Putting a brand in its own store is one thing. You own the walls, you set the rules, you control every sightline.
Putting it in someone else’s store is a different discipline entirely.
Inside a department store, a sporting goods retailer, a specialty retailer — the walls aren’t yours, the rules aren’t yours, and the customer walking in might have come for something else entirely.
Making The North Face feel unmistakably like The North Face across all of them is the work of McKenna Ellis, Account Marketing Manager at The North Face — alongside the sales, creative, retail, and agency partners she builds every campaign with.
And it isn’t decoration. It’s consumer psychology, brand discipline, logistics, and diplomacy — all at once.
She also went looking for this work on purpose — and what makes her good at it started years before the job did, in a college classroom.
The Degree She Actually Gets To Use Every Day
McKenna started college on a sensible path: Business major, marketing concentration. Then Colorado State handed her a class list that rearranged the plan.
She’d discovered the university’s apparel and merchandising program — and reading through it, she realized it was built for exactly the person she was. Someone drawn to fashion and art who still wanted the rigor of business behind it.
She switched her major fully and minored in business, landing in what she calls a genuine culmination of creativity, business, science, and technology.
The unusual part isn’t just that she studied it. It’s that she gets to use all of it — daily.
“I do say I use a lot of what I learned, too, which isn’t always common. The consumer behavior, design, merchandising — even textiles, everything we learned, it’s always coming back up for me.”
Consumer behavior. Design. Merchandising. Textiles. For McKenna, they’re the working toolkit she reaches for every time she has to figure out how a campaign should actually feel on a shelf. Having that focus early, she says, let her pursue exactly the kind of work she wanted.
When The Whole Job Is Translation
Day to day, McKenna sits at a crossroads that touches nearly everyone.
“I sit at the intersection of sales, creative, visual merchandising, retail operations, and our external agencies.”
From that seat, she brings the brand and its campaigns to life in physical retail — fixtures, graphics, store openings and remodels, showrooms, trade shows, and the in-store experiences shoppers actually walk into, from department stores and specialty shops to sporting goods retailers. The North Face’s global team sets the overall brand direction for retail; McKenna takes those pieces and makes them real for the specific store in front of her.
The core of it, in her words, is finding the bridge — between the brand and its standards, the storytelling and the campaigns, and the audience actually standing in the store.
And much of that work happens inside stores that aren’t The North Face’s own — which gives wholesale its own particular discipline. She’s carrying the brand into someone else’s space, on someone else’s terms.
“You’re representing our brand in someone else’s space and within their guidelines. You’re working with different layouts, priorities, customer journeys, and operational processes — constantly trying to find ways that we can stand out while also being a good partner.”
Stand out, but be a good guest. That’s the needle McKenna threads every single day.
One Campaign, a Hundred Different Customers
This is where McKenna’s consumer-behavior training earns its keep. Because a person shopping at a sporting goods store isn’t the same person browsing a department store — and the work has to account for that.
“Different channels bring a different audience, different priorities, different shopping habits. How does a sporting goods customer shop versus a department store customer? You’re understanding their psychology, staying true to our brand and our values, and adapting it for the retailer.”
Take a seasonal campaign built around one of The North Face’s most iconic products — running at a national department store. The global team hands down a directive: the materials, the design recommendation, the story. From there, it’s McKenna’s job to make it work in that specific environment. And tangibly, she says, it starts with one thing: a clear brief.
“These are the assets available. This is the messaging. This is what we want to stand behind. You make the campaign and the goal very clear — then the guidelines we have to work around with the partner, the budget, the timelines, the material recommendation, the design layout, the fixture parameters. All the information they need.”
From there it’s concepts, then rounds of review — pressure-testing whether it will land well in store, from every angle — then partner approval, then the logistics of delivery and points of contact. It’s a lot of quiet, unglamorous coordination. Which is exactly her point.
“It’s all the little things that are behind the scenes but make a big difference. From beginning to end, truly.”
The Only One Doing This — But Never Actually Alone
On paper, McKenna’s scope can look overwhelming. Within her wholesale channels, a single retailer might mean a couple hundred doors — a department store chain here, a sporting goods giant there, hundreds of specialty and sporting goods locations, each with a point person and a seasonal plan. She’s the only team member dedicated purely to the physical, in-store side of it: the fixtures, the graphics, anything physically representing the brand.
But “only one” doesn’t mean on her own. She’s quick to credit her wider team — the account managers on the outbound side, the Americas and Canadian teams she shares resources with, and the global team she takes direction from. What stands out to her most is how everyone shows up for each other.
“I’m really proud of our team and how everyone is really leaning in for each other. There’s always people to reach out to, always people that are inspiring. It’s very much a team.”
