The Bearhug Network: 39 Newly Vetted Leaders Went Live This Week (Out of 230+ Who Joined You). This Is The Company Your Profile Keeps. See Who You're Standing Next To and Join Them Today.
The best opportunities rarely start with a job posting, they start with someone recognizing your track record before you've even started looking.
This week's slate leans hard into brand-building disciplines. Product and design claims the largest share of new profiles, with marketing and brand and sales and commercial right behind it, a signal that consumer-facing leadership is where the market is actively looking right now. Operations and supply chain rounds out a strong showing, while a handful of specialized profiles in engineering, data, legal and general management fill out the rest. If your background sits anywhere in that consumer brand or commercial growth lane, this is a week where the company you keep matters.
Among this week's standouts, a product leader who has spent 25 years inside enterprise TMS platforms, diagnosing exactly where Fortune 500 implementations stall before the sales cycle even closes. A marketer who built an entertainment-first playbook that generated 30 billion earned media impressions in a single year on a fraction of a typical media budget. A sales executive who built enterprise go-to-market motion across 6 leadership stops, carrying teams through an IPO and 2 acquisitions including a 10x return exit. And a director who took a wholesale-first outdoor brand's very first store and scaled it into a 5-location network across destination markets.
Bearhug surfaces these profiles to the CEOs, investors, PE partners, and board members who are actively building leadership teams, without requiring executives to post publicly, signal distress, or compromise their current roles. The network exists for operators who are open to the right conversation, not for those who are desperate for any one.
How it works
Your profile goes in anonymized. Nothing identifies you. No one at your current company, no one in your LinkedIn network, no one browsing casually will ever see your name. You stay protected while becoming visible to the people who matter. The only way someone learns who you are is if you want them to.
The people browsing this network aren't recruiters blasting InMail. They're CEOs with a specific leadership gap, investors pointing a portfolio company toward the right hire, and board members who need to make a recommendation they're confident in. When one of them wants to meet you, we screen it before it reaches you. Nothing hits your inbox that isn't worth your time.
You're not committing to anything. You're not on the market. You're making yourself findable for opportunities you don't even know exist yet. Whether you're exploring what's next, open to advisory or board work, raising capital, or simply want to know what's out there without broadcasting it, your profile works for you in the background while you keep doing what you're doing. Five minutes now, and the right thing finds you when the timing is right.
Know someone who's too good to be invisible? Send them this page. You become the person who opened a door they didn't know existed. And when you refer a hiring authority who ends up working with us, whether they hire through the network or engage us for a full search, we cut you a $5,000 check for making the intro. All from a single introduction you probably would have made anyway. No paperwork, no hoops. Just a standing commitment that the people who make this network stronger get rewarded for it.
Takes less than 5 minutes. We handle everything from there. Your profile is reviewed by our team, anonymized, and goes live usually within 1-2 business days. The right people are already browsing. The only question is whether they can find you.
Here is a fresh cross section of 39 of the hundreds of newly vetted executive profiles our team has added to the Bearhug Network this week:
BHRN-1280 📈 Sales — When a wholesale-first outdoor brand decides to open its own stores, the first hire has to be someone who can build the operational playbook from nothing and then scale it. This director opened the first owned retail location for a founder-led outdoor apparel brand during one of the highest-traffic weeks on the outdoor calendar, then grew that single store into a five-location network across distinct destination markets. Visual merchandising depth from Gap Inc.
BHRN-1806 🛠️ Product — Twenty-five years working at the intersection of enterprise software and transportation logistics, building and evolving TMS platforms at companies ranging from a scrappy 300-person supply chain software firm through an enterprise giant and back again. The product leader who knows where Fortune 500 implementations break down, why they stall in configuration, and how to design around those failure points before the sales cycle closes. Suited for supply chain and transportation software companies in the mid-size range where product ownership means something and the roadmap isn't decided by committee.
BHRN-956 🎯 Marketing — Electrolyte hydration is a small-surface-area category where the entire growth bet rides on whether your brand can earn a place inside someone's training ritual, not just their shopping cart. At one of the most recognized names in endurance hydration, this marketer built experiential campaigns and partnership ecosystems across specialty run, triathlon, and fitness channels that turned product occasions into identity moments for the core athlete. Brands sitting at the intersection of active lifestyle and functional nutrition hire this profile to close the gap between category awareness and genuine community ownership.
