The Bearhug Network: 18 Newly Vetted Leaders Went Live This Week (Out of 94+ Who Joined You). This Is The Company Your Profile Keeps. See Who You're Standing Next To and Join Them Today.
Who sees your work before you ever send a resume?
Two functions dominate the 18 profiles featured this week from the hundreds who went live on the network. Marketing and Brand brings 6 and Sales and Commercial brings 4, which puts 10 of the 18 on the commercial side of the business. If you are gauging where the market is moving, look at what those leaders built. Consumer brands that grew on DTC are building wholesale and specialty relationships, and enterprise tech companies want marketers who can prove pipeline instead of describing it. Product and Design adds 3 more, and several of them stood up a function from scratch instead of inheriting one.
The standouts show what that looks like. One sales operator built an NE APAC business from zero presence, with wholesale, channel, and retail relationships developed over a decade-plus. One operations leader ran a lean transformation that produced an 87.5% improvement in delivery consistency and a 94.6% reduction in inventory variance. One marketer walked in as a company's first marketing hire and scaled the function to 30+ events a year, including a flagship conference that returned 160%+ ROI. And one product leader led 300+ developers and engineers across 7 countries before standing up a footwear program from the ground up.
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 18 of the hundreds of newly vetted executive profiles our team has added to the Bearhug Network this week:
BHRN-1430 📈 Sales — Specialty outdoor retail punishes brands that have burned the channel, and winning it back requires someone buyers and floor staff already trust. This sales leader rebuilt a technical outdoor apparel brand's standing with the Grassroots Outdoor Alliance from the ground up, earning the organization's Vendor of Excellence recognition while managing the full wholesale channel across independent specialty and key accounts. Exactly the relationship equity a brand needs when credibility in specialty outdoor has to be rebuilt, not just claimed.
BHRN-1382 ⚙️ Operations — Demand signal accuracy at a footwear company running two outdoor brands simultaneously is a different problem than generic supply chain planning, because each brand carries distinct channel mix, seasonal velocity, and wholesale versus DTC inventory logic that has to resolve into a single operating plan. This director holds that complexity at Merrell and Chaco inside one of the largest publicly traded footwear portfolios in North America. Bring them to a mid-sized outdoor or active lifestyle brand where demand planning is still being built rather than optimized.
BHRN-964 🛠️ Product — Performance footwear and outdoor brands break when design culture drifts from the product identity that built the channel relationships in the first place. This designer rebuilt that alignment at a sustainable footwear brand navigating a pivot toward profitability, after leading global design at a cycling performance brand and serving as Global Creative Director at a French alpine sports powerhouse. Aesthetic authority and commercial grounding in the same seat.
BHRN-2267 🎯 Marketing — Surface protection is a commodity category until someone builds a brand architecture that makes four independent trade labels speak with one voice. That is exactly what this marketer did at the 2022 launch of a multi-brand platform uniting construction, paint, flooring, and trades channels under a single house-of-brands strategy, earning a major national retailer's Marketing Innovator Award in year one. Brings 30 years of brand-building depth across premium kitchen appliances and home improvement hardware to any manufacturer navigating the moment when fragmented product lines need to become a coherent brand.
BHRN-1730 🏢 General Management — Roughly 20 years building enterprise SaaS for the connected-vehicle and telematics space, from early IoT platforms to AI-driven fleet intelligence at a major telematics company serving small-to-mid-size operators. The engineering depth is CTO-level, the product instinct was sharpened by sitting directly below a CPO and owning the roadmap conversation on the R&D side. Built for a high-growth or earlier-stage company that needs one person to own both the engineering org and the product direction, particularly where IoT, location intelligence, or connected-asset data is the core of the platform.
BHRN-3342 🎯 Marketing — Thirty-five years inside the brand environments that define how consumers experience outdoor and active lifestyle companies in stores, at retail, and across markets worldwide. At a publicly traded outdoor conglomerate navigating revenue pressure and an international growth thesis, she holds the dual mandate of activating international markets and setting the physical and experiential standard for how the brand shows up globally. If a company needs someone who can hold brand coherence across 90 countries while simultaneously pushing international marketing activation forward, this is that executive.
BHRN-1231 🎯 Marketing — Snowboard culture is either native to how you think about a brand or it isn't, and no amount of clever strategy closes that gap. This operator spent more than a decade as the architect of positioning, athlete partnerships, and channel marketing at a fast-growing independent technical outerwear brand, steering through a founder transition and into back-to-back record years. Senior marketing leader for action sports and technical apparel brands where specialty credibility has to be earned the same way the consumer earns theirs.
BHRN-1092 📈 Sales — Stood up the sales strategy and planning function at a DTC-first performance apparel brand mid-transition, when the wholesale channel existed mostly on the whiteboard and retail partnerships were still being negotiated from scratch. The proof is a track record across three ethical and mission-led apparel and footwear brands, each navigating the moment when DTC-built brand equity has to translate into shelf placement, gym-floor distribution, and specialty retail relationships. Bring this to a brand where the DTC foundation is solid and the wholesale chapter is just beginning.
