Fernish brings on Kerry Cooper, former C-level exec at Rothy’s, ModCloth and Walmart.com, to its Board of Directors
We’ve spent the last few months here at Fernish expanding our team at all levels — and everyone in our organization is crucial to its success. Part of this effort was ensuring Fernish has the best leadership, advisory, and accountability resources in place as possible — and that starts with our Board of Directors. Among other new members of our team, it is our pleasure to announce that Kerry Cooper has joined the Fernish Board of Directors, adding her immense breadth of relevant experience to our organization.
Kerry has an exceptional background as an executive across consumer-driven e-commerce. She was VP of Strategy & Development and then CMO at Walmart.com, in charge of connecting the online and offline customer experience, driving the launch of “Pickup Today”, and helping create the platform’s initial online marketplace. She was then COO & CMO at ModCloth, tripling the size of the next-gen fashion and decor brand that was acquired by Walmart. Most recently, Kerry was the President & COO at Rothy’s, leading the popular DTC brand that creates shoes from plastic water bottles with a low-waste 3D-knitting process (we see excellent alignment here with Fernish’s sustainable, circular economy model). In addition to her Board position at Fernish, Kerry also sits on the Boards of BevMo!, the spirits retailer, and PG&E, the nation’s largest public utility company. We would be hard-pressed to find someone more qualified than Kerry to supercharge our company’s trajectory.
Thanks to our successful Series A earlier this year led by Khosla Ventures, we have also had the opportunity to significantly build out the rest of the Fernish organization. From marketing and partnerships to data science and operations, our full-time team has now grown to almost 60 strong. And while our organization has adjusted to the new realities of operating within a pandemic, we’ve continued to invest in our team and use these times to refine our culture. We are very proud to say that we’ve had 100% voluntary retention in our team since our company started in 2017, and have thankfully not had to lay off anyone in our organization during this COVID-19 era. We believe that the retention of our team is rooted in a highly collaborative culture, which starts with our deliberate hiring process and adherence to our unique set of operating values.
On top of both our Board and day-to-day operators, we have been very fortunate to have a highly-relevant investor network that are very much considered part of the Fernish team. Fernish is proudly an LA-based company (#longLA), and from this local community our investors include, Spencer Rascoff (co-founder at Zillow and dot.LA), Kim Perell (former CEO at Amobee) Eytan Elbaz (co-founder at Scopely and Social Native), Gil Elbaz (founder at Applied Semantics, now Google AdSense, and Factual), Michael Broukhim (co-founder at FabFitFun) among many others. We are grateful for this group’s willingness to engage to propel Fernish’s business forward.
We look forward to continuing to recruit and build all levels of our team here at Fernish — as this group is what makes it such a pleasure to come (or dial-in!) to work every day.
Thank you all for your belief and support in our mission of making it effortless to create a home.
Sincerely,
Michael Barlow and Lucas Dickey
