Overview
LANDS’ END, INC.
12 W. 31st St.
New York, New York, 10018
+1-212-302-6100
www.landsend.com
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About the job
This is a hybrid role with 12 days per month onsite in our New York Office at 12 W. 31st St.
The Vice President, Integrated Marketing, with oversight across all Lands’ End growth and retention channels, will drive the Go To Market strategy that brings in new customers and onboards them while maximizing return in existing files.This executive will have a customer and brand first mentality and a proven track record of driving customer acquisition and retention in a high-growth company.
They should bring relevant and nuanced approaches to attracting, reaching, and engaging key customer segments. There should be a strong emphasis on bringing a customer-centric mindset to marketing while unlocking Lands’ End’s full brand potential, driving profitability, and building a robust customer platform across all touchpoints (including licensing, 3rd party and marketplace).
Reporting into the SVP of Creative and Marketing, the VP, Integrated Marketing will be an influential and collaborative leader within the organization and connect as an enterprise leader across multiple functions. This executive thrives in a fast-paced and rapidly changing digital landscape and can straddle brand, business, and technology. This leader should be able to drive business results, have a proven ability to build and develop teams, partner with peers across the organization, and communicate effectively.
Responsibilities
- Develop and implement Lands’ End’s go to market strategy and integration of channels to drive existing customer growth and new customer acquisition.
- Expand our digital growth strategy by bringing expertise on the digital marketing landscape and a deep understanding of Lands’ End’s customer and product offering.
- Lead the transformation from catalog marketing to integrated marketing planning, ensuring seamless alignment across all touchpoints.
- Utilize AI search capabilities to enhance customer targeting and campaign effectiveness.
- Integrate customer journey mapping and loyalty program insights into marketing strategy to deepen engagement and retention.
- Drive product launches and campaign planning with a focus on funnel expansion and optimization.
- Collaborate with external agency partners and internal teams to execute integrated marketing initiatives.
- Bring a test and learn approach to the organization by defining and driving a learning agenda for how we connect and engage with key customer segments.
- Transform our marketing into a story-driven platform oriented around our product solutions.
- Lead the identification of target customer segments and markets to drive profitable customer acquisition at scale and new opportunities, utilizing data-driven and data-informed insights to continuously reallocate spend and optimize ROI.
- Execute and scale the acquisition strategy through online marketing channels, including search engine marketing (SEM), email, social, display, video, external partnerships, and other direct marketing programs.
- Build a CRM plan for smart growth and improve key customer KPI’s and overall profitability (acquisition, retention, loyalty).
- Utilize data-driven insights to improve performance, growth, and efficiency.
- Lead and inspire a team of growth marketers, providing guidance and fostering a culture of innovation and performance. Continuously identify and implement opportunities while measuring for a portfolio effect which drives proper KPI’s and a test-and-learn approach.
- Partner with Brand, and other internal partners, to drive the end-to-end customer journey from initial brand awareness to first order conversion to an ongoing customer relationship and ultimately substantial top-and bottom-line growth.
- Utilize the existing robust analytics and drive performance of all relevant KPIs (LTV, CAC, contribution margin, channel CPAs, retention cohorts, customer churn feedback, return rates, etc.).
- Capitalize on opportunity to lead company’s approach to establishing LTV and CAC metrics, as key performance indicators that are relevant, growing, and top of mind.
Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience leading high-growth and performance marketing at multiple apparel retailers focused on scaling top-line and profitability.
- A self-motivated and resourceful executive with a strong bias for action who thrives in complexity and enjoys maintaining a long-term view on business.
- Strong understanding of trends within the digital space and proven success in a leadership role driving growth for the business and team.
- An understanding of key MarTech platforms and how to leverage platforms to create scaled impact.
- A track-record of implementing the appropriate processes to achieve the organization’s KPIs; an expert collaborator who can solve for this across their own team and others.
- Skilled at leveraging, interpreting, and applying data and analytics to build integrated marketing strategies to drive healthy growth.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skillset; an ability to communicate, collaborate and influence cross-functionally achieving results in a hands-on environment.
- Experience in a dimensionalized marketing program across channels: direct, wholesale and marketplace.
- Warm and inclusive leadership skills; someone who is an inspiring, strategic, and supportive leader.
- Customer and brand first mentality is required.