BHRN-2730 🛠️ Product — Thirty-plus years building performance footwear from the ground up, including a decade-long run as VP leading 300+ developers and engineers across seven countries and a nine-figure operating budget at the world's largest athletic brand. Then came the harder test: standing up the product creation function from scratch at an India-based sportswear startup, then stepping into a high-growth outdoor brand's first-ever in-house footwear program as it aims to become a pinnacle mountain footwear name. The executive who knows how to build technical footwear organizations at both ends of the scale spectrum.
BHRN-1260 🖥️ Digital — When a DTC-first performance apparel brand scales through a buyout, a full women's launch, and a resale platform debut all inside the same ecommerce function, it needs someone who owns the infrastructure through every transition, not just the growth phase. This VP did exactly that at a premium men's performance apparel brand, becoming the longest-tenured digital leader in its history. Built for brands that need ecommerce leadership with institutional memory, not just momentum.
BHRN-1913 🎯 Marketing — Rare profile in B2B SaaS marketing: someone who walked in as a company's first marketing hire, built the entire function from nothing, and scaled it to 30-plus events a year including a flagship industry conference with 160-percent-plus ROI. That foundation sits on top of deep martech fluency across Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot, and Terminus, plus a customer success layer built around an AI-powered consumer product. Brings the full-stack GTM range that growth-stage technology companies need when they are ready to turn marketing from a cost center into a compounding growth engine.
BHRN-3410 📈 Sales — Selling digital commerce services into the outdoor and active-lifestyle industry requires something most agency sales leaders don't have: two decades of credibility on the brand side, earned across a technical performance-materials company, a men's performance apparel brand, and one of Seattle's most respected technical outdoor labels. That background is what turns a cold outreach into a peer conversation and a peer conversation into a signed engagement. Brings VP-caliber commercial leadership to growth-stage ecommerce agencies and platforms that need a seller who already speaks the buyer's language.
BHRN-2062 📊 Data — Rare data executive who has built analytics capability inside two structurally different organizations, a fintech lender processing millions of mortgage transactions and a nine-figure family-owned workwear brand navigating its own DTC expansion. Thirteen-plus years at one of the most data-intensive companies in financial services, then brought that infrastructure discipline to a consumer brand where the analytics function had to grow alongside the business. Equally fluent in the organizational change work of shifting a company toward data-driven decisions and the technical architecture that makes those decisions possible.
BHRN-1619 🎯 Marketing — Pipeline accountability is easy to claim in B2B SaaS marketing and hard to actually build. This executive built the demand engine from scratch at a Vista Equity-backed compliance SaaS company, then at a healthcare performance management platform through a spin-out transition, then at a cloud infrastructure SaaS company through a hyper-growth phase and unicorn raise. Sixteen years of connecting marketing spend to sourced pipeline, funnel metrics, and attribution across enterprise software environments.
BHRN-2467 ⚙️ Operations — Firearms and defense-adjacent manufacturers face demand swings that few other consumer categories match, and the operations leader who keeps the factory floor intact through both the surge and the collapse is rare. Lean transformation at an outdoor and defense accessories manufacturer produced an 87.5% improvement in delivery consistency and a 94.6% reduction in inventory variance, then a workforce restructuring after rapid demand normalization kept the culture intact. Built for VP or COO roles at mid-market industrial or defense-adjacent manufacturers navigating volatility between growth cycles.
BHRN-1969 🎯 Marketing — Cybersecurity and enterprise software marketing built from a two-person function to an eleven-person team, with revenue scaled from seven figures to eight across that same span at a domain intelligence platform. That build happened through demand generation, customer lifecycle marketing, and product marketing working as a single system, not three separate lanes. Handed to an early-stage B2B technology company that is ready to get serious about demand acceleration, this is the operator who has done it once and is returning to do it faster.
BHRN-1574 📈 Sales — Japan is not a market you enter with a global playbook and a local distributor and expect it to work. This operator built Wahoo Fitness from zero presence into a functioning NE APAC business, with wholesale, channel, and retail relationships built from the ground up over a decade-plus, following a previous tenure doing the same thing for a major commercial fitness company in the same market. Fluent in the relationship depth Japan requires and the commercial architecture global brands need to make those markets perform.
BHRN-6842 🛠️ Product — Commercial real estate funds have long priced debt and leverage risk on spreadsheets and gut instinct, until this operator built an AI powered debt management platform for CRE funds through Techstars. That founder run followed capital markets and industrial asset work at a major real estate services firm, pairing real estate finance fluency with product instincts built for institutional buyers. Now leads capital markets and investor facing product lines at a large CRE data platform, shipping the tools lenders and investment teams use to underwrite deals faster.
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