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Revenue Brew

Revenue Strategy & Leadership

Layla Ilchi

revenuebrew.com

When Courtney Claghorn started beauty services company Sugared + Bronzed in 2010, clients would swing by her Los Angeles apartment to get their spray tans.

Fourteen years later, Sugared + Bronzed now operates 39 locations across the country (most opened post-Covid) and offers mobile services in Los Angeles. According to the company, the quick retail growth has contributed to 50% CAGR over the last five years and 20% YoY revenue growth, and it projects it will exceed $50 million in revenue by the end of 2025. The company’s customer base has also increased 47% YoY, according to Claghorn.

“As soon as we were back in growth mode, we started to focus on, ‘can we sign a lease every single month?’” she said. “With construction and permitting, you never know quite when they’re going to open, but if we could just focus on that lease signing, we knew we would be back to growing. That’s what we continue to focus on. It averages out at about 12 new locations per year. We also focus on one to two new markets per year, and then we’re also focusing on expanding and growing our product line.”

Before Covid, Sugared + Bronzed had 10 stores across Los Angeles, New York City and Philadelphia. Now, the business has expanded to other parts of California, including Orange County and San Diego, and major cities like Washington, DC, Dallas, Houston, and Miami.

Claghorn said the company’s next batch of store openings are filling in these existing markets. However, she is also looking at new markets in Phoenix, Chicago, Denver, and Atlanta.

“The science is a little bit easier when it comes to new markets,” she said. “We still have so much white space, which is a good problem to have, but also can make it challenging. We look at several different things. We look at the demographics of the city compared to our core demo of our client base. We take our zip codes and extract them and see maybe people are traveling a lot…Where are they already coming from? Or, where are they buying our products online? What cities? What does that look like?”

Memberships at both existing and new locations have also helped fuel growth, according to Claghorn, who said that more than 60% of the company’s customer base has a membership.

Since 2022, Sugared + Bronzed has consistently seen an average 30–40% YoY revenue increase during the April to June festival season. With 15 locations in Southern California, Claghorn credits this increase to more people being in the area and attending music festivals—namely the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Stagecoach Festival.

“Festival season just coincides with also those moments where people are starting to get out again, showing their skin,” she said.

When Sugared + Bronzed closed stores due to Covid, Claghorn introduced a mobile service called Glow on the Go, where an associate would go to a client’s home or set up satellite locations for clients to receive sugaring or spray tan services.

While Claghorn said these mobile services were a success, she paused the initiative once she could reopen stores. As the company scaled its brick-and-mortar operations, Claghorn said mobile service clients, as well as newer customers, wanted the service back. 

Glow on the Go is currently only offered in Los Angeles, but Claghorn wants to expand the initiative to high-volume markets like New York City and Miami.

“We’re in this place where we have an amazing corporate team. We have great infrastructure, and we feel really solid,” she said. “The pandemic is long behind us, and we’re like, ‘We need to bring this back. Clients are asking for it.’”

Update 7/30/25: This story has been corrected to reflect that the company was founded in 2010, not 2011, and to include Philadelphia among the list of named cities with stores. We have also clarified the brand's percentage of customers who are also members based on a statement provided to Revenue Brew.

Sugared + Bronzed's Georgetown storefront

Sugared + Bronzed's retail strategy

The beauty services company is on track to exceed 40 stores this year. 

How Sugared + Bronzed drives growth through retail

Beck Salgado

As it continues to emerge as a force in social media ad sales, Reddit has revealed it is creating a new leadership role dedicated to global sales.

The company announced today that it is bringing on Jia Hyun to serve as VP of global large customer sales. Hyun has previously worked at Citigroup, GE Capital, and most recently at LinkedIn, where she served as head of North America and LATAM enterprise.

The company said this experience is what makes them think Hyun will be perfect for the role.

“Jia’s experience scaling global businesses and deep connections across the advertising industry will be instrumental in driving Reddit’s next phase of growth. In this newly created role as VP of Global Large Customer Sales, Jia will continue our expansion in both the US and international markets as we deepen our relationships with the largest advertisers worldwide,” Mike Romoff, Reddit’s CRO, said in an email.

In the company’s first quarter report, Reddit posted revenue growth of 61% year over year, totaling $392.4 million. In the same period, international revenue outpaced domestic growth, surging 82% year over year.

According to the company, the jump in sales growth, both in the US and overseas, is precisely what Hyun is expected to oversee in this new role.

“Great advertising creates value by forging real connections between brands and people. On Reddit, brands have a unique opportunity to do that by engaging with passionate communities in authentic, dynamic ways, at the heart of meaningful conversations and idea exchange. I’m excited to build on the strong foundation this team has laid and help global brands form impactful relationships with the communities that matter most to them,” Hyun told Revenue Brew.