The base salary range for this position is $200,000 to $300,000, and will be determined based on the candidate’s experience and qualifications. Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities. This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws.
Lands' End is a 60-year-old apparel brand trying to reinvent itself for platforms that didn't exist three years ago. Q2 2025 revenue was $294 million, down 7% year-over-year. The company generates roughly $1.4 billion annually when things go right, but fiscal 2025 is trending toward the low end of their $1.33-$1.40 billion guidance range.
Here's what matters: Lands' End carries approximately $250 million in debt at SOFR + 8%—that's distress-level pricing—which costs them approximately $40 million annually in interest. Operating margins run 3-4%, meaning they're uncomfortably close to not covering their interest from operations. They lost $12 million in H1 2025 and are banking on exceptional holiday performance to hit full-year guidance of $19-27 million in adjusted net income.
The business has three main parts: direct-to-consumer (website, catalog, social), B2B commercial uniforms and school uniforms (the only segment consistently growing), and an expanding licensing/marketplace business (Amazon, Macy's, Nordstrom, Kohl's). The Board announced they're exploring "strategic alternatives"—code for potentially selling the company—but months later there's no deal, which tells you something about buyer enthusiasm.
Consumer discretionary spending is wobbly. Middle-income families—Lands' End's core customer—are getting squeezed by persistent inflation, high interest rates, and economic uncertainty. Premium casual apparel is the definition of deferrable spending.
The apparel retail landscape has fundamentally changed. Platform containment is real: TikTok, Meta, and Google are keeping traffic in-feed with native checkouts. Industry reports suggest website conversions from social are declining significantly, while in-platform conversions surge. Lands' End's own U.S. ecommerce dropped 11% in Q2—their flagship channel is bleeding.
Meanwhile, search behavior has fragmented across Google, TikTok, ChatGPT, Reddit, and YouTube. Traditional SEO playbooks are worth less every quarter. Platform dependency is the new single-point-of-failure risk, with some brands reportedly experiencing significant revenue losses after platform algorithm changes.
AI is compressing the discovery-to-purchase funnel. LLMs are answering "what's the best rain jacket for Seattle winters?" without sending anyone to your website. If Lands' End isn't structured for LLM ingestion and recommendation, they're invisible to an entire generation of shoppers who won't tolerate clicking through five pages to find a product.
The catalog business (once Lands' End's superpower) is being reborn but transformed. Management talks about using catalogs offensively again, but the economics have changed. Paper and postage costs are up, response rates are down, and the younger "evolver" customer (35-50 years old) doesn't want to see promotional "was/is" pricing like the traditional "resolver" customer does. This requires sophisticated segmentation and personalization at scale.
The B2B Outfitters business is killing it. Revenue up 5% in Q2, school uniforms up high single digits. They achieved record contract duration growth—the highest since the company's 2014 spin-off. Management stated they're leveraging "the strength of our brand, our steadfast focus on quality, our market-leading embroidery and personalization capabilities and our great customer service." This is sticky, predictable, high-margin revenue with multi-year contracts.
Having said that, B2B success masks consumer brand weakness. The Outfitters team is excellent at enterprise sales, logistics, and service delivery. The consumer marketing team is struggling to stop a 7% revenue decline. These require completely different skill sets, and right now the B2B wins are subsidizing consumer losses.
Gross margins improved 90 basis points to 49% despite tariff headwinds. That's operationally impressive. They've built a flexible sourcing network that can shift manufacturing and fabric across geographies as tariff conditions change. They negotiated vendor consolidation to share tariff burdens. The majority of fall/holiday inventory is already shipped, so they've got near-term visibility.
The contradiction: gross margin gains disappeared into SG&A deleverage (up 130 bps as a percentage of revenue) and operating income still fell 20%. When you dig into aggregate profitability, it's deteriorating—operating income is down almost 80% year-to-date. The company won't disclose segment-level profitability, so you can't tell if the marketplace and licensing growth is accretive or just cannibalizing higher-margin direct sales at worse economics.
The distributed commerce strategy is real and growing. Third-party marketplaces up 14%, licensing up 19% in Q2 (36% YTD). They delivered over half of new customer growth through these channels on virtually no capital investment. The Lands' End Essentials line on Amazon—approximately 40 SKUs at opening price points—generated strong Q3 results according to management, with the CEO stating "Our Q3 numbers have been absolutely astonishing." They're seeing customers migrate from Amazon to the brand site for fuller assortment, creating a potential flywheel.
