Retail Ecommerce Ventures
Pier 1 · RadioShack · Dressbarn · Stein Mart · Modell’s · Franklin Mint · Contract, 2019–2021
15→400+
company headcount · the setting, not my result
Company-reported
Lifecycle and retention across a portfolio of acquired heritage brands as the company scaled from 15 to 400+ people and 250K+ SKUs.
The role
Head of Growth & Retention
Retail Ecommerce Ventures
Contract
Nov 2019 – Oct 2021
How this number was made
Company-reported · not my result- What was counted
- Company headcount over the period of my contract, as the company reported it.
- What was not
- My contribution. This is the only figure on this site that is deliberately not a result of mine — it is the environment the work happened in. I grew no headcount. It is here because it is the honest way to convey the scale and speed of the thing, and dropping it would leave the work sounding calmer than it was.
- The denominator
- None, and that is the point. A headcount is a context number, not a performance one, and it should never be read as a proxy for what lifecycle produced.
- The window
- Nov 2019 – Oct 2021, across concurrent relaunches.
- Who else touched it
- Everyone. That is what a company going from 15 to 400-plus people means.
What I owned
Owned lifecycle and retention strategy across REV’s portfolio of acquired heritage retail brands, turning inherited customer bases into revenue-generating retention engines post-acquisition.
The mechanism
- BeforeRetail Ecommerce Ventures bought dead retail brands — Pier 1, RadioShack, Dressbarn, Stein Mart, Modell’s, Franklin Mint. What you get in a deal like that is not a business: it is a trademark, a domain, vendor contacts and a customer file that has been sitting cold for two or three years. The file is most of what the money bought.
- What I changedStood lifecycle up across all six brands without burning the asset. The obvious move is the one that destroys it — mail the whole file on relaunch day, every record in it, a big number on the board. But a file that old is thick with dead addresses and spam traps, the sending domain is brand new with no reputation anywhere, and complaints from people who do not remember the brand land on infrastructure with nothing to absorb them. You get one good run and then you are in the spam folder, and the asset does not come back at any budget. So: segmentation over millions of legacy records, with welcome, win-back, post-purchase and VIP running in Klaviyo and Listrak through concurrent relaunches and 250K+ SKUs.
- AfterLifecycle ran across six brands while the company went from 15 to more than 400 people. That last figure is the company’s, not mine — see the panel above.
Want this on your second order?
It runs as one engagement: ninety days on your own account, measured against a holdout.