The Reddit mascot rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange

Reddit creates new global sales role

Reddit hires Jia Hyun as global large customer sales VP.

Reddit hires new global sales leader

Luxury resale company Reklaim launched in 2022 with the mission of making designer goods available to the masses, using its AI-powered platform to source $10 billion worth of luxury watches and handbags from brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Chanel.

Over the last three years, Reklaim has partnered with department stores like Nordstrom and Selfridges to make its AI-sourcing capabilities more accessible to consumers. Let’s say a customer wants a very specific Chanel bag: They search the platform and AI runs through its list of providers to find that exact Chanel bag. Sounds easy enough, but the devil’s in the details.

One of those details: who holds the keys to the AI kingdom. Reklaim is taking the next step in its retail evolution with its new vice president of business development and sales, Peter Englehart, who previously worked at Tiffany & Co. and Swarovski.

“I’m a shopkeeper at heart,” Englehart said. “For me, regardless of what I’ve done in my career, it’s about the last three feet between that sales professional and the consumer. Having excellence at point of sale includes training. It includes a lot of different details, but it includes having the right product in the right place as well. With that mindset, that’s the way I'm looking at this [role] going to market.”

While its e-commerce platform was launched this spring, Reklaim’s president Gary Schoenfeld said the bulk of the brand’s revenue is still coming through physical retail partnerships, which currently extends across jewelry stores, travel retail, and department stores. Reklaim declined to provide revenue details for this story.

One of Englehart’s main tasks is expanding those retail partnerships to include independent retailers, specifically local or family-owned jewelry stores. He explained this strategy allows for these smaller businesses and their customers to have access to luxury labels that wouldn’t traditionally be available in these stores. Schoenfeld is betting on a win-win-win situation for retailers, for consumers, and of course, for Reklaim. Since Reklaim works as a sourcing platform, the company and its retail partners don’t have to worry about housing inventory, which can reduce costs and eliminates a major barrier to entry into the resale market.

“We want to give independent jewelry stores the opportunity to have the kind of assortment that they would like to have for their customers,” he said. “Similarly, for customers that have developed relationships with those independent jewelry stores that go for many years, to be that trusted destination for them to find these conscious luxury brands in an environment that they would expect.”

Englehart is still working out the kinks of Reklaim’s independent retail strategy, but he said the platform is first looking regionally within the US. Englehart already has relationships with retailers across North America and the Caribbean from his previous roles.

The draw of these jewelry stores is the close-knit relationship shop owners have with their customers, according to Englehart. Reklaim is looking at many family-owned businesses that have been trusted sources in their communities for years. With luxury products in high demand, Englehart said, retailers can become frustrated when they don’t have access to the products their customers are asking for.

“I spent 22 years in fine jewelry retail and nine in branded wholesale and also a period in manufacturing, so I’ve seen the value chain from a lot of different perspectives,” Englehart said. “What I love about Reklaim is it’s about reclaiming the power of the consumer, both from an end consumer basis, as well as from the retailer standpoint, to be able to buy what you want, when you want it.”

Reklaim hires first vp of business development and sales

The AI-powered luxury resale company has hired its first VP of business development and sales to take its retail partnership to the next level. 

Reklaim is in the next phase of its resale takeover

As a sales technique, cold calling is as old as the telephone itself. But over the last two decades, as landlines have become practically extinct and call screening ubiquitous, the art of the blind pitch is becoming lost. Using a spray-and-pray approach after punching a keypad is not as common as it once was, so Revenue Brew wanted to know whether sales pros still have some love for one of the oldest plays in the marketing book.

Paul Towers, who manages Australia and New Zealand sales for software company Liferay, thinks if cold calling is not already dead it is “rapidly dying.” While Towers cited its waning effectiveness, ultimately he said, the cause of death comes down to a poor return on investment.

“Essentially, you’re paying a BDR [business development representative] in Australia, probably at least $70,000 a year without commission on top to have to call for an entire week before you maybe get one person who’s interested in meeting,” Towers said.

like workplace social media and in-person gatherings, could also be killing cold calling. Towers said, instead of adding a BDR to the payroll, he has found it more worthwhile to pay a higher up-front cost to attend (or organize) an executive lunch. There, he said, he can directly target key decision-makers.

“If you do the ROI and go, ‘well, hang on, how many months will my BDR have to call to get me in front of not only 15 to 20 people in total, but 15 to 20 senior people who actually have purchasing authority in the right title?’ You could spend a whole year doing that,” Towers said.

Terry Lee, chief revenue officer at loan documentation software company Informed.IQ, and his team are struggling to use cold calling to effectively reach their target audience.

“It’s very difficult to find a phone number for a human,” he said. “It’s less difficult to find a phone number for a company. But when you call, you’re either getting voicemail, getting [a] phone number not working, or alternatively, you may get lucky and actually get them to pick up a cell phone, but that often is viewed negatively [by recipients].”