The contradiction: this is the right long-term strategy but terrible near-term optics. U.S. e-commerce (the brand's flagship) declined 11% in Q2. Is distributed commerce reaching net new customers or just teaching existing customers to shop elsewhere at worse margins? Management claims there's a flywheel effect, but they provide limited data to support it. The aggregate profit picture—down significantly—suggests the channel economics aren't working as advertised.
They've made genuine AI investments. Management described deploying "our new AI-driven recommendation and outfitting engine" that helps customers mix and match products. They built an AI engine that creates product display pages with platform-optimized language—Amazon listings read differently than Nordstrom listings. Advanced data science enables sophisticated catalog segmentation based on customer behavior.
Social commerce showed momentum, with Instagram followers growing by over 100% year-over-year, total social traffic up nearly 19% versus last year and nearly 60% in June and July. The "Tote Girl Summer" campaign, which offered the iconic pocket tote with personalization at pop-up shops in popular summer destinations, contributed to continued customer acquisition, with the tote remaining the #1 new-to-brand acquisition product.
The contradiction: all this AI-powered personalization couldn't prevent an 11% drop in their core ecommerce business. Technology is necessary but not sufficient. You can have the best recommendation engine in the world, but if your brand relevance is fading or your product assortment is stale, the tech won't save you.
The core U.S. ecommerce business is deteriorating fast. Flat in Q1, down 11% in Q2. Management blamed a "slow start to the swim season," but Q2 ends in early August—essentially the end of summer. That excuse doesn't hold water. This is the premium, full-margin, brand-defining channel, and it's bleeding. This suggests either brand health problems, competitive losses, or both.
European operations are a mess. Down 15% in Q2, an improvement from down 28% in Q1, but still awful. Management cited "supply chain challenges on key seasonal products and broader macroeconomic pressures." Translation: they can't execute operationally and the market is tough. Europe is small enough that it shouldn't command this much attention, yet leadership keeps discussing it. Either fix it decisively or exit—the current "test bed" approach is burning resources.
Debt structure is dangerous. Approximately $250 million in debt at SOFR + 8% (that interest rate screams credit risk), costing roughly $40 million annually—approximately two-thirds of fiscal 2024 operating income. With operating margins of 3-4% and volatile quarterly performance, any operational stumble risks covenant breaches. Term loans have leverage ratio and interest coverage covenants that tighten when performance weakens. If they miss H2 guidance, this becomes a liquidity crisis fast.
The guidance requires heroic H2 execution. They lost $12 million in H1 and need to generate substantial profits in H2 to hit full-year guidance of $19-27 million in adjusted net income. Q3 guidance projects net revenue between $320-350 million—a wide range. They're asking investors to assume near-perfect Q4 execution (approximately 35% of annual revenue per historical patterns) during a period of uncertain consumer sentiment with potential tariff escalations. There's no margin for error.
Strategic alternatives process = organizational distraction. The Board announced they're exploring strategic alternatives but stated "We will not be commenting further on it at this time." Months later, no deal. That tells you potential buyers either found problems in due diligence or couldn't agree on valuation. Meanwhile, this process consumes management attention, creates employee uncertainty, and signals to the market that even the Board thinks current strategy might not work.
The licensing business is genuinely scalable. Up 36% YTD with likely near-100% gross margins. The CEO stated "We're up 36% on our licensing revenues...We continue to look at how we will drive the business forward in the back half...we see tremendous upside opportunity. And actually, the sky is the limit in terms of the licenses we can go after." Strong performance in club stores, planned footwear introduction later in the year, and increasing interest from distributors.
Amazon Essentials could be a customer acquisition engine. The approximately 40-SKU line at opening price points had strong Q3 performance. Management observed "a tremendous amount of those customers then migrate to see the full assortment on landsend.com," creating a potential flywheel. If this proves out with data, you've unlocked real value in customer acquisition economics.
B2B pipeline has legs. The commercial uniform business won back Delta Airlines, with management noting "the impact of bringing a Delta back is not lost on other airlines out there." Healthcare is identified as an adjacent category for expansion. School uniforms continue growing with competitive advantages in quality and service. This segment could grow 10-15% annually if executed well.
