Allison Stadd — CMO @ Ollie | 🥁 Former Jazz Drummer | Follow me for ideas on creative leadership, taste & better work for the bored & burnt out
CMO @ Ollie | 🥁 Former Jazz Drummer | Follow me for ideas on creative leadership, taste & better work for the bored & burnt out
Allison Stadd ranks #424 of 18,566 LinkedIn creators in Consumer Goods, and is a standout voice in United States. They have 8.5K followers and published 32 posts in the last 60 days at a 0.6% average engagement rate.
- 8.5K followers
- 32 posts / 60d
- 0.6% avg engagement
- 300 follower growth / 30d
The roast
Allison spent fifteen years scaling Shake Shack and Sweetgreen just to realize her true calling is charging people for 1-1 office hours so she can teach them how to sage away their Sunday Scaries. She’s not a marketer, she’s a LinkedIn support group for people who peaked in English class.
About Allison
I never meant to be a marketer. I studied English, creative writing, and art history. I played jazz drums. I thought I’d write books or edit magazines. What I didn’t see coming was that marketing would become the place where all of that converged. Creativity, systems thinking, human behavior, and taste, all in one discipline. Over the past 15+ years, I’ve helped scale, evolve, and exit consumer-obsessed brands across industries ranging from fast food to retail tech. I’ve held senior marketing leadership roles at three companies that IPOed (Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, BARK), as well as at Fortune 500 power players like Anheuser-Busch InBev and Target. Along the way, I created The Creativity of Work: a weekly newsletter featuring fresh-squeezed takes on what’s broken about work, and how we un-blah it. I'll show you how to: sage away the Sunday Scaries, see your work through a fresh lens, and build a career that feels like you. Come jam with me → https://allisonstadd.substack.com/ 🥁 Two more ways to work together: 1️⃣ Book a fun, fresh-eyed 1-1 Office Hours session with me to dig into brand & marketing or leadership & career challenges → https://allisonstadd.as.me/ 2️⃣ I also work with founders and senior marketing leads from Series A through exit. Growth-stage consumer brands hire me as an advisor when they need brand clarity and the marketing engine to scale it → https://allisonstadd.as.me/
Highlights
- Top 5% in Consumer Goods — Ranked #3 of 174 creators
- Top 5% Creator — 32 posts in 30 days
- Top 5% in United States — Ranked #170 of 5851 creators
- Top 25% Audience — 8,482 followers
Recent posts
Specialization gets you into the room. Range is what gets you heard once you're there. Specializing works. It's how many of us got hired, and promoted. My degree is in English. I studied creative writing and art history. I played jazz drums. None of that was a plan to end up in marketing. Marketing just turned out to be the place all of my interests converged: creativity, systems thinking, and human behavior, all in one discipline. This is why I think the most dangerous CMO is one who only knows marketing. In today's increasingly complex market, we can only succeed if we have high-qualit
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Nobody feels like a trailblazer in real time. You only see the trail looking backward. Veronica Beard named their Fall 2026 collection Trailblazers. A double meaning, since the blazer is the wardrobe piece they’ve made a name for themselves with. What I adore is the creative direction for the launch: beautiful embroidery. The collection runs on handwork, too: cabochon buttons, studded hardware, animal print liners. Embroidery is one of the slowest crafts, which feels contradictory for a word about moving fast. But the trailblazing women Veronica Beard spotlights in the campaign (Georgia O
10 reactions · 2 comments · 0 reposts
Ivy Ross once fixed a team of 12 by changing the music in the room. Not the org chart, not the ways of working. The literal music playing in the room. She was at Mattel, with 12 employees who weren't clicking creatively. So she brought in a sound specialist. He captured each employee’s vocal range, found the frequencies they shared, and embedded those frequencies into background studio music. Her words: “You could feel the alignment within 40 minutes." Their ideas got better. They collaborated more effectively. The whole thing won a chairman's award for helping revitalize a brand line.
12 reactions · 3 comments · 0 reposts
Last updated 2026-08-01