Fractional CMO + E-commerce Lead · New York
I set the strategy, then I build it.
Eighteen years running digital commerce for DTC brands, with experience from early stage startup to acquisition, and the integration work that follows.
Receipts
JackThreads, in three years, as sole planner and merchandiser.
Workwear brand, in 60 days, as fractional CSMO.
Hatch Collection, during a Magento to Shopify replatform.
Cosabella, in the first 30 days after the acquisition.
Audited and streamlined into one documented stack.
What I’m hired to do
Workwear brand · Fractional CSMO
A 70-year-old family workwear brand. Paid media, a CRO pass on the storefront, rebuilt email flows and a fulfillment cleanup, all completed before Q4.
Cosabella · post-acquisition
Cut e-commerce operating costs by a third in the first 30 days. Ran paid search, Meta and the storefront in-house while bringing on new vendors.
goTenna · through acquisition
E-commerce and marketing across seven properties, startup through acquisition. Cut DTC costs by almost half by dropping underperforming agencies and ad spend, then put the savings into affiliate platforms and conversion tools, with revenue held.
What I inherit
After a deal, or a few years of moving fast, the people who set up the stack have moved on and no one has the whole picture. I build it, then we decide what stays.
Working together
When a brand needs someone to own growth without adding a full-time hire, I take the seat as fractional CMO or e-commerce lead. Strategy, budget and the work itself.
Monthly retainer, scoped after a conversation.
Your customers are asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers which brand to buy. Those tools answer from what they can read, and they read the web differently than a person does. The brands that come up are not always the biggest ones, they are the ones easiest to read, quote and verify. I make yours one of them.
where you stand
What the engines can read, what they say about you now, who gets cited instead, and whether an AI agent can move through your site and finish a purchase. Ends in a fix list in priority order. About two weeks.
from $6,500
month after month
The fixes shipped, then schema, answer content and citation work, with tracking of which prompts you show up in and which you don’t.
from $4,000/mo
built to be read
Design, copy and build for a marketing site, structured so AI engines can read it from day one rather than retrofitted later.
from $10,000
New clients usually start with an audit or a defined project.
In their words
“Christie was a gift on our team as LIVELY was getting ready to launch, and every moment after. She truly sees the world as puzzles, not problems. Her work ethic is like no other.”
“Christie is an unparalleled force in e-commerce. Her superpower is knitting merchandising, data, technology and operations into a picture that empowers teams to act. It’s rare to find someone this talented who is also fun as hell.”
People call it GEO or AEO. Classic SEO is about ranking in a list of links. This is about being the source an AI engine uses when it writes the answer instead, which depends on what the engine can read, what schema you expose, and which third-party pages quote you.
I run the commercial side of a DTC brand part-time: growth strategy, paid media, merchandising, site, analytics and the P&L. Executive ownership without a full-time salary, and without an agency between the decision and the work.
Five to twenty-five person DTC brands, usually in the stage where you’re validating product-market fit while building the operational and technical foundation underneath it. That’s where I add the most.
No. I own the strategy and execute it, and I bring in trusted developers and designers at cost when a project needs them. AI covers the work that used to require junior headcount.
It’s built into the workflow rather than used as a chatbot. Dashboards, creative testing, customer insight from reviews and tickets, conversion audits, and first drafts of email flows and landing pages. I write and judge the output myself.
Most begin with an audit or a defined project, because it gives us both a real look at how we work together before anything longer. Several turn into an interim role from there.