A brand-new adult-use market was opening in Connecticut and the race was on for real estate and mindshare. There was no brand, no marketing playbook, and no time to build one slowly - each new store needed to open into demand, not into silence.

Cannabis is marketing where marketing is mostly illegal: no Meta ads, no Google, a compliance review on every word, and rules that shift by town. And it all had to run on a five-person team covering brand, content, SEO, CRO, and retail - no agency bench to hide behind.

I built the brand from zero, then turned store openings into a repeatable system: a six-week launch sprint run for every location - branding, marketing, and store design end to end, with in-house SEO, content, and conversion work instead of paid ads. I stood up a loyalty program from scratch and made it the demand engine each opening could lean on.

Seven locations opened in under two years; five operating today (two closed on the owners' decisions - retail is a hard business). Loyalty was built from zero, and the launch model held up store after store instead of starting from scratch each time.

Curaleaf was the largest cannabis operator in the US, scaling through the fastest category expansion in modern consumer retail. Growth was the mandate - across dozens of markets at once - and the brand had to stay one recognizable thing while it multiplied.

Almost every normal marketing channel was off-limits. No paid social, no search ads, patchwork state-by-state rules, and legal review on nearly every asset. Traditional demand generation simply wasn't available.

I ran PR and culture marketing as the growth engine instead of ads: 150+ product launches across 23 markets, support for 100+ dispensary openings, and a celebrity seeding program that put the brand into culture and earned media rather than paid slots. Consistent narrative, executed at multi-state scale.

166% year-over-year revenue growth across the run, and the highest share of voice of any multi-state operator at 29.1% - built almost entirely on earned attention in a category where you can't buy it.

Kiehl's needed modern, creator-driven growth inside the world's largest beauty company - a heritage prestige brand that had to show up natively in social without cheapening the name.

There was no network to start from and prestige standards to protect: build from scratch, at big-company scale and process, without turning the brand into a discount influencer feed.

I built Kiehl's influencer network from zero to 1,400+ active creators and systematized how they were seeded and activated - a repeatable engine, not one-off gifting. I also sat on the L'Oréal Agency Selection Committee, helping select the national agencies of record behind the brand's marketing.

A 200% lift in social engagement and a creator engine that made Kiehl's one of the strongest-performing prestige skincare brands in social - built to keep running after any single campaign.