RewardStyle bolsters talent to accelerate “high growth” phase

RewardStyle, the global influencer marketing company behind LiketoKnow.it, the influencer-driven shopping app, has named nine new executives including a chief financial officer and chief revenue officer, as it looks to accelerate what it is calling its “high growth” phase of global retail and marketing innovation.

The influencer platform has gathered talent with “cross-industry, global experience” to help it with its “scaled hypergrowth” plans, including Jeff Dawson, chief financial officer and former chief financial officer of Match, Tom Sipple, chief revenue officer and former vice president at AppLovin, Kacy Cole, senior vice president of marketing, and former marketing director at T-Mobile, and Raj Lalsare, formerly the vice president of strategy, merchandise and analytics at Travelocity, has been named RewardStyle’s new senior vice president of strategy and analysis.

Other new hires include Ben Newell, who has been named vice president of product, he joins from Sabre, where he created TripCase, a mobile travel tool serving more than 10 million consumers, while Kristi O'Brien, takes on the vice president of corporate development and strategy role, joining from Allen and Company where she executed a number of complex transactions ranging from mergers and acquisitions to public and private financings for industry players such as Time Warner, Refinery29, and Scripps Networks, and Vijai Viswanathan, will become vice president of engineering, joining RewardStyle from Lexis Nexis.

Melinda McCall, vice president of human resources, has worked for both fast-growing and large established companies such as Dr Pepper Snapple Group, The Coatings Group, and Coca-Cola Enterprises, and Brittany DeGan has been named as the company’s general counsel.

"As a world-class technology platform, we are defining a new industry that began in marketing and has now expanded into a mobile retail renaissance, all driven by our mobilisation of the global influencer,” said Amber Venz Box, president and co-founder of RewardStyle. “We have a clear and audacious vision of where RewardStyle is going in the next 3-5 years, and as founders, we have chosen to invest and augment our existing competencies with values-driven, high-performance individuals who have brought their careers to RewardStyle because of a shared vision of that future.”

Venz Box added: "RewardStyle built a business that not only empowers the next generation of creative entrepreneurs, but also redefines the shopping experience.”

The appointments follow the company's steady financial growth over the past four years. Annually, RewardStyle drives over 1 billion US dollars in retails sales, representing a 300 percent growth since 2015 from its 40,000 plus digital-style influencers. In 2017, it launched their consumer shopping app, LiketoKnow.it, which has become the largest influencer-driven commerce channel in the world, in garnered 1 million app users in under nine months.