Lee points to the post-Covid period as a possible time of death for cold calling, saying it is now harder to reach decision-makers in an office, since many work from home or don’t have landlines.

“If I go back to pre-Covid, certain organizations were very likely to have my target person sitting at a desk in a building. Once Covid happened, that is very, very unlikely,” Lee said.

This only leaves calling via cell phone, something Lee said can be a slippery slope.

“Does interrupting someone on their cell phone work? Or does it create a negative feeling? I personally think it’s the negative feeling.”

Joey Gilkey, CEO of sales intelligence platform TitanX, said cold calling is alive and well, especially when used for a wider variety of objectives. Instead of using cold calling as a “one-swing, knockout punch,” Gilkey said it should be used to gather intelligence.

“If you start looking at the phone as a conversational advertising platform, then you start to uncover new data that doesn’t exist online,” said Gilkey. “You start to uncover: What is their buying behavior? What incumbent solution are they using? When are they going to buy? That data then influences our follow-up.”

Gilkey said that the more cold calls he and his team make, the more data they can unearth. And based on information about what potential customers are or are not interested in, he can place them into different buckets with notes for follow-ups.

“I might be getting very few ‘not me’s’ and referrals, which means my targeting is good, but our meeting rate and our activation rates are really low, our ‘not interested’ rates are really high, which means that’s a messaging issue,” Gilkey said.

A firm believer in quantity, Gilkey said the advantage of more calls is a faster feedback loop, which can create better messaging.

“Oh, that message did not land,” he said. “Oh, let's try this message. Cool. The next 10 conversations. Let’s see how those go.”

What is the future of cold calling?

It depends on who you ask.

Is cold calling dead?

Pinterest, the social media platform known for mood boards and, more recently, as a budding AI-integrated search engine, has hired Ben Wood to head agency sales in Europe. Wood, a former Meta VP, was most recently the CEO of the digital marketing agency IDHL.

"What drew me to Pinterest is its distinct role in people’s lives,” Wood said in an email to Revenue Brew. “It’s a positive, intent-driven environment where inspiration turns into action. For agencies, that’s a compelling context to build meaningful, results-driven campaigns. I’m excited to help our partners across Europe tap into the full potential of the platform.”

Soniya Monga, Pinterest’s VP of global agency sales, said that Wood’s understanding of both macros and micro trends stood out when appointing him.

“Ben’s deep understanding of both the agency world and platform dynamics makes him perfectly suited to help agencies unlock the full value of Pinterest. This is a platform where people come to plan, dream, and take action, and that’s a meaningful space for brands to connect. I’m thrilled to have him on board as we strengthen our agency partnerships across Europe,” she told Revenue Brew in an email.

Europe, in particular, has been a region of notable growth for Pinterest, as the company looks to find ways to compete with its larger platform competitors. According to its Q1 earnings report, global monthly active users reached 570 million, a company record.

In that same period, MAUs in Europe grew 5% year over year, with the US and Canada coming in just behind at 4%.

Pinterest announces a new director of agency sales in Europe

Ben Wood to run European agency sales.

Pinterest appoints new director of agency sales in Europe

The sales world often measures one by the stripes they’ve earned. This means to climb the ranks one must perfect smiling and dialing, becoming a closer, and eventually managing up-and-comers.

Revenue Brew asked three sales leaders about the most important lessons from their first sales roles and how they helped them climb to the top of the org chart.

John Schoenstein, CRO at Customer.io, started his sales career at Oracle as a business development rep, a role he said that changed his view of sales relationships. He found that instead of trying to sell, focusing on the needs of potential customers led to successful deals.

“I realized that when you treat customers as partners rather than transactions, you earn trust, you uncover deeper needs that they might have, and you start to create more of a value-oriented conversation, which I found then leads to good outcomes,” Schoenstein said.

Today, Schoenstein encourages his employees to put in the time and work and to practice listening to clients.

Early on in Elizabeth Temples’s career, she used to make extensive weekly to-do lists outlining everything she wanted to accomplish. That is until a mentor at an early role told her to drastically scale this practice back.

“She challenged me to identify the three things that would actually move the needle for my business that week and to ruthlessly prioritize them. That simple shift changed how I approached everything,” Temples wrote in an email to Revenue Brew. “To this day, I start each week by identifying my top priorities and end it by asking, ‘Did I move the needle?’ The rest, as she would say, is just noise.”

Now, as group VP of sales at Clari, she explained how prioritization allows her to better orient her team in a way that does not “confuse motion for progress.”

In sales, time is money, a fact Jeff Kroeger learned quickly in his first sales role at a mom-and-pop shop called Restaurant Select Insurance.

Now, as a division revenue leader at World Insurance Associates, Kroeger creates boundaries to ensure his time is being used as effectively as possible. He will, for example, gauge someone’s seriousness when determining how to allocate his time.

