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Meet Dana Paris

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

Dana built her career in large CPG and mid-sized private equity portfolio companies. Here are the need-to-knows about Dana:

• As Global CMO of OGX, Dana helped lead the brand through a successful $3.3B sale to Johnson & Johnson.

• At L’Oréal, she spearheaded an e-commerce task force that helped reposition the company for digital growth, including early adoption of Amazon and influencer marketing.

• She’s held C-suite roles at high-growth brands including Skinfix Inc, Canidae Pet Food, and ZNLabs.

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Finding marketing through anthropology

Marketing wasn’t on Dana’s radar throughout most of college. She majored in psychology with a minor in anthropology, with plans to pursue a doctorate in archaeology. But that plan took a turn when she was working on her capstone project at a bar in Miami. She was running experiments to see how moving signage around the bar influenced customer behavior and sales. 

One of Dana’s friends, who was working at Hallmark, came to campus for a recruiting event and urged her to come to one of the company’s events. Despite never having taken a business or marketing class, Dana went and ended up talking to a senior VP of marketing at Hallmark. “I told him about my capstone project and he said he just hired a cultural anthropologist to do the exact same thing for their card aisle. That’s what brand marketing is. ”

From there, everything fell into place. Dana was offered an internship and was brought on as a full-time assistant product manager after graduation. 

“Hallmark was a really great learning ground in CPG—how to work with retailers, how to understand what consumers want, shopping behaviors, the classic brand marketing fundamentals,” Dana said. She was given real ownership early, running Hallmark’s gift wrap aisle, developing new planograms, and introducing a lot of new innovation.

After about two years of getting classical marketing experience at Hallmark, Dana had her eyes on moving to New York City. Since Hallmark was headquartered in Kansas City, that move meant the end of her time there and the start of her time at Kraft Foods, Hearst Magazines, and eventually L’Oréal. 

Innovating with E-commerce

Dana’s time at L’Oréal—eight years across multiple roles—refined her instincts as both a marketer and operator. Despite being a global beauty giant, Dana described the company as very entrepreneurial. And that spirit gave her room to experiment.

“I noticed there was this huge opportunity on Amazon and e-commerce. At the time, we were asking our Costco sales team to call on Amazon, which I think a lot of people did in the early days because they're out in Seattle. In hindsight, it was kind of a crazy concept.” 

Recognizing that probably wasn’t the best model to understand and grow this new channel, Dana proposed a cross-division e-commerce task force. She got buy-in from senior leaders and built a strategic playbook that guided L’Oréal’s expansion into online retail.

She also helped the company become an early adopter of influencer marketing. “We were spending upwards of 20% of our P&L on marketing. That gave us the runway to test influencers, creators, YouTube stars. We were able to adapt very quickly onto social platforms, take risks, and enter in at an early stage. We failed fast and cheap, and then moved on to the next thing.”

By the time she left as VP of Customer Marketing, Dana had helped reshape L’Oréal’s approach to digital, laying the groundwork for how beauty brands compete online today.

The C-suite + preparing to sell

Dana’s first foray into the CMO role was with a hair care brand called OGX. She was one of four people in the C-Suite leading a very scrappy company of just 30 people total. She came in with a $2 million marketing budget for a $250M business. “I had to make every dollar work. I was really taking the core strategies and playbooks I had learned and applying it to OGX.”

In practice, that meant focusing on the core drivers of the business and optimizing the profitability, sales, and category mix. “I was focused on right sizing the entire organization and upskilling our partners for what our future vision was. And we expanded very rapidly.”

Dana said when she started, the brand was in about 15 countries but haphazardly. Within roughly two years, they expanded to 38 countries with a very clear strategic position in each one. “I spent a lot of time on the road and overseas revamping our marketing messages, creative, and consumer proposition—and then just putting that into the marketplace.”

OGX ended up having a very successful sale to Johnson & Johnson for $3.3 billion. Having such a strong passion for the brand, Dana stayed on after the acquisition but soon found the pace at a large corporation didn’t match her entrepreneurial drive. “What I love about private equity-backed companies is the speed, ownership, impact. So every company I’ve worked at since OGX has been either PE-backed or family-funded.”

A standout campaign: Badass Hair Day 

While at OGX, Dana spearheaded one of the brand’s most emotionally resonant campaigns: Badass Hair Day. It was rooted around the idea that hair doesn’t have to look a certain way. “This was 10 years ago when everything with women was retouched. But as CMO, I put into effect a rule that there was no retouching in any of our advertising. And when you think about hair—it’s messy. It’s got flyaways, dead ends, frizz. That’s real.”

“Our insight was: our consumer lives in the real world. We wanted them to feel great getting out of the gym, running errands, or just living her life—not chasing this glossy, unrealistic ideal.”

OGX applied the same no-filter policy to all paid influencer content, and saw engagement and brand love skyrocket, particularly with younger consumers. Building an emotional connection with consumers paid off. 

“We weren’t chasing earned media, but the social engagement, sharing, and tagging took off. That campaign just caught on like wildfire,” Dana said. “It was one of the first big campaigns we put out—and it really helped drive double-digit growth in our measured channels.”

Advice and takeaways

1) Take your brand listening seriously.g as your loudest tool.

Dana was first drawn to her current company, Jordan’s Skinny Mixes, by the brand’s customers. “They’re super fanatic. I went to TikTok and saw hundreds of thousands of videos showing how people use our products to hit hydration or health goals.” What sealed the deal was how deeply the internal team listened. “If a customer said they wanted a coconut macaroon flavor, we’d make it. That kind of deep social listening and fast innovation is a winning formula.”

Consider the depth and breadth of your brand listening efforts. Could you be more tuned into how your consumers use your product? Or what ideas they have to make it better? Explore strategies that can help you listen and respond to them. 

2) Focus on fundamentals.

Before launching a single campaign at OGX, Dana overhauled planograms, eliminated underperforming SKUs, and created clear pricing and assortment strategies across different retailers. “I truly start with the foundational element of every business,” she said. “If your foundation isn’t sound, it’s a waste of money to start spending on media.”

Before going big on campaigns, zoom in on the basics. Is your brand marketing optimized across all touchpoints? Are your agency partners, PR partners, and media buying partners aligned with your team’s goals? Cover those bases before you launch into the sexy stuff. 

3) Consider the stage of organization you thrive in.

Sean’s agency days might feel far from fintech, but they gave him the perspective to approach every project with purpose. Experience—especially nonlinear experience—can become your most valuable creative asset. It teaches you how to adapt, how to connect dots others might not see, and how to lead from context, not ego.

Even if your career path feels circuitous, that background becomes your advantage. Bring those instincts forward, no matter what room you’re in. The strongest marketers don’t run from their past—they build from it.

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