The Bearhug Network: 20 Newly Vetted Leaders Went Live This Week (Out of 89+ Who Joined You). This Is The Company Your Profile Keeps. See Who You're Standing Next To and Join Them Today.

If the right opportunity went looking for you today, would it know where to find you?

Sales and Commercial and Product and Design account for 11 of this week's 20 featured profiles, and the pattern says something about where demand is forming. The commercial leaders on this slate are builders, people who stood up a channel, a sales motion, or a national account program where none existed. The product leaders share a thread too, and most of them work where physical operations meet complex software. If you are gauging the market, the signal is that companies want leaders who have already done the first build, not ones who have only managed the second.

The standouts make the point. One account manager grew POS 73% across more than 1,200 stores and launched a private label program from scratch. One operations executive consolidated 5 brands into a single distribution hub that quadrupled the prior footprint. One sales leader trained as a tech-transaction lawyer, then hired 100 reps in a single year and built a go-to-market motion from nothing. And one product leader was the first in the seat at a company that went on to a unicorn valuation, then stepped up to run both product and engineering at the next one.

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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 20 of the hundreds of newly vetted executive profiles our team has added to the Bearhug Network this week:

  1. BHRN-6657 🛠️ Product — Early-growth construction-tech platforms building AI for jobsites need a product leader who has already scaled one company from zero to unicorn. This executive was the first product leader at a construction-lending fintech, taking it through product-market fit, a Series C and D, and a unicorn valuation, then joined an early-growth AI construction platform as VP of Product before being promoted to Chief Product Officer over both product and engineering. Brings the rare pairing of zero-to-one instinct and at-scale discipline to a category still inventing its own rules.

  2. BHRN-1644 🎯 Marketing — Geospatial and autonomous technology sells to hardhats, not CTOs, and closing that gap between complex aerial-intelligence products and field buyers who need to trust them is a specific kind of marketing problem. This director solved it across a drone-analytics platform and a global positioning hardware company, running go-to-market, partner marketing, and channel programs across North America and Europe. Built for B2B technology brands where the product roadmap and the buyer's vocabulary start in different places.

  3. BHRN-2588 👥 People & Culture — Heavy-industry operations credibility is rare inside AI-driven recycling infrastructure, and AMP found it in an executive who spent years running a forging and machining company as President and CEO before leading engineering at a major electric steel manufacturer. That background is what makes standing up fully autonomous sortation facilities credible at the operations level, not just the pitch level. Brought in to operationalize the flagship AI-driven materials recovery facility and become a public-facing voice for the next generation of autonomous waste sortation at scale.

  4. BHRN-2045 💰 Finance — Four decades of accounting and finance discipline, with nearly three decades inside a heritage workwear brand that scaled from regional roots to nine-figure global revenue. Sat at the table for every major business unit planning cycle, channel expansion, and wholesale-to-omnichannel shift a brand of that scale encounters. An FP&A director who brings institutional memory, multi-channel financial modeling depth, and a rare ability to translate brand strategy into the numbers that actually govern decisions.

  5. BHRN-1394 🛠️ Product — When a heritage sandal brand has to earn credibility in technical trail footwear without abandoning the open-toe identity that built its following, the product design has to do the convincing. The director behind the Aventrail trail sandal family, the Trailwinder GTX hiker, and the Hurricane Daybreaker waterproof line solved that exact brief inside one of the largest publicly traded footwear holding companies in the world. Footwear design leadership built for a brand that needs performance and lifestyle to read as the same sentence.

  6. BHRN-6547 💻 Engineering — Farmers trust proof in the field, not a black box, and building AI tools that earn both accuracy and adoption inside a fragmented, trust-driven network is a different problem than shipping software to consumers. This technologist built the AI agronomist advisor and the crop disease, carbon, and logistics models running inside a farmer-owned network of over 100,000 growers, after six years shaping product and UX at a major digital agriculture platform. He is the technical leader who turns agronomic complexity into tools farmers actually adopt.

  7. BHRN-2154 💻 Engineering — Vehicle rack and carrier systems fail at the fitment level or the factory level, and fixing either after launch is expensive. This engineer progressed from engineering manager to director inside a nationally distributed vehicle-mounted outdoor transport brand, owning DFM across stamped metal, extruded aluminum, and injection-molded components built to fit Toyota, Honda, and Subaru platforms. Brings Taiwan contract manufacturing fluency and the institutional depth to scale hardgoods lines without rebuilding engineering judgment from scratch.

  8. BHRN-4299 ⚙️ Operations — Mission-driven drinkware brands live or die on whether the sourcing behind the label can actually deliver the environmental standards printed on it. This operator built that infrastructure from scratch at a B Corp drinkware brand, progressing from sales into VP Operations and VP Supply Chain, holding factory relationships, QA/QC, and sustainability compliance together across Asia and domestic distribution. For outdoor lifestyle and mission-led brands navigating the intersection of sourcing rigor and environmental accountability, this is the operator who has already solved it.

  9. BHRN-1661 🛠️ Product — Autonomous mobile robots and enterprise warehouse software sit at the intersection of physical operations and complex software product, and shipping both requires a product leader who can hold human factors research, UX strategy, and platform roadmaps in the same hand. This person built that exact capability across voice-directed workflows for distribution and logistics at a major industrial conglomerate, then carried it into a full autonomous material handling platform. Bring them in when the product challenge is turning robot-and-software infrastructure into something warehouse operators actually trust and adopt.

  10. BHRN-2787 📈 Sales — Apparel categories inside sporting goods brands don't expand themselves, they require someone who understands both channel architecture and the product credibility that earns a performance brand permission to move beyond core equipment. This director built that credibility at the world's leading hockey equipment brand, extending into lifestyle lines, national team licensing, and co-branded collaborations while drawing on earlier roots in performance textiles and specialty trade sales. Positioned to lead category-building for any active lifestyle brand that needs a commercial apparel lead who already knows where the channel traps are.

