What happens to your career trajectory when you're the best-kept secret in your industry?
This week's slate skews heavily toward product and design, four of the 16 featured profiles, with operations and supply chain and people and culture close behind at three apiece. That concentration says something about where consumer brands and enterprise tech companies are investing right now, less in broad management layers and more in the specific operators who can own a category, a supply chain, or a workforce transformation end to end. General management, marketing and brand, finance and strategy, and sales and commercial round out the group, proof that this network isn't organized around one function looking for its moment, it's built for executives across the full org chart who are ready to be found.
Among this week's standouts, a product director who built an entirely new running category inside a cycling-first connected fitness brand, positioning its flagship device as a credible alternative to established incumbents. A GM and de facto CPO who rebuilt a shuttered heritage wool brand from zero, restoring its wholesale relationships and supply chain in a single push. And a people leader who built HR infrastructure for a 450-person vertically integrated sock mill running seven days a week, proving that manufacturing culture and mission-driven retention aren't mutually exclusive.
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 16 of the 89+ newly vetted executive profiles our team has added to the Bearhug Network this week:
BHRN-1151 ⚙️ Operations — Multi-brand outdoor operations experience, earned across a portfolio house running Kelty, Sierra Designs, and Ultimate Direction simultaneously, is a rare foundation for a VP Ops role at a growth-stage brand. Topo Designs added this operator to lead supply chain, distribution, logistics, and the full back-office stack as the brand scaled through PE backing and a 10-plus-store retail footprint. Fit for outdoor and active lifestyle brands navigating the $30M-to-$100M stage where wholesale complexity, owned retail, and DTC all have to run on the same operational infrastructure.
BHRN-1816 🛠️ Product — Warehouse floors, retail stores, and logistics networks all have the same unsolved problem: knowing where everything is, in real time, without requiring a full infrastructure overhaul to find out. Across three decades building location-intelligence and IoT platforms at the intersection of hardware, software, and edge computing, this director has shipped the systems that answer that question at scale inside one of the largest supply-chain technology companies in the world. Ideal for organizations that need someone who can hold the product vision and the engineering reality in the same hand simultaneously.
BHRN-2094 💰 Finance — CPA-credentialed finance leader who grew into the CFO seat at a Southern California action sports apparel brand, managing full-cycle finance across DTC and wholesale at a bootstrapped, mid-market consumer label before moving to the same role at a nine-figure bootstrapped men's performance brand. Rare profile for growing DTC apparel companies that need a finance leader who has already lived the transition from scrappy accounting function to boardroom-ready CFO, without ever sitting inside a public company or a PE-backed bureaucracy.
BHRN-2038 👥 People & Culture — HR architecture for a manufacturing workforce looks nothing like corporate HR, union and non-union dynamics, shift-based scheduling, high-turnover environments, and the constant tension between operational throughput and workforce investment. Across nearly two decades at one of America's most recognizable workwear brands, this director has built and sustained the people infrastructure behind both corporate functions and domestic supply chain operations spanning multiple states. If your brand is scaling domestic manufacturing or navigating workforce complexity in a union-adjacent environment, this is the operator who has lived it at nine-figure scale.
BHRN-1213 ⚙️ Operations — Quality and compliance systems for a category that did not exist five years ago require someone who can write the regulatory playbook while the product is already on shelves nationwide. A Certified Food Scientist with a master's in food safety who built the global QA function at America's largest dedicated non-alcoholic craft brewer, scaling it through triple-digit growth, international expansion, and three production facilities. The person consumer brands in better-for-you beverages call when food science credibility, regulatory fluency, and operational scale all have to move together.
BHRN-1575 🛠️ Product — Wahoo's entry into indoor running required someone who could take a hardware-first cycling brand and build an entirely new product category from scratch, inside a company with no running DNA. At a connected fitness company that had spent its first decade owning the cycling training space, this director architected the running portfolio and positioned KICKR RUN as the credible alternative to category incumbents. Rare product leadership with both the zero-to-one build instincts and the channel literacy to take a new category from concept to shelf in a specialty-retail-plus-DTC distribution model.
BHRN-1828 📈 Sales — Decades selling integrated advertising programs across some of the most recognized consumer media titles in the market, with a sustained focus on retail, CPG, and food categories where brand partnerships live or die on data, targeting, and custom content. Built new business consistently at a celebrity weekly, a prestige lifestyle publisher, a major sports franchise title, and a native advertising platform, across both print and digital. Brings the category fluency and agency relationships that let a sales team walk into retail and CPG accounts with credibility from the first call.