BHRN-1527 ⚙️ Operations — Hard goods manufacturing at three distinct levels of complexity: a venture-backed outdoor energy brand selling through REI and Bass Pro in 70-plus countries, a publicly traded connected fitness company operating at peak consumer hardware velocity, and a robotics startup deploying physical product into premium hospitality environments. Each stop demanded a different manufacturing discipline, and this operator has run all three. The person a board calls when a consumer hardware brand needs to scale physical product without the quality failures that typically arrive at that inflection point.
BHRN-2022 🛠️ Product — New colors and styles every two weeks, across 130-plus stores globally, is a product development cadence that breaks teams not built for it. Fifteen-plus years of global apparel product development, anchored at a performance-lifestyle brand running one of the fastest launch cycles in the category, is the proof that this cadence can be operationalized without sacrificing quality or brand integrity. Built for VP Product Development or Operations roles at performance apparel brands in the $50M-to-$300M range where speed-to-market and factory relationships are the actual competitive lever.
BHRN-1784 🛠️ Product — Policing and criminal intelligence built an instinct for pattern recognition that most product leaders never develop. That instinct moved through operational risk at a major regional insurer, enterprise AI delivery across three continents at a pioneer cognitive platform company, and now leads a 20-person product org building a virtual assistant that touches tens of millions of banking customers. When an organization needs someone who can translate messy, high-stakes human problems into conversational AI use cases that actually perform at scale, this is that person.
BHRN-1635 💻 Engineering — Spatial computing infrastructure built from the ground up, at a company redefining how software understands physical space in three dimensions. Co-founded and served as CTO of an email marketing platform that scaled to tens of thousands of customers before acquisition, then spent over a decade leading consumer engineering at one of the largest real estate search platforms in the country. Rare combination of founding-era technical depth and large-organization engineering leadership, applied now to augmented reality systems that sit at the edge of what mobile hardware can do.
BHRN-1693 📈 Sales — Enterprise sales divisions at drone-analytics and aerial-intelligence platforms do not build themselves, and the verticalized go-to-market models that compound in renewable energy, oil and gas, and large-scale construction require a different architecture than standard SaaS. This operator has built that motion from scratch across six enterprise leadership stops, carrying teams through an IPO and two acquisitions, including one exit at a 10x return on entry valuation. Hand over a greenfield enterprise charter and get back a scalable, vertical-specific division.
BHRN-1488 🎯 Marketing — Athlete roster management, performance nutrition campaigns, and outdoor pack brand marketing are not three separate careers, they are one operator's proof that sports marketing instinct travels across every corner of the active lifestyle market. Built global athlete partnerships at one of the largest sportswear companies in the world, then carried that earned-media credibility into a premium nutrition brand and a legacy pack brand finding its next voice. Sports brands entering a category or refreshing their position will find a tested translator between product, channel, and culture.
BHRN-1564 ⚙️ Operations — When a small outdoor brand gets acquired by a multinational parent, the operational gap between independent supply chain management and corporate infrastructure can quietly destroy delivery performance and wholesale relationships. This operator has run that exact integration challenge at a heritage travel and climbing apparel brand, managing factory networks across three Asian sourcing countries while keeping a multi-channel distribution model intact across DTC, specialty wholesale, and European retail. Built for brands navigating the complexity of scaling operations inside a larger ownership structure without losing what made the brand work.
BHRN-3335 🎯 Marketing — Experiential marketing is the hardest part of brand building to scale, because it lives or dies on community trust, not media budget. This operator built it twice, leading experiential and retail marketing for a Southern California action-sports eyewear brand through a PE acquisition and North American expansion, then independently founding a wellness events community that grew to 10,000 members and attracted brand partners including a major performance apparel company, an automotive brand, and a professional haircare company. Adweek Marketing Vanguard recognition and Nike pedigree behind every activation.
BHRN-3340 🎯 Marketing — Conservation credibility is earned, not announced, and outdoor brands that treat it as a marketing layer eventually get exposed by the consumer who actually lives outside. This executive built and led a DC-based outdoor recreation policy coalition to historic federal wins, co-founded the outdoor retail space's first female-founded benefit corporation in Utah, and now architects institutional conservation programs for one of the most respected hunting and fishing brands on the market. Built for brands that need conservation infrastructure wired into brand identity, not bolted on after the fact.
