Contributors

MARIA DUBUC

Marketing By Design, President, Big Red Rooster, Vice President, Maria is a 25 year pioneer in creative management, Maria’s key talent is to combine a career’s worth of branding experience into something personal and unique for each and every client. Smart & Final, The Home Depot, 7-Eleven, and PriceSmart are among the retailer programs she currently runs.

CHRISTOPHER DURHAM

Founder, My Private Brand and The

Velocity Private Brand Conference.

Christopher Durham is an author, consultant, strategist and retailer with close to 20 years of real-world retail and corporate experience creating, launching and building numerous billion dollar Private Brands. My Private Brand, seeks to drive the changing Private Brand landscape, focusing on the emerging art and science of Private Brand management.

HANS KRAAK

is educated in biology and journalism and wrote two books about nutrition and health. He worked for the Dutch ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food quality and the Netherlands Nutrition Centre. As editor in chief he publishes in Voeding Nu, a business to business platform on food and health, as a food and wine writer he publishes in Meininger’s Wine Business International and reports for PLMA Live EU and PLMA USA.

AYANA GREEN

Vice President of SMB Strategy and Revenue Channels at UPS. Prior to joining UPS, she accumulated nearly a decade of marketing experience at Kimberly-Clark, where she leveraged customer insights to manage B2B and B2C business.

IVAN MELNIK

Innovations Director at X5 Retail Group. Ivan Melnik has been with X5 Retail Group for 10 years. Since the beginning of 2019, he oversees the scouting and implementation of innovative solutions at X5, both in collaboration with startups and on the basis of internal R&D. Since 2017, the Innovations Department has evaluated more than 1,500 startups from Russia, China and Israel and launched more than 117 pilot projects in partnership with startups.

KARA MIENCIER

Kara Miencier, Private Brand Sales Executive for Paramount Roasters, has a passion for store brands and the coffee industry. As a Board of Directors Member for Women Impacting Storebrand Excellence, Kara finds great value in the diversity and inclusion mission of WISE and bridging the experience gap between generations.

PERRY SEELERT

A retail branding and marketing expert, with a passion for challenging conventional strategy and truths. Perry is the Strategic Partner and Co-founder of Emerge, a strategic marketing consultancy dedicated to helping Retailers, Manufacturers and Services grow exponentially and differentiate with purpose.

ELENA SULLIVAN

Elena Sullivan holds a BA in Creative Writing and a Masters Degree in Social Work. She is a writer, editor, social worker and advocate. With more than 15 years writing and researching the private label industry, Elena was previously the Managing Editor at Private Label Magazine and most recently created content for Private Label Manufacturers Association’s PLMALive! PL Category Trends series. Through her writing, Elena seeks to provide holistic information on Private Labels for all players in the industry.