Social commerce and younger demographics are showing life. With Instagram followers doubled and significant social traffic increases, younger customer acquisition is gaining traction. If you can convert these social-acquired customers into repeat purchasers across categories beyond the entry-point tote, you reshape the demographic profile. The current 35-50 "evolver" segment will age out—younger customer acquisition is existential.
European turnaround through distributed commerce replication. Recent launches on Amazon, Debenhams, and Next showed "results significantly ahead of expectations." If you can replicate the U.S. distributed commerce model in markets that management describes as "more marketplace-driven than in North America," the depressed European base offers meaningful recovery upside.
Platform algorithm changes can crater revenue overnight. Industry reports suggest brands have experienced significant revenue losses after platform policy changes. Lands' End is increasing platform dependency through marketplaces and social—one algorithm change could destroy a quarter.
Tariffs beyond mitigated levels. Management stated "We are implementing mitigation measures to effectively manage the tariff headwinds at current levels for the remainder of fiscal 2025," but guidance assumes no escalation. The CEO acknowledged passing some costs to customers, stating "are we handing anything on to the customer? I'm going to be honest, yes, we are, as little as we possibly can." With 3-4% operating margins, any significant additional tariffs could push below breakeven.
Consumer spending pullback during holiday. Q4 represents approximately 35% of annual revenue based on historical seasonality patterns. If middle-income families cut discretionary spending during the critical holiday period, full-year guidance collapses and debt covenant problems become acute.
Channel cannibalization without visibility. The company won't disclose segment profitability. If marketplace and licensing growth is just teaching customers to shop elsewhere at worse economics—and aggregate operating income down 80% YTD suggests it might be—the entire distributed commerce strategy could be destroying value while looking good on revenue diversification slides.
Debt covenant breach spiral. Miss guidance, breach covenants, lenders demand immediate repayment or force punitive amendment fees. With limited cash deployment (only $2 million in share buybacks despite $25 million authorization), a covenant breach could force emergency refinancing, asset sales, or worse. Independent analyst assessment notes the company is "perilously close to not covering interest expenses from operating income."
From what I can tell, you're being hired to fix a broken consumer acquisition and retention engine while the company simultaneously pursues distributed commerce (unproven economics), explores strategic alternatives (distraction), manages dangerous leverage (limited margin for error), and bets the year on Q4 execution (low visibility).
All this according to Seeking Alpha and triple-checked across multiple AI platforms. Ask me for my source material.
The VP Integrated Marketing role is designed to solve the LTV:CAC crisis, prove distributed commerce channel economics, establish proper attribution across licensing/marketplace/direct, and build customer retention that offsets acquisition challenges. Management wants someone who can "transform from catalog marketing to integrated marketing planning," "utilize AI search capabilities to enhance customer targeting," and "establish LTV and CAC metrics as key performance indicators"—metrics that apparently don't exist robustly today.
This is a 12-days-per-month in New York office role, reporting to the SVP of Creative and Marketing, requiring 10+ years of performance marketing at apparel retailers. The job posting emphasizes "customer and brand first mentality" and "proven ability to drive customer acquisition and retention in a high-growth company."
Let me translate: the previous approach wasn't customer-first, and this is definitively not a high-growth company right now—it's a declining business trying to stabilize.
The opportunity: If you successfully prove the distributed commerce model economics, establish proper attribution, and stabilize the core business, you'd be the architect of a genuine business model transformation. That's resume-defining. The B2B business provides cash flow stability that some turnarounds don't have. The brand has 60 years of equity and genuine customer love—it's not starting from zero.
The risk: You could execute brilliantly and still fail because of platform algorithm changes, tariff escalations, consumer spending collapse, or debt covenant breaches. The "strategic alternatives" process might conclude with a sale where your strategy gets discarded by new owners. You'd be building a marketing transformation on a financial foundation that's uncomfortably fragile.
1. Honest channel economics assessment. You need to build actual P&L visibility by channel within 90 days. If marketplace and licensing are cannibalizing direct at worse economics, leadership needs to know, even if it contradicts the narrative they've been telling investors. This requires political courage.
2. Radical simplification of the testing agenda. With limited resources and high leverage, the company can't afford to test everything. You need to identify the 3-5 tests that could move LTV:CAC by 20%+ and kill everything else. The AI capabilities are there—what's missing is ruthless prioritization.
