The Bearhug Network: Check Out This Week's 20 Freshly Vetted Executive Profiles (out of 82+) Added Across Consumer Brands & Enterprise Tech. All Ready and Waiting Right Now To Take Your Call.
What does it say about the state of hiring when the executive who could fix your wholesale channel this quarter is sitting in a profile most search firms will never surface.
Sales and commercial leadership dominates this week's slate, and the pattern underneath the count is more interesting than the count itself. Nearly every commercial profile carries a channel-building story, wholesale from zero, partner networks scaled past a thousand accounts, distribution built into dozens of countries, often inside outdoor, apparel, and action sports categories where specialty retail relationships take years to earn and days to lose. Product and design profiles run close behind, and several of them come out of the same connected fitness and hardware world, suggesting a cluster of operators who understand both the engineering and the commercial side of physical products built to ship at scale.
Among the standouts, one executive built a wholesale function from scratch at a recognized DTC apparel brand and landed Nordstrom, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Scheels as launch partners in the process. Another led product development across smart trainers, GPS computers, and power pedals for a connected fitness hardware company where every device has to integrate cleanly with outside platforms. A third took a premium outerwear brand's non-technical category from nine figures to more than double globally while building its China strategy from the ground up. A fourth built an eco-footwear brand's entire DTC, wholesale, and brand story across two languages before the company had scale to justify a team.
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, with dozens more being added daily.
BHRN-6726 🏢 General Management — National security credibility rarely converts into contract wins for a small defense contractor entering the Army's enterprise procurement world. This executive commanded Patriot missile forces, served in the Secretary of Defense's immediate office under two administrations, and was personally selected by the Army Chief of Staff to run Army University Press before stepping into Army accounts leadership at a fast-growing federal contractor. Brings four-star-level trust and hands-on relationship building that opens doors most contractors can only request meetings for.
BHRN-1553 📈 Sales — Wholesale channels at outdoor and surf brands break when they grow faster than the relationships managing them. This executive spent over a decade as VP of North American Sales at one of the most distribution-intensive action sports companies in the world, then joined a founder-led performance apparel brand to architect its wholesale expansion into surf, coastal, and specialty outdoor doors. Bring this person in when the channel strategy needs to scale from regional traction to a national account footprint without losing the specialty relationships that built the brand.
BHRN-1809 🛠️ Product — Cybersecurity, AIOps, and IoT products built from early-stage hardware through cloud-scale platforms, with stops at a fleet intelligence company, an IT operations platform, and a data analytics leader before landing at an autonomous penetration testing startup. The connective tissue across two decades is translating machine learning and sensor data into products that non-technical buyers can actually act on. Bring this profile in when the roadmap lives at the intersection of AI capability and enterprise adoption and the gap between the two is costing you pipeline.
BHRN-1203 🖥️ Digital — Rare in digital commerce, this director has run both the brand's DTC engine and its channel marketing function at the same connected fitness company, earning fluency across two disciplines most operators never overlap. Demand generation, on-site merchandising, and revenue management on the brand's own site, then Amazon and REI account strategy and annual go-to-market planning before that. The cross-channel profile that active lifestyle brands need when DTC growth and retail channel performance have to move in the same direction at the same time.
BHRN-1340 ⚙️ Operations — Steel, hardware, and fitness equipment share one unforgiving supply-chain trait: cost overruns compound quietly until a balance sheet breaks. This operator built the procurement and inventory discipline to catch those breaks early, carrying SAP-backed materials management experience from a global steel conglomerate and North American heavy manufacturing into the operational core of a connected-fitness hardware company. Bring this profile into any early-growth hardware brand that needs supply-chain rigor without the overhead of a VP-level budget.
BHRN-1779 📈 Sales — Selling enterprise software through partners across 60+ countries is a different discipline than direct sales, and most software companies find that out the wrong way. This operator built partner sales organizations from scratch at an encryption software company later acquired by a major technology conglomerate, a PE-owned utilities resource management platform, and a partnership division spanning 55 countries at a publicly held enterprise software vendor. Boards and growth-stage software companies in the $10M-to-$100M range bring this person in when channel revenue needs to become real, not theoretical.
BHRN-6630 🎯 Marketing — Technical climbing and mountain-sports brands live or die by how their gear moves through specialty outdoor retail, and few marketers understand that channel from both sides of the aisle. This director built channel and brand marketing at a leading climbing hardware manufacturer, then led sport marketing and communications at its most direct global competitor, before returning to run global channel marketing at the original brand. That cross-competitor vantage point translates into channel strategy that speaks the language of REI buyers and specialty retail partners alike.
BHRN-1812 🛠️ Product — Thirteen years at the intersection of back-office finance, procurement, and supply chain automation, translated into product strategy at one of the largest enterprise workflow platforms in the world. The throughline across consulting at a global firm, digital product ownership at a services company built around finance transformation, and senior PM work at scale is an ability to walk into a room with finance or procurement buyers and speak their language before opening a slide deck. Builds customer-facing product roadmaps where domain credibility is the differentiator, not just the resume line.
BHRN-1445 📈 Sales — Lifestyle apparel brands expanding into wholesale often underestimate how different the Rocky Mountain specialty channel is from coastal accounts, and how long it takes to build the credibility that actually moves product off independent retailer floors. This operator built that regional foundation from scratch, progressing from territory rep across action sports and premium footwear to Director-level wholesale leadership at a sustainability-forward lifestyle brand and a nine-figure apparel company. Brands building their first serious wholesale infrastructure in outdoor and lifestyle channels will find someone who has done exactly this work.