That instinct extends to the outside partners she works with, too — including the vendors who help her turn a brief into something physical. When she finds the ones who get it, she keeps them close. (The Imagine Shop by SuperGraphics is one of them, which we’re not too humble to mention.) As she puts it:
“When we find ones, we hold on to them … I think you guys really understand us.”
The Three-Week Temp Job That Never Really Ended
McKenna’s history with The North Face didn’t start with a big title. It started with a three-week, fully remote temp role she landed through a professor — back when the brand was constantly top of mind in her Colorado program, its parent company having recently planted its headquarters in Denver.
The work itself was small. She was clipping CADs for a presentation. But the team around her made it anything but forgettable.
“It was such a small role … But I was just so excited to dive into product and color and learn from them and sit in on meetings. The team really impacted me. They were so supportive. It made me feel valued.”
Those same people are still at the brand, she says — still killing it. And now she’s one of them, with a lot more context and a role she doesn’t take lightly. That thread — being pulled forward by the people around her — runs through her whole story, from the students in her program to her colleagues today.
“Everyone is so smart and ambitious and just genuinely cool. Everyone is climbing a mountain, running a race, traveling somewhere.”
She'd Wear the Brand Anyway
There’s a reason the enthusiasm reads as real: McKenna is the customer she’s marketing to. She grew up in Colorado playing every sport, still runs, and spends her time in the mountains hiking, biking, and trail running. Working at The North Face has only fueled it — including the small, ridiculous perk of being able to walk one floor down and test gear that hasn’t launched yet.
“Getting to go down one floor and test a product — that is huge. How could you not want to get this gear out on the trail?”
She loves fashion and trends, too — she’ll happily land somewhere between the runway and the trailhead. But what moves her most is the part of the brand that reaches past product: its push to get people outside, especially kids, through programs like Power of Nature. She’ll point to a sobering figure — the average American kid gets just seven minutes of unstructured outdoor play a day — and that’s exactly what Power of Nature is built to close.
That’s what keeps the job from being just merchandising for her. Every display she helps land in a store is a small invitation — to try something on, and just get outside.
The Real Opportunity in Being a Guest
It would be easy to frame wholesale as the harder, more constrained version of retail marketing — all someone else’s rules, none of your own walls. McKenna sees the opposite.
“The opportunity, versus an owned store, is that we can reach customers in different environments. They’re already shopping, already engaged. If we do our jobs well, I can introduce someone to our brand and broaden our audience.”
A department store shopper. A specialty shopper. A sporting goods shopper. Each one is a chance to bring a new person into a brand she genuinely loves. And for a heritage name with deep roots in exploration and performance, she’s clear-eyed that the physical store still matters — maybe now more than ever.
“I get to be a part of it and inspire people in a physical space. And I’m proud that that hasn’t gone away — that people want to be in-store, and want to engage in a meaningful way.”
Ask her how she pulls off a job with this many moving pieces, and the answer is refreshingly simple:
“It helps when you love your job and you love the brand.”
What McKenna's Approach Teaches Retail Marketers
You don’t have to run in-store marketing for a global brand to take something from how McKenna works. A few things stand out:
Study the shopper, not just the brand. The consumer-behavior training McKenna still leans on is exactly what lets her adapt one campaign for a sporting goods customer and a department store customer without losing the brand. Knowing who’s walking in is what makes the work land.
When you’re a guest in someone else’s store, stand out and play nice. McKenna’s whole job lives in that tension — being distinctive inside another retailer’s space while staying an easy partner to work with. Get either half wrong and the brand suffers.
The brief is where the work is won. Notice how much lived in McKenna’s brief: assets, messaging, guidelines, budget, timelines, materials, layout, fixtures. All the unglamorous detail up front is what makes everything downstream go right.
Keep the partners who get you. When McKenna finds a vendor or agency that truly understands the brand, she holds on. That relationship becomes an asset worth protecting — not a line item to re-bid every year.
Consistency across hundreds of doors is a relationship, not a rulebook. With a couple hundred doors per retailer and a point person at each, McKenna’s consistency doesn’t come from enforcement. It comes from communication, seasonal planning, and trust built store by store.
Your Brand Doesn't Stop at Your Own Front Door.
At The Imagine Shop by SuperGraphics, we’re inspired by marketers like McKenna — people who make a brand feel unmistakably itself no matter whose store it lands in.
From fixtures and graphics to full in-store environments across hundreds of doors, we help brands show up with precision, speed, and white-glove service everywhere their customers are already shopping.
Curious how The Imagine Shop can help bring your brand to life across every retail environment?
