JILL VAN GYN

Over the past six and a half years I have built my company, Fatso Peanut Butter, into a nationally recognized brand with a reputation for divergent marketing tactics with an irreverent style. I pride myself on agility, decisiveness, and cross-functionality as evidenced by my stewardship of the company during the pandemic and the ensuing supply chain crisis. I have built a strong cultural approach to both the brand and team architecture that focuses on moving beyond simple revenue to meet the demands of an increasingly diverse consumership. I place a high value on project collaboration, individual professional autonomy, and lean management to deliver efficient and effective results. With multiple awards for both the product and my leadership, Fatso has become one of the most recognized brands in the Canadian natural food industry. 

Marketing isn't about the polish or the price tag - it's about the message. Whether visual or direct, a bold, captivating, and boundary smashing message can be achieved by uncovering the distilled brand personality. As the creative leadership of a fast-growing brand, I focused on pulling out the deeper brand personality and deployed lean resources with max effort to produce irreverent, playful, and sticky marketing campaigns that told our customers not only who we were but who we were going to be. Now, imagine what I could do with a big budget...

Purpose is at the core of my leadership and business approach. I firmly believe that any truly successful business requires an eye to the outside world with a mission to be an active participant in community betterment. As the first nut butter company in Canada to become certified B Corp, I developed a mandate of focusing on the most marginalized and stigmatized causes in our community. This maximized our dollar, our leverage, and our impact. We established multiple grants, did some incredible fundraising, and donated over $250,000 worth of peanut butter to underserved communities since 2020. Under my leadership, Fatso has helped to shape the intersect between business and ESG in the Canadian CPG industry.

As a recently-exited founder, I have the benefit of hard-won industry hindsight. Coming out of the COVID era and into a volatile market rife with supply chain disruptions, I have learned that the quest for exponential growth needs a  more thoughtful and measured touch than ever before. Companies and brands now require a deeper understanding of their margins, P&Ls, and forecasts in order to make key decisions around growth, funding, and team architecture. Furthermore, turning an eye to redundant operations plans that attempt to account for any number of disasters  (the Four Horsemen always seem to be hot on our heels) will be essential in the coming years. As the globalized economy flexes to adapt to any number of external pressures, cultivating team members (me, I'm one of those team members) with experience and clarity around some of the most pressing industry challenges of the day can be a huge asset to the sustainability and longevity of your company or brand.

 I am seeking an open landscape with challenges, opportunity, and runway for the next chapter in my career. One of my core strengths is identifying the gaps in a given challenge or problem and finding a way to redefine and rebuild for that gap. Constructing a vision for a campaign, project, or company is at the heart of my passion for business. I believe deeply in collaborative thinking to produce bold yet grounded directionality with data driven results. You might even call me a Jill of All Trades, Master of Most. 

Or don't - I won't hold you to it.