BHRN-1127 👥 People & Culture — Integrating three acquired companies into a single culture without losing the mission that made the original brand worth acquiring is one of the hardest people problems in consumer goods. This people leader navigated exactly that at an energy-access outdoor brand, managing the human architecture of combining Goal Zero, MPOWERD, and a third acquisition while scaling headcount across a B-Corp-certified organization. A VP-level HR operator whose background in sustainable fashion and social impact nonprofits gives her a cultural credibility inside mission-driven brands that a traditional HR hire rarely carries.
BHRN-1567 🛠️ Product — Relaunching a shuttered merino wool brand from zero means rebuilding the product line, the supply chain, and the wholesale relationships simultaneously, with no runway for mistakes. At a heritage performance apparel label that closed and re-emerged under new ownership, this operator served as de facto GM and CPO through the full rebuild, re-entering specialty outdoor wholesale after years of DTC-only operation. If your brand is navigating a restart or a channel-mix reset, this is the product leader who has done exactly that with tier-one technical fabrics and a lean team.
BHRN-1705 🏢 General Management — Consumer marketplaces, financial products, and device protection at scale create a specific kind of product complexity, where the business model, the customer experience, and the trust architecture have to move together or the whole thing breaks. This product leader has navigated that exact tension across a major short-term rental platform, a rent-to-own proptech company, and a consumer technology services company. Rare combination of investment banking analytical rigor and operator-level product craft, built for CPO or senior product roles spanning ambiguous early-stage and scaled-platform problems.
BHRN-1238 👥 People & Culture — Purpose-driven consumer brands attract mission-aligned people, but retaining them through rapid growth, a manufacturing floor running seven days a week, and a lifetime-guarantee culture requires HR architecture most brand-side people leaders have never built. This operator built exactly that, bringing people leadership across three of Vermont's most recognized social-impact consumer brands before taking on the manufacturing complexity of a 450-person vertically integrated sock mill. The rare HR executive who can hold culture and shop floor accountability in the same operating model.
BHRN-2098 🎯 Marketing — Retention marketing and ecommerce at DTC-native lifestyle brands where growth without the right inventory and merchandising foundation usually ends badly. Built that foundation twice, at a cult coastal apparel brand and a curated outdoor men's retailer, running the full web business, revenue and margin targets, and website UX while simultaneously owning merchandise planning and paid growth. Strong fit for brands where the DTC channel is the business, not an afterthought to wholesale.
BHRN-1869 🛠️ Product — Search, discovery, and recommendation systems built to operate at cloud scale across healthcare, entertainment, finance, and education, with patents and IEEE-published research behind the work. Spent two decades getting AI to do something harder than accuracy, getting it to matter inside organizations that have competing priorities, legacy architectures, and no patience for pilot-forever deployments. Bring this person into a product organization where AI needs to go from capability to adoption and the gap between those two things is where the roadmap keeps stalling.
BHRN-2057 ⚙️ Operations — Vendor contracts, social compliance, and global sourcing risk usually require three different people at most brands. This operator holds a JD in Procurement Law and built supply chain strategy from senior manager to Global VP at a nine-figure workwear institution, then rebuilt procurement infrastructure from scratch at a mid-market outdoor living company before that. Rare profile for brands that need supply chain leadership capable of negotiating, litigating, and executing without a translator between legal and ops.
BHRN-2074 🏢 General Management — Somebody has to build HR at a founder-run workwear brand that spent decades winning on product and culture before it ever had a formal people function. This executive was that person, building from a single HR manager role to leading a 140-person global HR organization at a nine-figure heritage apparel company while the workforce grew double digits over a sustained stretch. The operating challenge now in front of Human Performance Brands navigating founder-to-institutional transitions is exactly where this depth compounds.
BHRN-968 🎯 Marketing — Affiliate and influencer programs are easy to launch and expensive to let run on autopilot; the brands that win treat them as precision growth channels with real attribution, real creator relationships, and real accountability. This operator built that infrastructure at a high-growth DTC subscription protein brand where affiliate was a primary acquisition engine, then carried the discipline into a connected fitness company navigating the post-pandemic hardware market. Fluent in both the analytics layer and the creator relationship side, where most programs fall apart when only one half is working.
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