BHRN-1583 💻 Engineering — Biomedical research, Apple-scale platform engineering, and full-stack product work inside a venture-backed home design platform form an unusual combination that most engineering teams cannot replicate with a single hire. The throughline across these contexts is software built to last, code quality rigorous enough that evaluators flagged it for samples, and a systems mindset that travels from embedded hardware through consumer-facing product layers. Engineers with this range of biological, electrical, and consumer software fluency tend to solve the problems that narrowly trained candidates cannot even see.
BHRN-4038 🛠️ Product — Quantum computing researcher turned machine learning product leader, with stops building ML platforms at a major data-lakehouse company, voice-assistant products at one of the largest consumer technology companies in the world, and autonomous vehicle systems at a robotaxi startup. The throughline across those stops is the same problem: turning cutting-edge AI capability into products that generate measurable revenue, not just research milestones. Wants to bring that rare combination of deep technical fluency and B2B commercial instinct back to an enterprise product role where the product is the primary revenue driver.
BHRN-1351 ⚖️ Legal — Sustainability credibility at a major running brand is harder to maintain than it looks when regulators are rewriting the rules faster than most corporate responsibility teams can track. This director built genuine policy fluency inside a globally distributed running brand, engaging directly with European Commission ESPR delegated acts and extended producer responsibility frameworks while most US brand teams were still catching up. Rare capability for brands facing circularity, packaging, or social impact disclosure pressure.
BHRN-1276 🎯 Marketing — Safety is not a category most marketers think of as brand-buildable, but that assumption is exactly why B2B industrial safety companies plateau. This marketer restructured a North America marketing organization from scratch, delivered nine figures in portfolio revenue growth, and built the function that turned a product catalog into an industry resource the trades actually use. Capable of doing the same for any industrial or adjacent brand that has outgrown its marketing infrastructure but not yet built the team to replace it.
BHRN-1094 🛠️ Product — Most performance apparel brands split material sourcing and design between two people, then lose spec integrity in the handoff. At a performance activewear brand built on engineering-first construction and sweat-management fabrics, this director holds both functions, translating performance requirements into material specs and into finished product. Formal textile education from Fashion Institute of Technology backs the technical fluency, making this a rare materials-and-design generalist for brands where the product has to perform before the story can land.
BHRN-1943 📈 Sales — ABM programs that close Fortune 500 retail deals in under 90 days are rare enough that most companies never build them correctly. Built and scaled full-funnel ABM infrastructure across early-growth SaaS and established enterprise environments, deploying Terminus, Eloqua, Marketo, and Salesforce to drive measurable pipeline, with an individual Adweek Rising Brand Star win validating the approach. Brings the martech fluency and vertical-program design a B2B marketing team needs when pipeline targets are not being hit by generic demand generation.
BHRN-1248 ⚙️ Operations — Specialty apparel brands scaling physical retail hit a consistent breaking point where store count outpaces the operational infrastructure holding it together. This operator built and managed that infrastructure layer across luxury flagships at two recognized fashion houses, then moved into a growth-stage performance apparel brand to do the same thing across a 20-plus store network. The person a VP Retail calls when field execution, store standards, and operational systems need to scale without degrading the brand experience at store level.
BHRN-1966 🎯 Marketing — Pipeline at enterprise SaaS scale is a sequencing problem, and most marketing leaders inherit a team, a tech stack, and a channel mix built for a different stage. This executive has solved it across CCaaS, UCaaS, and IT transformation markets, turning a struggling North America region into a 10X pipeline operation and then building a global demand engine that delivered 4X bookings growth at a PE-backed CX platform. Hired to build what the org does not yet have and wire it to revenue.
BHRN-1223 📈 Sales — Specialty outdoor brands selling through REI, Backcountry, and independent climbing shops need a primary account contact who has actually built the commercial infrastructure, not inherited it. Four consecutive roles at credible names in alpine, pack, and backcountry ski, including building a professional division from scratch and launching an elite 40-person partner program across North America. Running the full North America business for a premium alpine brand now, the kind of operator specialty retail trusts because the credibility was earned rep by rep.
