Job Description
EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it. RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem. ️ SEE EXAMPLE ️ HARRY’S TEARDOWN: Tervis invented the double-wall insulated tumbler in 1946 (literally — two cups fused together with an air gap between them to keep drinks hot or cold). For most of the next 78 years, it was the default American drinkware brand your mom bought at the college bookstore with your school’s logo on it. Then stainless steel happened. YETI happened. Stanley happened. Simple Modern happened. Tervis, which had been building a wholesale-first business on licensed designs, got caught flat-footed by a category that suddenly rewarded DTC-native operators with TikTok-fluent creative teams. Hey, I’m just telling it like it is. In September 2024 (filed on or about September 5–6, 2024), the company filed for Chapter 11. In February 2025 (plan confirmed February 18, 2025; formally exited February 11, 2025), it emerged from bankruptcy. In August 2025, a Delaware-based manufacturing investor group called JV2 Innovative Products acquired a majority stake, and the company is now operating as Tervis LLC under new ownership, with headquarters relocated to Bradenton, Florida. And on or around April 8, 2026, Tervis announced the acquisition of Symglass — an unbreakable glass drinkware maker — now being brought to market as Symglass by Tervis, the first product-line extension under new ownership. This is a reset. It’s happening now. And a CMO is being hired into the reset. Here’s why I think this job is genuinely interesting: First, the category is growing, not shrinking. The global insulated and reusable drinkware category continues to grow meaningfully, with various third-party forecasts projecting strong mid-to-high single-digit CAGRs through 2033, driven by sustainability, on-the-go consumption, and premiumization trends. The U.S. reusable water bottle and tumbler segment remains a multi-billion-dollar opportunity growing in the mid-single digits. The pie is expanding. Tervis is not losing to the category — it is recovering inside a rising category. A CMO who shows up with a disciplined DTC and brand playbook is pushing on a door that’s already opening. Second, the licensing portfolio is the real story here, and almost nobody outside the industry knows about it. Tervis has active licensing agreements across MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, effectively the entire NCAA, and every branch of the U.S. Military. This is one of the most extensive independent drinkware licensing portfolios in North America, anchored by sports, collegiate, entertainment, and military IP. Licensed designs have historically represented a substantial share of total company revenue — in the mid-40% range, per public third-party case study sources. And yet — stay with me — the tervis.com DTC channel currently represents a modest but growing portion of total revenue, with significant headroom relative to the size of Tervis’ addressable fan base. By comparison, Simple Modern — with FAR fewer licensed designs and no pro sports licensing — has generated an estimated $250M+ in recent years, primarily through DTC and Amazon. The asset is real. The monetization of that asset, direct to the fan, is wide open. The incoming CMO’s single highest-leverage opportunity is to convert the licensing portfolio into a DTC personalization engine. Third, the customer is specific, honest, and predictable. Tervis’ core buyer historically skews toward women aged 35–55, college-educated, Southern and Southeast U.S., with strong affinity for licensed content — SEC football, pro sports, military service branches, Disney, and gift-worthy personalization. The purchase occasion is emotional: The person is not buying a tumbler; they are buying their team, their school, or their branch of service — on a functional object they use every day. Tervis’ historical Lifetime Guarantee was its original Grand Slam Offer. Rebuilding trust in that guarantee post-bankruptcy is one of the most important brand moves this CMO will make. Fourth, this is a seat creation, not a seat replacement. Tervis has not had a standalone C-level marketing executive in its modern era. The most recent Chief Brand Officer, Rich Kaplan, departed in 2013, and for 13 years the function has been run at a VP level below the C-suite. JV2 is elevating the seat because the growth thesis requires it. There is no political legacy, no predecessor’s ghost, no budget locked into the wrong agency retainers, and no KPI tradition to unlearn. That is either a builder’s dream or a builder’s graveyard, depending on the operator. Fifth, the peer group knows licensed retail cold. The President and Chief Revenue Officer at Tervis is a senior consumer-goods operator whose background includes P&G, Dannon, Yankee Candle, and Wellness Pet. If the name **Yankee Candle** registers with you, you already know how licensed / giftable / occasion-driven consumer brands actually run at the retail shelf. The incoming CMO will be partnering with an executive who understands retail velocity, category management, sell-through, and turns at a native level — which means a CMO who can speak both brand-equity AND commercial-ops language will thrive, and a CMO who speaks only in brand-equity abstractions will not. The short version: Tervis owns a licensing moat that is genuinely hard to replicate, inside a category that is growing fast, under manufacturing-focused owners who are actively funding product-line expansion (Symglass, TervisHome melamine dinnerware, America250) and who explicitly elevated the marketing function to the C-suite. The DTC channel is currently generating less than 10% of total revenue. Simple Modern proved what’s possible with roughly one-tenth the licensing IP. The math for a capable operator is compelling. JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™ ABOUT THE ROLE: Tervis is hiring a Chief Marketing Officer to lead the brand, licensing, digital, and category-expansion agenda across all commercial channels — DTC (tervis.com), Amazon, wholesale (Dick’s Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Lids, college bookstores, resort/gift shops), promotional products, and owned retail. Your mission will be to … • Convert Tervis’ licensing portfolio into a direct-to-consumer personalization engine that generates meaningful incremental revenue and gross profit, • Lead the category-expansion narrative behind TervisHome (licensed melamine dinnerware), Symglass by Tervis (unbreakable glass drinkware), and the America250 patriotic collection, and • Stand up the modern marketing infrastructure — brand, CRM, retention, attribution, and creative — that the business has not had at a C-suite level in more than a decade. THIS IS A COACH & PLAYER ROLE. The org chart is lean by design, and the CMO is expected to build through direct hands-on execution in Year 1 before scaling a team. THIS IS NOT A TURNAROUND — the company has already exited Chapter 11, has new ownership, has a working product line, and is actively acquiring. THIS IS A RESET AND EXPANSION, and the CMO is being hired to be the marketing engine of that reset. Location & Work Style: The company is headquartered in Bradenton, Florida following its post-acquisition HQ relocation. This role is open to remote candidates on the East Coast, with travel as needed to the Bradenton headquarters, key retail partners, licensor meetings, and industry events. JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™ AREAS OF OVERSIGHT: Brand, Licensing & Category Strategy • Define and lead the Tervis brand positioning across all channels — bringing clarity to what Tervis means in 2026 and beyond, in a category now anchored by YETI, Stanley, Simple Modern, Hydro Flask, and Corkcicle. • Own the licensing strategy end-to-end: renewals and active compliance management across MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, NCAA institutions, U.S. Military branches, and entertainment IP — treating the licensing portfolio as the company’s most valuable and most undermonetized asset, not as a wholesale catalog. • Lead the category-expansion narrative for TervisHome (licensed melamine dinnerware as the at-home extension of the stadium experience), Symglass (premium unbreakable glass with licensed designs applied), and the America250 patriotic collection launching in 1,700+ retail doors before Memorial Day 2026. • Run the public warranty-trust restoration program, publicly reaffirming the Lifetime Guarantee with operational backing — the single highest-leverage brand move available to the incoming CMO. Multi-Brand Digital Acquisition (DTC + Amazon) • Rebuild tervis.com into a licensing-led, “Shop Your Team” design experience — with dedicated NCAA, NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and Military sections, league-level email capture, and retargeting audiences built by team affinity rather than product category. • Lead the Amazon channel end-to-end: Brand Store rebuild with Shop Your Team filtering, A+ content on the top-velocity ASINs, SEO-optimized listings for licensed-design keywords, disciplined bid and budget management aligned to SKU-level profit, and a deliberate halo strategy that protects margin instead of surrendering the conversion to a marketplace. • Own paid media discipline across Google, Meta, and emerging platforms — with a clear mandate to fix back-of-funnel retention and LTV before scaling first-purchase paid acquisition, because category-level CAC inflation has made disciplined retention and repeat-purchase math the only reliable way to make DTC paid economics work at scale in this category. • Stand up a TikTok commerce program — creator partnerships, native licensed-design content, and TikTok Shop catalog enablement — to activate the most powerful brand-discovery channel currently