Director of Product Management
Joined 9/2023
Emily fell into the e-commerce industry and digital asset production in early 2007 at Cost Plus World Market, back when the field was still nacent – less than 10% of revenue. She was settling back into the U.S. from a few years of traveling and volunteering, picking up a husband on her way through Sri Lanka and gearing up to for a masters in Development Economics.
On her first day in her temp role, she had to dig herself out of a sample closet trying to determine the right products to be shot for the website – urgently needed because they were already in stock and not selling! After that first day and many days after, she was able to start putting order to chaos, devising systems for working with merchants to hand off samples (with labels) to ease the production flow. In the coming years, e-commerce assortments grew and the number of skus on the website exploded, and with it, Emily expanded the single tiny studio set into 3 sets across 2 locations. Eventually Emily built the team and kicked off the development of a new studio within the distribution center.
She headed to Banana Republic, where she learned about Product Management and witnessed development teams doing amazing work building their own software. After a few more years in visual content production, she transitioned into a Product role, leveraging with her rich history of technology particularly optimizing use of website tooling for exceptional customer experiences. One of Emily’s early products was photo studio software, originally a homegrown solution custom built to the needs of the Gap Inc photo studio, delivering millions of photos to the website each year. She was able to implement ShotFlow for Athleta in 2017, an early adopter who saw the potential of the platform immediately. Since then, Emily has built out the product management function at L.L.Bean, launching many key customer-loving website improvements as well as sustainable cross-functional workflows to continue delivering high-value enhancements.
Emily lives in Oakland with her chef husband and 2 daughters.