BHRN-1742 📈 Sales — Psychology-trained, then Air Force-commissioned, then decade-plus of VP-level sales at health and wellness SaaS companies, this is a background that does not come off an assembly line. Built and rebuilt revenue teams at a diagnostics and wellness platform serving Fortune 500 payers and providers, then carried that playbook into early-stage SaaS where the motion had to be invented before it could be scaled. What separates this operator is the combination of enterprise account depth in healthcare and the channel alliance architecture that opens doors traditional direct sales teams cannot reach.
BHRN-1201 💻 Engineering — Consumer fitness hardware that performs at the elite professional level and ships reliably to millions of cyclists worldwide is an engineering problem most R&D directors never face at that combination of scale and openness. This engineer has led product development across smart trainers, GPS computers, power pedals, and a structured training app at a connected fitness hardware company, where every device must integrate cleanly with third-party platforms. A design and manufacturing foundation built across scaled consumer goods and logistics operations comes with the territory.
BHRN-1808 🛠️ Product — Warehouse robotics QA leadership built across the two organizations that defined the category, Amazon Robotics and a leading autonomous-fulfillment platform that counts major retailers among its customers. Oversaw quality assurance on systems with documented potential to eliminate tens of billions in supply chain operating costs, and led the architectural upgrade of a services-based robotics platform to guaranteed 100% uptime across fulfillment center sites. Brought in at the zero-to-one stage and still standing, this is the director who builds the quality infrastructure that makes robotics deployments sellable and scalable.
BHRN-1152 📈 Sales — Scaling a wholesale partner network past 1,200 accounts while simultaneously building the international distribution infrastructure to reach 30+ countries is the kind of commercial problem most outdoor brands face once and never fully solve. This operator did both inside a PE-backed outdoor brand navigating a CEO transition, leading a 12-person sales team across specialty retail, big box, and global channels. Rare capability at the intersection of domestic wholesale depth and international channel build, at exactly the $20M-to-$40M stage where those two motions usually pull in opposite directions.
BHRN-2064 ⚖️ Legal — Fourteen years as the sole legal voice inside a family-owned workwear brand that operates at nine-figure scale, covering corporate law, IP, privacy, technology vendor management, and international compliance without a big-firm safety net underneath. That breadth, combined with an undergraduate foundation in advertising, produces a GC who reads commercial risk the way operators do, not the way outside counsel does. Brands navigating ownership transitions, first-time legal buildouts, or IP protection in contested categories will find a rare combination of institutional depth and commercial instinct here.
BHRN-1440 🎯 Marketing — Sustainable footwear is a harder brand story to tell than it looks, recycled materials and algae foam mean nothing to a consumer who has never heard of the brand. This director built that story from scratch at a sub-$5M eco-footwear startup, running DTC, wholesale support, partnerships, and brand awareness simultaneously across English and French markets. Built for an early-stage or founder-led consumer brand that needs a bilingual marketer who can own the full brand stack without a team underneath her.
BHRN-981 📈 Sales — Zero-to-wholesale is the hardest channel build a DTC brand ever attempts, because the buyers, the logistics, and the org design are all foreign terrain while the DTC machine is still running. This executive built that function from scratch at one of the most recognized DTC apparel brands in the country, landing Nordstrom, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Scheels as launch partners while standing up the team and cross-functional model to sustain it. Built for brands in the $30M-to-$150M range when the board decides it's time to open wholesale.
BHRN-2324 📈 Sales — Contract and private-label manufacturing is a selling environment most branded CPG directors have never navigated, where the product on the shelf carries someone else's name and the value proposition has to be rebuilt from scratch. This director made that translation at a nine-figure aerosol and liquid manufacturer, managing retail and B2B relationships across personal care, home care, and automotive categories. Someone who understands both sides of the shelf equation, with P&L ownership, digital marketing leadership, and national account development across health, beauty, and household goods.
BHRN-1624 🎯 Marketing — Seed-to-scale marketing for B2B software companies where the real end user is a tradesperson, a lawyer, or someone whose job looks nothing like the buyer who signed the contract. Built growth engines at a construction-tech platform and a legal workflow startup, taking both from early traction to the point where paid and organic channels compounded without constant reinvention. The marketer who understands that the gap between the buyer persona and the person actually using the product is where brand-building either earns its keep or disappears into the noise.
BHRN-3395 🛠️ Product — Award-winning product design chops built at a major power tool manufacturer and a global sporting goods company, then deepened across five escalating roles at a publicly traded industrial tools group where the work shifted from designing individual products to leading the innovation architecture behind an entire portfolio. The operator who takes a manufacturing company's new product development function from reactive to strategic, connecting industrial design, growth mandates, and cross-functional teams into a single motion. Suited for product leadership roles at manufacturers navigating the gap between engineering-driven culture and market-driven innovation.
BHRN-1185 🛠️ Product — When a premium outerwear brand needs to coordinate global product strategy, DTC rationalization, and China market development at the same time, the merchandising function has to do three different jobs without losing coherence. This executive scaled a non-technical lifestyle category from nine figures to more than double globally, built a China-specific product and marketing strategy from the ground up, and oversaw a softgoods portfolio of meaningful scale at a marquee outerwear brand. Rare fluency across international complexity, DTC transformation, and wholesale channel management.
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