strategy as a conversion and confidence-building tool — positioning products contextually for different customer segments, use cases, and shopping missions rather than relying on default catalog layouts.
• Own onsite product storytelling and presentation across every brand.com site — ensuring that Dearfoams’ comfort heritage and gifting occasions, Baggallini’s travel functionality and organizational benefits, and each new brand’s unique value proposition are communicated through page design, copy, imagery, and video, not just product specs.
• Partner with Brand and Creative teams to translate seasonal strategies into commercially optimized onsite experiences — including occasion-based merchandising calendars (Mother’s Day, back-to-school, holiday gifting, travel season) designed to flatten Dearfoams’ Q4-concentrated revenue curve.
• Continuously evolve onsite storytelling and merchandising to reflect relevant cultural, seasonal, and consumer behavior trends — including the casualization of everyday footwear, sustainability-driven purchasing (Planet A), and the athleisure crossover (Gola).

🟥 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™

Marketing Partnership & Traffic Conversion Efficiency

• Partner closely with eCommerce Marketing to ensure that every dollar of paid and owned traffic acquisition converts as efficiently as possible — serving as the “conversion partner” who closes the loop between traffic and revenue.
• Optimize landing pages, onsite paths, and campaign execution to maximize ROI on traffic driven through paid social, paid search, email, and retail media — using persona-based campaign architecture (gift-givers, business travelers, comfort seekers) to match traffic intent with landing experience.
• Champion personalization strategies based on behavior, intent, and lifecycle stage — building the segmentation infrastructure that allows brand.com to deliver different experiences to first-time visitors vs. repeat buyers vs. lapsed customers vs. high-LTV VIPs.
• Maintain accountability for brand.com demand forecasting as a commercial input — feeding first-party conversion and purchase data into enterprise inventory and supply chain planning to improve the 82-day inventory cycle that currently constrains the business.

Team Leadership & Portfolio Expansion

• Lead Brand.com strategy across a multi-brand portfolio, flexing approach by brand maturity (established Dearfoams vs. startup Planet A), customer base (comfort-driven gift buyers vs. travel-oriented professionals), and market dynamics (US-dominant Dearfoams vs. UK/European Gola).
• Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing ecommerce team — building the operational infrastructure and talent pipeline that will scale from 2–3 brand.com sites today to 5–7+ over the next several years as acquisitions accelerate.
• Drive sustained year-over-year growth while building scalable capabilities that get faster with each new brand, not heavier — repeatable CRO playbooks, brand-specific guardrails, enabling constraints that raise the team’s floor, and cross-functional decision rhythms that support long-term portfolio expansion under Marubeni’s 4–6x growth mandate.

Qualifications

Education & Certification

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Digital Commerce, Analytics, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience building and scaling brand.com ecommerce businesses.

Functional Competencies — Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 10–14 years of progressive ecommerce experience with senior-level responsibility for brand.com performance — including at least 3–5 years leading teams or cross-functional initiatives with direct accountability for revenue, conversion, and contribution margin outcomes.
• Demonstrated experience leading brand.com ecommerce businesses in a multi-brand or portfolio environment — with the ability to flex strategy by brand maturity, price point, customer demographics, and channel dynamics.
• Deep command of conversion rate optimization methodology: funnel analysis, hypothesis-driven A/B and multivariate testing, device-specific optimization, session recording analysis, and customer research integration. You are not just reading CRO reports — you are designing the testing roadmap and interpreting results at a granular level.
• Strong analytical, quantitative, and problem-solving skills — fluent in contribution margin analysis, LTV:CAC ratios, cohort retention tracking, revenue per visit, and the unit economics that determine whether a DTC brand is self-funding or burning capital.
• Proven ability to translate brand narratives into high-performing onsite product storytelling — including occasion-based merchandising (gifting, travel, seasonal), cross-sell/upsell architecture, and visual merchandising that drives conversion, not just aesthetics.
• Hands-on experience with ecommerce platforms (Shopify strongly preferred), analytics tools (GA4, Hotjar/FullStory, Looker/Tableau), and the testing/personalization stack needed to run a data-driven brand.com operation at scale.
• Experience partnering closely with eCommerce Marketing and performance marketing teams to maximize return on traffic investment — you understand the full loop from ad click to checkout completion, and you know where the leaks are.
• Consumer brand, apparel, footwear, or lifestyle experience preferred — particularly experience with brands that sell through both DTC and wholesale channels, where channel conflict and pricing integrity are live operational concerns.
• AI fluency at the workflow design level — you don’t just use AI tools, you design where AI fits in the merchandising cycle, the CRO testing loop, and the demand forecasting process — and where human judgment is non-negotiable. You can decompose a product launch into AI-sized problems, triage hallucination risk without slowing time-to-market, and teach your team to do the same.
• Critical evaluation of AI output — you know when AI is confidently wrong (e.g., generating plausible but inaccurate size recommendations or phantom inventory in product copy). You validate AI-generated insights against first-party data before acting on them. In a multi-brand portfolio where brand voice consistency matters across Dearfoams, Baggallini, and Gola, you understand that AI-generated copy drifts unless you build guardrails that feel natural, not bureaucratic.

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Leadership & Management / Behavioral Competencies

• Demonstrated ability to lead, develop, and retain high-performing ecommerce teams — including coaching direct reports, influencing cross-functional partners without formal authority, and managing agency relationships when applicable.
• Ability to serve as the commercial authority for brand.com — making trade-off decisions between growth and profitability, between brand integrity and promotional velocity, and between short-term revenue targets and long-term portfolio health. This requires the confidence to say no to ideas that don’t serve the P&L, even when they come from above.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills — particularly with Brand/Creative, Demand Planning, Finance, and Wholesale teams that have different incentives and time horizons. You will need to build the “halo measurement” framework that proves how brand.com investment lifts the entire enterprise, not just DTC.
• Enabling constraints mindset — you build simple rules and brand-specific guardrails that raise the floor for everyone on the team, rather than complex process infrastructure that creates bottlenecks. You know the difference between a playbook that scales and a playbook that calcifies. When the portfolio grows from 3 brands to 7, your system gets faster, not heavier.
• Experience operating in a PE-backed, acquisition-driven, or portfolio-management environment is a strong plus — the pace of integration, the demand for repeatable playbooks, and the rigor of financial reporting in these environments maps directly to what R.G. Barry needs under Marubeni ownership.

🟥 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™

Personal Characteristics

• High integrity and intellectual honesty — you report the real numbers, flag the real problems, and resist the temptation to cherry-pick metrics that make brand.com look better than it is.
• Builder’s mentality — you are energized by building systems, playbooks, and teams from early-stage foundations, not just optimizing what already exists.
• Entrepreneurial orientation — you treat brand.com as your own P&L, make decisions with an owner’s mindset, and operate with urgency proportional to the opportunity.
• Resilience and adaptability — you can manage through the seasonal peaks and valleys of a Q4-concentrated business, maintain team morale during slower months, and adjust strategy as new brands are acquired and integrated.
• Strong communicator — you translate data into narrative, financial complexity into executive-ready summaries, and competitive intelligence into actionable recommendations. You can present to the CEO and coach a junior analyst in the same afternoon.
• Self-directed — you do not need to be told what to work on. You see the gap between where brand.com is and where it needs to be, and you close it.
• Comfort with ambiguity — in a fast-acquiring, multi-brand portfolio backed by long-horizon capital, the org chart, the brand portfolio, and the competitive landscape will change faster than the strategic plan. You navigate that without losing focus.
• Ability to be in office 2–3 days per week in Boston, MA. This is not a remote role.

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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.