unused by the business. Email, SMS, Lifecycle & Retention • Stand up a Klaviyo (or equivalent) ESP with a full 7-email welcome series, abandoned-cart flows, post-purchase flows, birthday and event triggers, and a disciplined 30-day repeat-purchase capture strategy — the window where the vast majority of second-order conversions happen. • Architect email and SMS segmentation around licensed affinity (your SEC football subscribers do not want NFL creative, and the NHL subscriber definitely does not want a Disney promo), which is both obvious and currently non-existent at Tervis. • Own the buildout of the loyalty / repeat-purchase program and tie it operationally to the reaffirmed Lifetime Guarantee, turning a brand promise into a retention mechanic. Category Expansion: TervisHome, Symglass, America250 • Lead the GTM for TervisHome, positioning licensed melamine dinnerware as a blue-ocean extension (“your stadium section, now at your dinner table”) into a category where YETI, Stanley, and Simple Modern are NOT competing — and where an NCAA football fan who owns a Tervis tumbler is an unusually high-likelihood buyer of a matching dinnerware set. • Lead the GTM for Symglass by Tervis, including the product roadmap for applying the existing licensing catalog to the unbreakable-glass platform, targeting the older, more affluent demographic that wants glass quality without the breakage risk. • Lead the America250 DTC campaign architecture — email capture, social amplification, pre-orders, and collector-set bundling — before the Memorial Day 2026 window, and turn the patriotic-buyer cohort into a remarketable segment for military, political, and seasonal licensed designs year-round. B2B, Corporate Gifting & Promotional Products • Partner with Koozie Group (Tervis’ exclusive US/Canada promotional products channel) and the internal sales organization to activate the corporate gifting and B2B customization funnel — a $242B global category in which branded drinkware is the #1 volume gift. • Build a dedicated B2B web experience, LinkedIn audience targeting for HR and corporate event planners, minimum-order optimization, and a clear promotional-products pipeline for repeat corporate buyers. ✅ subscribe Data, Analytics & Marketing Technology • Audit the existing marketing tech stack and build the modern infrastructure the business has never had — CDP, ESP, attribution tooling, creative ops, marketing mix modeling — in a disciplined, budget-conscious way. • Move attribution beyond last-click toward a defensible multi-touch or MMM-informed model that the CFO and the CRO can both live with. • Own the KPI dashboard the CMO will report on monthly: total net revenue, licensed-design sell-through at retail, DTC channel revenue as a percentage of total, 30-day repeat purchase rate, warranty/sentiment scores, paid media payback, and incremental gross profit attributable to marketing investment. Agency, Vendor & Creative Leadership • Build or rebuild the agency roster from a near-clean-sheet starting point — creative, paid media, SEO, influencer/creator, lifecycle, and PR — with deliberate vendor consolidation wherever possible. • Lead creative direction for brand campaigns, licensed-design launches, TervisHome, Symglass, and America250 — partnering closely with the existing internal Graphics, Creative Services, and Art Direction teams who currently sit inside the commercial organization. Cross-Functional Commercial Partnership • Operate as a peer to the President / Chief Revenue Officer, the CFO, the VP of Sales, and the Senior Director of Innovation & NPD — translating brand and marketing investments into the language of retail velocity, category management, sell-through, and turns that the commercial leadership already speaks fluently. • Partner with Operations and Supply Chain on demand planning, S&OP discipline, and inventory-aware marketing — because the Amazon and DTC playbooks both require marketers who integrate inventory data into campaign planning, not marketers who treat inventory as a separate operational issue. JOB SEARCH GOT YOU STUCK? Book an hour with VP/CMO ecommerce recruiter, Harry Joiner, who prepared this analysis. Includes a 3-month membership to NEXTgig™ QUALIFICATIONS: EDUCATION & CERTIFICATION • Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrated experience running a consumer-brand marketing function. FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCIES — SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE • 8–15 years of progressive marketing leadership experience in consumer goods or consumer lifestyle brands, with demonstrated ownership of both brand and commercial outcomes. Large-company generalist CPG experience alone (e.g., pure P&G / Unilever / Kraft Heinz CPG track, with no DTC or licensed-product ownership) is not the profile we’re looking for. • Proven, hands-on experience running DTC (ecommerce + Amazon) for a branded consumer business — including the specific levers of traffic, conversion, AOV, and retention, and the specific tooling of ESP/CRM (Klaviyo, Attentive, or equivalent), paid media platforms, and marketplace ad stacks. • Strong command of licensed merchandise, sports/collegiate/military/entertainment licensing, or licensed-giftable consumer categories. Direct background at a sports-licensed brand (Fanatics, Collegiate Licensing Company, a Learfield property, Cutter & Buck, Heritage Sportswear, Vineyard Vines, Johnnie-O, or similar) is a substantial advantage — as is experience at a heritage or challenger consumer brand that has executed a post-distressed brand recovery. Drinkware-specific experience is a bonus, not a requirement. • Demonstrated ability to build DTC revenue on a constrained budget and against a wholesale-anchored revenue base, without triggering channel conflict with existing retail accounts. • Fluency in wholesale and retail channel dynamics — sell-in, sell-through, retail velocity, category management, co-op marketing, retail media, and key-account partnership development. • Operating fluency with modern marketing technology: CDP selection and deployment, ESP/CRM flow architecture, attribution and MMM, creative ops, and AI-assisted workflow tooling where it accelerates execution and sharpens analysis. We are looking for a CMO who uses AI to execute faster and think sharper — not a CMO who treats AI as a research novelty or a reporting toy. • Demonstrated hands-on command of Amazon as a brand-building channel — not just an advertising channel. SKU-level profit analytics, TACoS discipline, search-query and brand-analytics literacy, and Brand Store / A+ content leadership are all expected. • Experience activating short-form video and creator commerce (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) for consumer brands, with the creative judgment to know what will travel natively and what will not. ✅ subscribe LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT / BEHAVIORAL COMPETENCIES • Ability to lead meaningful commercial outcomes through influence before you have formal authority. The CMO is a new C-level seat in an organization whose commercial function (ecommerce, sales, retail) currently reports up through the President / CRO. You will earn authority through commercial results in the first 12 months, not receive it by title on Day One. • Demonstrated ability to manage agency relationships, direct internal creative teams, and hire smart in a constrained headcount environment — including comfort with fractional, contract, and agency leverage in Year 1 before scaling a permanent team. • Executive communication fluency with commercial-first leadership, ownership group reporting, and manufacturing-investor-style boards — meaning you can translate brand equity and lifetime value into the same P&L language the CFO and CRO use. • Strong partnership instincts with Product, Innovation & NPD, Operations, Supply Chain, Sales, and Finance — no solo-artist CMOs, no ivory-tower brand strategists. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS • High integrity, high self-direction, high tolerance for ambiguity. • Builder’s temperament. You are energized by a clean-sheet opportunity — the idea of writing the marketing playbook from scratch inside a 78-year-old heritage brand is a feature, not a bug. • Carry-your-own-bags operator. Happy to open Klaviyo yourself, sketch the wireframe yourself, draft the brief yourself, and review the creative yourself in Year 1. The institutional-resources CMO profile will not thrive here. • Commercial, not ceremonial. You measure your own performance the way the CFO and the CRO measure it — in incremental revenue and gross profit, not in brand-health scores alone. • Resilient, entrepreneurial, and comfortable operating inside a reset-and-expansion environment under new ownership. • Genuine affection for licensed consumer goods, sports fandom, and gift-driven commerce. If you don’t emotionally understand why an SEC football fan would pay $35 for a tumbler with their team’s logo on it, this is not the role for you. • Strong written and verbal communicator — especially in writing, because the role is remote-friendly and the CMO will need to lead through clear, disciplined written communication across a distributed commercial organization. EMPLOYERS: Separate from recruiting, I write investment‑grade recruiting briefs that walk A‑player ecommerce candidates through the real business case for your role – the market, channels, KPIs, tech stack, team, and AI issues – before they ever get on Zoom with you. I research / write it. YOU bless it. YOU own it. RESULT: Your first‑round conversations are with 6-8 highly informed A-players who already understand where/how they can drive EBITDA. To have me write and send your posting out to this list, text Harry Joiner at (404) 281‑2025. Confidential briefs / application process are no problem.