Kristy Engels

I love good stories.  Listening to them, crafting them, and telling them.

I am responsible for hearing the voice of the consumer and telling their story to help improve the customer experience. These stories in turn influence my development of strategic initiatives for marketing communication, content creation, branding, promotional activities,  social media, new product development, UX and even corporate policy.

Customers can no longer be confined to limited distribution channels. I am a channel agnostic marketer and understand how to engage in a meaningful way, whether you choose to shop in mass, direct, prestige stores or online.

I’ve had the opportunity to travel often for work and use these journeys to further engage with people.  I’m always curious to hear the story of the person next to me on a plane, and the customer in the aisle.  

Inspiration is everywhere if you know how to look and listen for it.

My story

I do not have a traditional background as a marketer. I started out in Los Angeles in the photography business as a studio manager and producer for a celebrity photographer. I handled budgets, billings and production for all of his shoots including the iconic images still in use today of the Seinfeld show. I would help to make the final image selects to determine which visual best told the story that he wanted to tell.   

I eventually moved to New York City working in a photo agency in SoHo as producer with an amazing roster of talent. Portfolio presentation was the key to booking a client and I learned how to position and price talented people accordingly. This was back in a time when portfolios were printed on photo paper and sent by bike messenger, call sheets were sent by fax and phones rang off the hook all day. The music industry had not imploded from digital yet, budgets were plentiful and there was loads of fun work. I helped produce album artwork for Lil Kim, Biggie Smalls, Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys, and Nirvana to name a few. Having helped to assemble the Glam Squads (the term used to refer to the hair, makeup and styling teams) for so many shoots I felt that I had developed an eye for this type of talent and worked my way into becoming an agent.

I spent 10 years as an agent which in a sense is being a people marketer.  You need to understand your artist and their goals and know how to position their talent to a client.  I called upon advertising agencies, magazines, cosmetic companies, publicists, movie studios, record labels and even celebrities themselves.  

When one of my artists wanted to start a product line,  I jumped at the opportunity to help him launch his brand Hair Rules.  Ignorance is bliss and I was blissfully unaware of the challenges and requirements to successfully launch a business of this type. In a sense this became on the job training for what I imagine an MBA program teaches you. I learned how to forecast, formulate, budget, and most importantly - how to build a brand. We were bootstrapped in every way but this scrappiness forced me to be resourceful and utilize every tool I could find to compete with our bigger budgeted rivals. I built a community of followers and relationships with influencers that helped to propel us into mass market distribution and eventually win a WWD Newcomer of the Year Award in 2012.  

In 2013 I joined La Lumiere, a start up team launching a new skincare device into the mass market beauty category.  We took the then unknown illuMask brand from startup, to $10M revenue in first year, onto $20M series-B capital raise.

MY SKILLS