  11. BHRN-3005 🛠️ Product — Nine-plus years managing global men's and gender-free apparel lines at one of the most iconic footwear and streetwear brands in the world built a cross-functional muscle that few merchandising leaders at the VP level actually have. That foundation now runs the full softgoods portfolio at the world's largest snowboard brand, bridging DTC investment, wholesale channel complexity, and international product architecture inside a family-owned, B-Corp certified business. The merchandising leader a board reaches for when a passion-sport brand needs its softgoods to perform as a business, not just as product.

  12. BHRN-1221 📈 Sales — Walmart's fishing and outdoor category breaks vendors who treat it like any other mass account, with line reviews, private label expansion, and shelf resets that reward operators who understand how the buying desk actually works. This account manager grew POS by 73% across more than 1,200 stores, launched a Walmart private label tackle program from scratch, and absorbed a nine-figure competitor's SKU portfolio during a bankruptcy transition without losing a foot of shelf. Built for brands that need someone who has already sat across that table and won.

  13. BHRN-2445 ⚙️ Operations — Relocating a national distribution center, consolidating multi-continent production across Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and a China JV, and running the largest sleeping bag manufacturing plant in the United States are not theoretical credentials for an outdoor brand facing operational complexity. This is the manufacturing VP who has built and transformed multi-site operations across outdoor consumer goods, furniture, aerospace composites, and HVAC, and who applies lean and Six Sigma discipline to the kind of messy, real-asset environments where efficiency gains actually show up on the income statement.

  14. BHRN-6498 💻 Engineering — Flight control software that has to work on the first automated landing, not the thousandth, is the problem this engineer has spent a career solving. He built guidance, navigation and control systems from the ground up at a universal flight operating system company, rising from senior control systems engineer to VP of Engineering and Product while the platform moved toward FAA certification across multiple aircraft types. Deep aerospace defense grounding at a major defense contractor and hands-on control systems work on hyperloop transportation back that up.

  15. BHRN-6566 📈 Sales — Construction permitting has run on paper and municipal red tape for decades, and enterprise builders needed a sales motion that could sell a category that didn't exist yet. This VP of Sales built that motion at a fast scaling AI permitting platform now working with national homebuilders and retail developers, after growing go to market teams past 40 reps at a fintech scaleup and leading domestic and international sales at a global co-working brand. He builds enterprise sales organizations for software categories that are still being defined in the market.

  16. BHRN-945 📈 Sales — Specialty outdoor brands expanding into North America often have world-class product and zero commercial infrastructure to match. This executive built the North American channel from scratch at a French ultra-light alpine brand, then ran all commercial operations for the sport, hunt, fish, and run segments of a globally respected safety and lighting company. A rare combination of wholesale depth, global product fluency, and general management range built entirely inside specialty outdoor.

  17. BHRN-3834 📈 Sales — Thirty years selling consumer goods through every channel that matters, from mass and drug to specialty outdoor and e-commerce, at brands spanning beauty, home goods, and outdoor categories. Division President P&L, SVP national accounts at a global beauty company, Chief Customer Officer rebuilding commercial infrastructure at a PE-backed home furnishings brand, now driving North American growth for a leading outdoor repellent brand expanding into adjacent categories. Executives who need a sales leader fluent in retail media, key account strategy, and omnichannel execution at the same time should take this meeting.

  18. BHRN-2648 ⚙️ Operations — Multi-brand sporting goods portfolios break at the fulfillment layer when each brand carries its own service-level identity and no shared infrastructure exists to hold them together. This executive built that infrastructure from scratch, consolidating five sporting goods and apparel brands into a single distribution hub quadrupling the prior footprint, with prior global operations leadership at two major golf equipment companies. Suited for multi-brand consumer goods environments navigating portfolio restructuring, divestiture rationalization, or the physical infrastructure decisions that follow a major consolidation.

  19. BHRN-1607 🛠️ Product — Robotics and AI product management at the intersection of physical automation and enterprise software, with hands-on experience shipping intelligent systems at a pre-IPO robotics company and a consumer robotics platform with global reach. The technical foundation runs from electrical engineering through an MBA, which means product decisions get pressure-tested from both the build side and the business side. Suited for product organizations that need someone who can translate between engineers building novel hardware-software stacks and the commercial teams responsible for selling them.

  20. BHRN-1586 📈 Sales — Trained as a tech-transaction lawyer, then spent a career turning that fluency into enterprise sales leadership at the platforms that digital contracting runs on. Hired 100 sales reps in a single year at a major professional network, built the legal-vertical go-to-market from scratch at a leading e-signature platform, and now leads the sales organization at the digital contracting platform reshaping how legal teams operate. Rare profile for any platform selling into legal operations, procurement, or general counsel offices where buyer credibility closes the deal faster than any playbook.

Register yourself for the Bearhug Network here: bearhugrecruiting.com/join-network

Know an executive or emerging leader who belongs in the Bearhug Network as well? Point them to bearhugrecruiting.com/join-network so we can get them the exposure they deserve as well.

Know someone hiring? Send them a link to the network page at bearhugrecruiting.com/network. 

You become the person who helped solve their problem and saved them both time and money by having more than one answer to the "who do you know?" question. And when that introduction leads to a hire, we track it, and believe you'll love getting unexpected thank-you checks in the mail!

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The Bearhug Network: 15 Newly Vetted Leaders Went Live This Week (Out of 93+ Who Joined You). This Is The Company Your Profile Keeps. See Who You're Standing Next To and Join Them Today.