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ALLAN’S COMMENTS: We are working with a confidential client — a well-established, nationally recognized family footwear retailer with hundreds of stores across the United States and a digital business approaching 9-figures in annual revenue. This company is a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest footwear organizations, which gives it unusual financial stability and global sourcing leverage that most mid-market retailers would kill for. They are profitable. They are growing.

THE BACKSTORY

The U.S. footwear market is roughly a $90 billion industry. Family and value footwear is one of the most durable, recession-resistant segments in all of retail. People need shoes. Families need affordable shoes. And the companies that figure out digital-first loyalty, omnichannel fulfillment, and full-funnel customer acquisition in this space are going to eat the ones that don’t.

But here’s the thing: the gap is closing, and it’s closing fast.

The person who steps into this role inherits a solid platform, a restructured team, a strong performance marketing #2, and a clear set of growth levers. What they need now is a builder-operator who can translate strategy into execution — someone who will not only build the roadmap but will personally walk across the hall to talk to IT and sit with Finance to model what it takes to take the ecom business to the next level.

The client needs someone who knows how to EXECUTE.

If you are a senior director or emerging VP at a multi-channel retailer — someone who has scaled a digital business from stabilization to growth, managed a platform migration without breaking what’s working, built or optimized a loyalty program, and led lean cross-functional teams in a matrix organization — this is your role. The comp is strong. The leadership is credible. The market is massive. And the timing could not be better.

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Sr. Director of Digital will own the digital P&L. You will report directly to the CDO and lead a team that includes performance marketing, digital merchandising, site operations, project management, and (initially) a UX team.

Your mission will be to:

1. Scale digital revenue with a mandate to double revenue in three years while maintaining a strong margin;
2. Build and execute the platform migration roadmap to a more agile commerce platform; and
3. Architect the loyalty, mobile app, and vendor drop-ship strategies that will become the company’s primary growth engines.

You Won’t Believe How Much We Know About This Search

I 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 I 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 KPIs 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.
• The competitive benchmarking data that shows exactly where this company stands against its top four competitors — digital penetration, loyalty program effectiveness, performance spend levels, and year-end results — plus the specific growth levers and financial model for scaling to 9-figures in digital revenue.

We have a massive amount of proprietary intel to share with qualified candidates. Our industry research for this assignment exceeds 75 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

Digital P&L Ownership & Revenue Strategy

• Own the end-to-end digital P&L with full accountability for delivering the ecommerce sales plan, managing margin, and building the financial model for doubling digital revenue within three years.
• Partner directly with Finance to develop detailed sales plans, ongoing forecasts, and growth trajectory models that incorporate the revenue impact of vendor drop-ship expansion, loyalty program enhancements, promotional strategy changes, and customer acquisition investments.
• Define the role of digital within the broader business — transitioning it from a sole profit driver to a contributor to total business awareness and omnichannel halo effect, aligning with the new CDO’s vision for full-funnel marketing investment.
• Monitor contribution margin, LTV-to-CAC ratios, and digital penetration rate as governing financial constraints — not just ROAS — to ensure profitable scaling rather than top-line-only growth.

Ecommerce Operations & Site Experience

• Oversee the end-to-end ecommerce experience — product discovery, site merchandising, PDP optimization, checkout flow, promo/campaign management, and site content updates — on a platform that is now stable but requires strategic scaling.
• Lead the platform migration roadmap: manage the interim migration from SAP Hybris to maintain vendor support, while simultaneously evaluating and planning for what a new platform could be.
• Manage cross-functional project management processes — including the integration of Workfront and Jira using Fusion connectors — and drive adoption of Scrum and agile methodologies across digital teams.

Performance Marketing & Full-Funnel Strategy

• Provide strategic oversight of performance marketing, working with a strong performance marketing director who manages the day-to-day execution of paid media, SEO, and digital partnerships.
• Lead the strategic shift from a bottom-funnel-only media strategy to a full-funnel approach that includes always-on evergreen campaigns, brand awareness investment, and market share recovery.
• Leverage Circana (formerly NPD) market share data to identify where the company is losing share by category, brand, and channel, and reallocate campaign investment accordingly.

Loyalty Program & Customer Lifecycle

• Partner with the CRM Director on customer lifecycle strategy across the omnichannel journey — identifying missing key journeys, unlocking customer signals from both ecommerce and in-store, and building acquisition-to-retention flows that the company currently lacks.
• Work cross-functionally with CRM, merchandising, and finance to develop and test differentiated pricing and promotional strategies at regional and .com levels during peak and off-peak periods to unlock new revenue streams.

Mobile App Strategy & Development

• Develop and execute a comprehensive mobile app strategy for an app that is now at functional parity but has no strategic roadmap — no QR scanning, no preference center, no personalization, no ratings and reviews, no loyalty card integration.
• Benchmark against competitor apps (which include all of these features) and build the business case for investment based on monthly active users, app-driven revenue, and the relationship between app engagement and loyalty program participation.
• Coordinate cross-functionally with CRM/loyalty, IT, and the offshore development agency to define feature requirements, prioritize the roadmap, and manage the app from a very average rating to a highly competitive UX.