BHRN-1776 ⚙️ Operations — Pharmacy automation is a narrow, high-stakes domain where the product leader has to hold hospital operations, warehouse robotics, and software workflows in the same hand at once. Built that fluency across a decade at a dominant pharmacy dispensing platform, then carried it into warehouse automation and autonomous mobile robots before landing in a senior director seat at a pharmacy automation company. Hire this person when you need someone to install the product development process itself, not just manage the roadmap that already exists.
BHRN-1346 🏢 General Management — Running a food division inside a values-led outdoor brand means every sourcing decision, every retail pitch, and every product launch has to hold up against the parent brand's ethics, not just the P&L. This operator built a hydroponic greenhouse company from zero to commercial scale, then stepped into the GM seat of a certified B-Corp food division distributed across natural channel, specialty outdoor, and DTC. Serial founder credibility combined with regenerative supply chain fluency and operating accountability across a complex multi-category portfolio.
BHRN-1023 🎯 Marketing — Thirty billion earned media impressions in a single year on under two million dollars in production and talent spend. That number came from an entertainment-first marketing playbook built inside one of the fastest-growing non-alcoholic beverage brands ever, where comedy, viral stunts, and cultural partnerships replaced traditional ad budgets. If a founder-led consumer brand is trying to build cultural cachet without buying its way in, this is the marketing leader who has already proven it works at scale.
BHRN-1263 🛠️ Product — Translating athlete-driven performance requirements into manufacturable product is where most technical apparel development directors stall, especially when PFAS-free transitions and rapid assortment growth hit at the same time. This director built that capability across multiple senior roles at a premium ski performance brand, then sharpened it running an independent creation and production agency with direct factory relationships. Rare cross-functional depth in technical specification, merchandising, and sustainability-driven line architecture, applied now at a venture-backed mountain lifestyle brand scaling DTC and retail simultaneously.
BHRN-1442 🎯 Marketing — When an international alpine brand needs to build a North American business from scratch, the person who figured out specialty outdoor retail, P&L ownership, and global brand strategy at the same brand over the same decade is rare. Grew a UK-based alpine brand's US presence from early foothold to channel authority, then moved up to run marketing across multiple labels and geographies before returning to stabilize the American business through a leadership transition. Built for brands where the commercial lead and the brand steward need to be the same person.
BHRN-3309 📈 Sales — Sneaker culture does not respond to traditional wholesale pushes, and turning a performance brand's lifestyle division into a fashion-credible property requires a different operator entirely. This director built that at a major Japanese footwear brand, driving the lifestyle category to triple-digit quarterly growth in North America by constructing a collaboration architecture with boutiques, designers, and cultural figures that performance-brand teams rarely know how to build. If your brand has dormant lifestyle potential, this is the person who speaks both retailer and streetwear in the same conversation.
BHRN-1410 🛠️ Product — Technical outdoor apparel punishes design directors who can't hold the line between performance credibility and commercial viability at the same time. Directing sportswear design at a technical alpine brand inside one of North America's largest public outdoor companies means making those calls at volume, across seasonal lines, in coordination with materials development and innovation teams before a single sample ships. A design director who connects fabrication, fit, and function into product that earns placement at specialty outdoor accounts rather than competing for markdown space.
BHRN-1939 🛠️ Product — Venture capital, impact investing, and blockchain infrastructure in a single career spanning the World Bank Group, a founding role at a major Ethereum-focused fund, and advisory seats at some of the most-scrutinized tech platforms of the last decade. Eighteen board seats, a first-of-its-kind blockchain accelerator, and a nine-figure portfolio spanning Fintech, clean energy, and emerging markets across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Rare breadth for boards and founders navigating the intersection of AI ethics, decentralized finance, and impact-first capital allocation.
BHRN-1396 🛠️ Product — Repositioning a sandal brand that defined a category is harder than launching a new one, because every product decision carries the weight of decades of consumer expectation. This product director has spent years inside Teva's turnaround, architecting the trail performance and lifestyle collaboration strategy that bridges function-first heritage with streetwear and sneaker communities, across prior stops at a Portland outdoor footwear brand and a global workwear boot company. The person a brand needs when the product line has to evolve without losing the loyal buyer it already has.
