Meet Amina Pasha

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their career, insights, and accomplishments. 

This week, that marketing leader is Amina Pasha, CMO of Thrive Market. From owning CPG brands at Procter & Gamble to scaling mission-driven DTC businesses like The Honest Company, Amina’s specialty is in building iconic, mission-driven brands.

Here are the need-to-knows about Amina:

• She led a pivot in growth strategy at Thrive Market, which reduced CAC and increased LTV significantly while building a mission-driven iconic brand

• She was responsible for leading commercial, equity, product, packaging, and design for the biggest brands at P&G, Pampers, Pantene, Wella and Crest/Oral B

• She has been recognized for ‘Redefining the CMO role’ by Forbes, ‘Career Moves’ by AdWeek, and is on the ‘Woman to Watch’ list by Brand Innovators.

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Road to brand building 

As a classical studies and economics major at University of Pennsylvania, Amina had many career routes open to her after graduation. But marketing wasn’t one of the options on her radar. “I actually didn’t love marketing when I first studied it at university,” she laughed. “I loved storytelling but looking at marketing through a textbook, it didn’t seem as exciting and entrepreneurial as it actually is today.”

Amina was considering finance or other econ-adjacent careers. “My brother was the one who pointed out that marketing would merge storytelling with my economics background.” Having her curiosity piqued, Amina applied and interviewed with Procter and Gamble, where she ended up getting hired as an assistant brand manager. 

Little did she know that her first day on the job would be at a runway fashion show where Pantene was doing a hair modeling exhibition. “I remember standing there thinking, 'Wow, this is my job?’ Slowly and surely, I started learning the ropes, but it wasn’t a linear fit. But I remembered what my brother told me though, and leaned into my ability to unlock the creative and business side.”

At P&G, Amina was given a brand, a P&L, and a business to run from the start. “In many ways, what I do now takes me back to what I did in that role because it trained me to think like a founder.” That ability to think holistically about a whole business and build integrated marketing plans is a skill Amina has used in each of her roles since.

From multinational to mission-driven

An inflection point came when Amina had her first child, which made her rethink her career and life choices. “75% of women change their purchasing behavior when they’re pregnant. I was one of them.” Suddenly, the ingredients on her makeup, skin care, and home care labels mattered more, and so did the values behind the brands. 

That shift led her to The Honest Company, a celebrity-founded CPG company focused on clean, sustainable baby and beauty products. “It was my first taste of mission, but it was a healthy marriage because I brought all this experience in baby, beauty, and brand from P&G. So it was a non-linear move, but it complemented and supplemented my skill set nicely to push me into this DTC world.”

After nearly two and a half years of building the brand at The Honest Company, codifying the strategy, and getting everyone on the same page, Amina met the founder of Thrive Market, Nick Green. “In our first meeting, I said to him, ‘Why are we having this conversation?’ Then, I said, ‘You must be trying to build an iconic brand.’ And he literally fell off his chair.”

The word ‘iconic’ is what stuck with Green. “He started realizing that he couldn’t build a mission-oriented company without also building an iconic brand. After all, those are the companies that can withstand the pressures of this market—they’re clear and who they are, what their values are, and how they’re unique to their consumer.”

Building a Brand That Performs

One of Amina’s philosophies is that brand and performance aren’t separate or mutually exclusive. “To me, a great brand drives performance. And performance without brand building won’t get you long-term results.”

Case in point: when she joined Thrive Market, Amina examined feedback from members and found that they were hungry for the sustainable groceries of the highest quality. So, shifted the brand narrative and shepherded the launch of Thrive Market’s quality standards, which restricted 1,000 ingredients, like red dyes and artificial flavors, from their hyper-curated catalog. 

Amina pivoted the majority of Thrive Market’s messaging to these unique value propositions. Discount ads decreased and now, they’re a minimal part of Thrive Market’s ads. As a result of the narrative shift, the brand saw higher LTV and lower CAC, with a much higher ROI. 

Amina said this approach ladders up to her approach as a brand builder. “You have to think harder and more strategically about how to drive enduring, year-on-year results. Now, we have a multi-year acquisition and growth strategy instead of a one-year-hit-wonder. So that's the nuance. That's the difference.”

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A standout campaign

Of all the campaigns Amina has led, she’s most proud of one that Thrive Market organized in 2025 when the LA wildfires hit in January. “Within about two and a half days, we had an entire donation activation strategy and campaign, complete with launch assets.” 

There was a designated mission marketing leader for disaster relief who assessed the size and scale. From there, the team created a donation strategy where Thrive Market members could donate to disaster relief at checkout. This alone raised $100,000. They also deployed personalized codes for free grocery stipends to members who had zip codes in impacted areas. 

Through a partnership with Baby to Baby, the team secured $50,000 worth of donated products. The brand had a segment on Good Morning America, giving $15,000 worth of healthy groceries to a 17-person family who lost their entire multi-generational home in Altadena to the wildfires. For Thrive Market employees impacted by the disaster, an internal employee resource fund was created (it saw matched donations from the company founders). 

“To me, what was amazing was the speed and the impact we could make with action steps, donations, and mission. I was very, very proud of that. It all connects back to our mission, too, which is about making healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable for all.”

The work didn’t stop with the donations, either. Following the campaign, Amina’s team did a full audit of their campaign. Then, they audited every mission-oriented brand’s activation for the disaster. Using insights from the audits, the team recommended a standard operating procedure for how to take it to the next level. “We've not only taken this as a case study—we’ve dissected it, we've understood it, and know how we want to help moving forward.”

Advice and takeaways

1) Lead with conviction combining data and judgement

Amina believes brand building is all about strategic choices—picking a lane, having a point of view. And those decisions often come with high difficulty and high volume. The data may point one direction, but you have to see the forest from the trees and also see what the data may not be telling you yet and where the puck is moving.

To crystallize your thinking and decisions, try pressure-testing your ideas with marketing leaders who can (and will) push back and ask provocative questions. The first step is convincing yourself that the strategies and ideas are sound. From there, you can share and advocate for your ideas internally, rallying your team to your vision. As results start coming in, use that as proof points to galvanize not just your functional team, but the entire cross functional team and company towards that unified goal.

2) Don’t just build a brand, evolve it

There’s a lot of chatter about brand builders and rebranders, but little talk about brand evolvers. Amina’s approach brings building and evolving under the same roof. “It’s not good enough to be where you were five years ago. What’s good enough then isn’t good enough anymore.”

Consider picking up a magnifying glass and giving your brand a close examination. Look for areas where it’s become stagnant and reevaluate long-standing strategies. If you see opportunities to evolve, start testing them out. 

3) Build a team of specialists over time 

Finding and hiring all the specialists onto Amina’s team didn’t happen overnight. She had to get the right leader in place, then get the right team in place. It was a multi-year effort, but once it was done, she started seeing multi-year impact. Ensuring you have a blend of both data-driven leaders who understand the importance of building an enduring brand. Teams should not be arbitrarily bifurcated into “brand” vs “performance.” Also, at the start of the company, you may need generalists, but as the company gets scaled, you need experts in every area and must continue to uplevel. In many ways, marketing has become like medicine, where you need to have experts and be able to look at your business holistically.

Think about what kind of specialists your team needs and the long-term impact they could have on your overall strategy—factor in the time it takes to build a highly skilled team and take action accordingly.

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