“Understanding when you’re spending your time efficiently is a huge part of it, and knowing when to not pursue something or knowing when to walk away is really important,” Kroeger said. “You want to make sure that the time that you’re spending to serve that client that it’s profitable for you at the end of the day.”

Kroeger found that a good way to establish client relationships was to lay your cards out on the table and ask what it would take for a sales rep to win their business. But also, he was getting smart about what his competition was doing and figured out ways to elbow his way into that business.

“If you feel that you can truly bring value, you need to be talking about that,” he said. “Because ultimately, in our industry, you don’t want to be commoditized.”

Two hands shaking surrounded by investing visual elements

The early sales lessons leaders still carry with them today

It’s all about relationships and time management.

The most important lessons sales leaders learned in their first sales role 

Serving as a CRO is hardly the beaten path to becoming a CEO. While sales leaders are relied upon to hunt for new business and spur growth, they are often overlooked when it comes to consideration for top dog.

A 2021 study from Spencer Stuart found that 85% of S&P 500 CEOs come from four positions: COO, CFO, divisional CEO, and candidates outside the C-suite. A 2023 McKinsey study found that only 11% of Fortune 100 companies even have a CRO.

However, this did not blunt Tom Pickett’s ascent. The current CEO of online mental health and wellness platform Headspace, former CRO of DoorDash, and veteran Google exec, has picked up a bag of tricks over the years. He spoke with Revenue Brew to discuss his journey from CRO to CEO, the “spectrum of the CRO,” and the advantages that come with running the show with a sales background.

(Being a former F/A-18 pilot and a “Top Gun” graduate from the Navy doesn’t hurt, either.)

Pickett’s sales and growth experience was good training ground to learn about customer tendencies, and he’s used that knowledge to make decisions at Headspace.

“Coming from the commercial side of the business, you have this market orientation. You are on the tip of the sword in terms of understanding what the market need is, and you’re talking to customers on a daily basis,” Pickett said.

The ability to understand customers, as well as growth, was important to Headspace as it conducted its CEO search in 2024. According to Sean Brecker, CFO of Oura and a board member at Headspace, “Tom’s career stood out. His ability to scale technology-driven companies across B2B and D2C models, combined with his leadership in customer trust, safety, and policy, reflects the multifaceted strengths increasingly required of today’s CROs stepping into CEO roles.” 

Different mindset needed for the CEO role

Four and a half years as DoorDash’s CRO and a decade at Google taught Pickett how to translate product into market value, how to work cross-functionally with other departments, and how to have an execution mindset. These skills served as the foundation for his CEO vision, and he likened the matriculation from CRO to CEO as similar to shifting from being a player to a coach.

“As a CRO, you are part of that process and an input to that process, but ultimately the job of the CEO is to set the strategy then create the conditions on the field so that your team can execute that strategy,” he said.

He added a truism: Your background before becoming CEO will dictate how the company is run.

Staying put versus finding new challenges

Some CEOs work their way up from the bottom, like Nike’s Elliott Hill, who started as a company intern in 1988. Others, like Pickett, pick up experience at several places before stepping into the CEO role.

Pickett was busy proving himself during his time at Google, working his way up the YouTube ladder, but ultimately knew that tech companies would have a bias toward product-oriented leaders.

“Google, being a technology-driven organization, if you don’t come from the tech side, it’s not going to happen,” Pickett said, “It was a little more clear to me that if I wanted to [be a CEO], I had to go jump to something else.”

According to Pickett, there are different types of CROs: You’ve got your sales-type CRO who comes from a lead generation background, and on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got your general management CRO who looks to expand responsibilities and knowledge across teams.At DoorDash, even as CRO, Pickett also oversaw the merchant side of its business. This meant a lot of control over the product roadmap, over the sales and customer success organization, but really understanding—and driving—the P&L of that segment. As the revenue leader, he got to play in all parts of the business, not just in sales. “I know there’s a spectrum in terms of CEO and CRO responsibilities, but I think the more general management [skillset you have], then the more likely you’re going to be a better fit for the CEO job,” he said.

This is what Julia Cheek, CEO of Every Health and a Headspace board member, said Headspace was looking for when hiring Pickett.

“Tom is widely respected for his transparent and authentic leadership style, strong personal accountability, and leading by example,” Cheek wrote in an email to Revenue Brew.

Pickett stressed adapting the skills of a CRO, such as contract negotiation, as leverage in high-level company discussions. After all, money talks, and demonstrating the ability to lead the company to profitability and growth is valuable.

“Nobody should have more market intelligence than you do, so that’s your superpower,” Pickett said. “You can bring anecdotes to the discussion and say, ‘I was just talking to the CEO of this company, and this is how they’re starting to think, I think our product or our strategy should start to point in that direction.”