User Experience & Conversion Rate Optimization

• Provide strategic leadership for the UX team — defining the UX vision, managing the test-and-learn backlog, and ensuring cross-functional handoffs between UX, front-end development, and backend engineering work correctly.
• Prioritize checkout optimization and PDP improvements as the highest-impact CRO opportunities.
• Implement a disciplined experimentation framework: hypothesis development, A/B testing prioritization (using impact, visibility, ease, and data support scoring), and closed-loop learning cycles that turn test results into permanent site improvements.
• Close the mobile-desktop conversion gap. Tailor the mobile experience to reduce navigation friction, improve product discoverability, and move social proof and trust elements above the fold.

Vendor Drop-Ship & Assortment Expansion

• Scale the vendor drop-ship program by onboarding new brands and categories that extend the endless aisle without carrying inventory.
• Integrate vendor drop-ship with store fulfillment to create a seamless experience where out-of-stock store SKUs can be fulfilled through the drop-ship network, reducing lost sales and improving customer satisfaction.
• Partner with merchandising to address assortment gaps identified through competitive analysis — including under-inventory in key categories.

Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Execution

• Lead a lean, cross-functional team spanning performance marketing, digital merchandising, site operations, project management, and UX — with the expectation that you will personally remove roadblocks, not just delegate downward.
• Serve as the primary digital business partner to IT, merchandising, finance, CRM, and real estate — operating effectively in a matrix organization.
• Build the case for and justify incremental headcount through demonstrated ROI.

QUALIFICATIONS

Education & Certification

Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, information technology, or a related field — or equivalent experience that demonstrates the required competencies.

Functional Competencies — Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 10+ years of progressive ecommerce experience with at least 5 years at a senior leadership level, ideally within footwear, apparel, or consumer goods retail.
• Proven P&L ownership for a digital business of at least $50M in revenue, with demonstrated ability to deliver revenue plans while maintaining margin targets in a fast-paced, multi-channel retail environment.
• Platform migration experience — ideally involving SAP Hybris, SAP Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Shopify Plus. You must understand commerce architecture well enough to evaluate platform options, manage vendor relationships, and lead a migration without destabilizing a business that’s finally running smoothly.
• Full-funnel performance marketing fluency — you don’t need to be the person building campaigns in the ad platforms, but you must understand how to shift from a bottom-funnel-only strategy to a full-funnel approach, how to measure brand awareness investment, and how to make the business case for increased marketing spend.
• CRO and experimentation mindset — experience running structured A/B testing programs, conversion funnel optimization, and checkout flow improvements using data-driven prioritization frameworks.
• Mobile app strategy — experience building or significantly improving a retail mobile app, including loyalty integration, personalization, and push notification strategy.
• Proficiency with modern ecommerce and analytics tools — including SAP Commerce platforms, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, MicroStrategy, Databricks, Power BI, Klaviyo or comparable ESPs, and CDP platforms.
• Cross-functional project management — experience working with Jira, Workfront, or comparable tools in an agile/Scrum environment, and the ability to integrate project management systems across marketing and IT organizations.
• Nice-to-have: CRM and customer data strategy — understanding of CRM systems, customer signal integration across ecommerce and in-store channels, and how to build unified customer profiles that drive both digital and omnichannel marketing.
• Nice-to-have: Vendor drop-ship or marketplace operations — experience with endless aisle strategies, vendor onboarding, or third-party fulfillment integration.

Leadership & Management Competencies

• You have led teams of 8-15 people across multiple functions (marketing, merchandising, operations, UX) and can manage both direct reports and agency/vendor relationships simultaneously.
• You are a player-coach who leads from the front — willing to get into the tools, unblock a stuck project, and sit in a cross-functional meeting to resolve a conflict rather than delegating it downward.
• You can operate effectively in a matrix organization where your ability to influence peers in IT, finance, merchandising, and real estate is as important as your ability to manage your own team.
• You can build the business case for headcount, budget, and technology investment — and defend it to a C-suite that requires demonstrated ROI before approving incremental spend.

Personal Characteristics

• High integrity and transparency — You tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. You own your mistakes and you give credit where it’s due.
• Builder mentality — You are energized by creating structure where there is ambiguity — building processes, standing up teams, defining roadmaps — not by maintaining the status quo.
• Execution-obsessed — You believe that strategy without execution is just a PowerPoint. You follow through on what you say you’ll do, and you expect the same from your teams.
• Financially literate — You can hold your own in a conversation with the CFO about contribution margin, LTV-to-CAC ratios, and operating profit — and you use financial rigor to prioritize your team’s work.
• Curious and competitive — You study your competitors, you benchmark relentlessly, and you bring market intelligence to every strategic conversation.
• Resilient under resource constraints — You’ve operated in environments where budgets are tight, headcount is hard to come by, and you have to prove the value of every dollar and every hire. That doesn’t frustrate you — it motivates you.
• Self-directed and low-maintenance — You don’t need to be told what to do. You see the problem, build the plan, and execute — and you loop your manager in at the right moments, not every moment.
• Collaborative without being political — You build genuine relationships across functions because you deliver value to your partners, not because you’re working an angle.

Apply for This 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.