3. Platform dependency risk mitigation. Build owned channels (app, SMS, email, zero-party data) that can sustain the business if TikTok or Meta algorithm changes crater social commerce. Brands without redundancy face existential risks from single platform changes.
The question is whether leadership will let you do this. The CEO seems committed to distributed commerce regardless of economics. The CFO provided no segment profitability data on the earnings call despite analyst interest. If you uncover that the strategy is destroying value, will they listen, or will you become the person who "doesn't get it"?
Success requires executive air cover to make unpopular recommendations and kill initiatives that aren't working. Ask directly in interviews whether there are sacred cows you're not allowed to touch.
"When you say the distributed commerce strategy delivered 'over half of new customer growth,' what's the LTV of those customers compared to direct-acquired customers at 12 months?" If they can't answer with data, you're walking into an attribution nightmare.
"The earnings call mentioned channel economics aren't broken out publicly. What segment profitability visibility will I have, and how quickly can I get it?" If the answer is "we're working on that" or vague, you'll be flying blind on the most important strategic question.
"What's the real story behind the core U.S. ecommerce dropping 11% in Q2? Was it just swim timing, or are there brand health or competitive issues?" Their willingness to be honest here tells you whether you're joining a truth-telling culture or a narrative-management one.
"With the strategic alternatives process ongoing, what happens to a new marketing strategy if the company gets sold in the next 12 months?" You need to understand if this is a 2-year turnaround play or a 6-month placeholder role.
"What's the marketing budget as a percentage of revenue, and how much discretion will I have to reallocate it?" If they're cost-cutting and marketing spend is locked, you're being hired to rearrange deck chairs.
1. Turnaround experience, not scale experience. They claim they want someone from a "high-growth company" but what they actually need is someone who's fixed a broken acquisition engine in a resource-constrained environment. If you've stabilized LTV:CAC in a declining business or led a channel strategy pivot under financial pressure, lead with that.
2. Attribution and analytics chops. They need to "capitalize on opportunity to lead company's approach to establishing LTV and CAC metrics as key performance indicators that are relevant, growing, and top of mind." This suggests the infrastructure doesn't exist. If you've built attribution systems from scratch or proven ROI on channel mix shifts with data, that's your differentiator.
3. AI-native operating model. The job posting emphasizes "understanding of key MarTech platforms" and "leveraging, interpreting, and applying data and analytics." Position yourself as someone who uses AI to increase testing velocity and compress decision cycles. Reference modern concepts: agent-based workflows, prompt-engineered campaign delivery, anomaly-driven adaptation with rapid response cycles.
Don't oversell strategy if they need execution. This is a hands-on role requiring 12 days/month in-office. They need someone who can operate, not just advise. If you pitch yourself as a visionary strategist who'll delegate execution, you'll mismatch their needs.
The company has limited budget flexibility given the leverage situation. They repurchased only $2 million in shares despite having a $25 million authorization—that tells you cash is tight.
This is a "prove yourself first" role, not an immediate investment. Expect base salary at market for VP-level apparel marketing ($200-250K range), but push for equity upside tied to specific KPIs (hitting LTV:CAC targets, achieving channel profitability thresholds). If the turnaround works or the company sells, equity could be meaningful. If it doesn't, you want a base that doesn't leave you financially underwater.
Ask about severance terms explicitly given the strategic alternatives process. If the company sells and your strategy gets scrapped, you need protection.
Request quarterly board-level reviews so your work is visible to potential acquirers. If the company sells, you want the new owners to see you as essential, not inherited overhead.
This role is for someone who wants a hard turnaround challenge with resume-defining upside if it works and significant career risk if it doesn't. The financial fragility (approximately $250 million in debt with $40 million annual interest against 3-4% operating margins), platform dependency, and strategic alternatives uncertainty make this higher risk than typical VP marketing roles. But if you can prove distributed commerce economics, establish attribution infrastructure, and stabilize a declining business, you'd be building a case study that every apparel retailer would study.
Not recommended if you want stability, resources, or predictable execution. Recommended if you want to test yourself against a genuinely hard problem with meaningful potential upside. Go in eyes open about the debt situation and platform risks. Negotiate equity participation and severance protection. And get absolute clarity on executive air cover to make unpopular recommendations—without that, you're set up to fail.
Analysis based on publicly available information including SEC filings, Q2 2025 earnings call transcript, earnings release, and analyst coverage as of September 10, 2025.
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