BHRN-1585 📈 Sales — McKinsey-trained analytically, then forged through a decade of APAC sales leadership at a global data-analytics software company, this is a sales leader who understands both the rigor of strategic problem-framing and the operational weight of managing large commercial teams across complex, multi-geography markets. Built SMB sales motion at scale, covering financial services and technology verticals across early-growth and expansion-stage companies. Suited for VP or Head of Sales roles where a team needs both intellectual architecture and day-to-day commercial discipline.
BHRN-2085 🛠️ Product — Recycled water bottles, fishing nets, and fabric scraps are easy to talk about as brand values and genuinely hard to build into a product line that performs, fits, and sells at scale. At a founder-led sustainable activewear brand backed by major consumer investors, this director has done exactly that, building circular economy product architecture into a DTC business operating with SA8000-certified fair trade manufacturing in Vietnam. The person a product team calls when sustainability commitments have to live in the actual construction of the garment, not just the marketing copy.
BHRN-2758 📊 Data — Data governance built from scratch inside two of the most data-intensive consumer and medtech enterprises in the world is a rare capability when boards approve AI strategies that the underlying data infrastructure cannot yet support. At a global athletic brand, this executive integrated an acquired machine learning company and scaled the enterprise data and analytics organization from governance foundation to full enablement. Now leading master data, analytics, and AI platforms at a nine-figure medical device enterprise navigating one of the most aggressive AI investment cycles in the industry.
BHRN-1437 🛠️ Product — Award-winning product development at the director level is rare in outdoor apparel, rarer still when the proof is an ISPO-recognized mountain biking collection built from brief to shelf at a merino action sports brand with global distribution. This product director holds the full discipline: technical design, material sourcing, and seasonal execution, with formal design education grounding every creative decision in construction reality. Built for outdoor and active brands that need creative ambition and supply chain pragmatism in the same person.
BHRN-1157 📈 Sales — Outdoor, hunting, fishing, and sporting goods channels are unforgiving when ownership changes, category resets, or a new sales leader inherits broken national account relationships. This operator rebuilt those relationships from scratch at a premium fishing brand through a PE raise, grew a licensed apparel program from near-zero to nine figures of shelf presence, and exceeded a nine-figure ammunition portfolio target by 108%. The candidate who already knows the room at Bass Pro, Cabela's, REI, Scheels, and Sportsman's Warehouse before the first meeting.
BHRN-1829 🎯 Marketing — Warehouse operators have seen automation promises fail, and robotic pick-and-place systems only get a second chance if the product story closes the credibility gap first. At an early-stage robotic fulfillment company, this operator built product and marketing simultaneously, translating machine learning and hardware complexity into a commercial narrative that lands with ops buyers. MIT materials science training combined with a decade inside fulfillment automation infrastructure, applied now to companies that need technical credibility and go-to-market architecture built together.
BHRN-1397 📈 Sales — When a performance running brand breaks into the mainstream, the commercial architecture underneath either scales with it or becomes the ceiling. This operator was inside that build at a cult running label during the years it crossed into nine-figure territory and became a category benchmark. Now running brand turnaround and repositioning mandates for heritage sandal labels inside a major public footwear company, bringing the rare combination of hypergrowth experience and challenged-brand accountability.
BHRN-1181 🎯 Marketing — Action sports brands live and die on the cultural energy of their events, and converting that energy into global interactive marketing is a discipline most digital marketers have never touched. This operator built that muscle at a world-leading skateboarding and surf brand, managing 14-plus global webcasts annually across flagship surf and skate events, then carried the same tease-launch-sustain discipline to licensed apparel at NFL, MLB, and NBA scale before owning full-funnel DTC marketing as SVP. Rare combination of subcultural credibility and national brand execution in a single seat.
BHRN-1800 📈 Sales — Most partner ecosystems fail quietly, not because the product is wrong but because no one built the infrastructure that makes partners want to sell it. Across a major ERP platform, a global enterprise software company, and a work-management platform, this director has spent two decades building that infrastructure, from certification frameworks to alliance GTM strategies, across retail, financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing. Bring her in when the channel motion exists on paper but the partner community is not producing.
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