Heather Marie, Founder & CEO

Heather@72lux.com

Heather Marie is the founder and CEO of 72Lux, Inc.

Prior to founding 72Lux, Heather was on the founding team at Affinity Labs, a digital media company that became the largest collection of online professional communities. While at Affinity Labs she played a critical role in their sales efforts and helped to lead the company's lead generation and display sales from the ground up to profitability. In January 2008, Affinity Labs was acquired by Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW). While assisting with the Affinity Labs and Monster.com post-acquisition integration, Heather 's role within Monster was expanded to focus on national lead generation sales strategy for all five U.S. divisions of Monster Worldwide.
 Heather has also spent seven years working in retail for women's clothing retailers such as Ralph Lauren (NYSE: RL), Express (Limited Inc.) (NYSE: LTD), and Abercrombie & Fitch.

She launched her first "venture" at age eleven, an arbitrage business on eBay. She received her undergraduate degree in Business Administration from a combination of the University of San Francisco and the London School of Economics.
She previously served as a Board Member for the San Francisco Opera BRAVO! board at the San Francisco Opera, as the Social Media and Communications chair.

Heather has spoken at several conferences including Fashinvest Capital Conference, The Social Edge Summit and Decoded Fashion.

Mike Melnicki, CTO

Mike Melnicki is the Chief Technology Officer at 72Lux where he is responsible for ensuring that 72Lux is a world-class, robust e-commerce platform. He also oversees engineering and helps define and execute the product strategy. In the past, he has served in multiple technology management and software development roles. At Strobe, he was the VP of Engineering where he led the team to build an HTML5 services platform that enabled developers to build multi-screen apps using standard web technologies. Prior to that, he worked at Adobe for eight years where he led engineering teams that contributed to the Digital Publishing Suite and built Flash Platform Services, a stack of web services for Flash developers. While at Macromedia, Mike led the mobile server engineering team to build a mobile data service called FlashCast and worked directly with NTT DoCoMo to launch the iChannel service in Japan, and with Verizon Wireless to launch FlashCast in the US. He is interested in mobile technology, web services and large-scale distributed systems. Mike has a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Joe Ekiert, Developer

Never averse to getting his hands digitally dirty, Joe spends quite a bit of time doing what he loves: typing lots and lots of symbols, numbers and letters. Coding and building websites has been a hobby since high school and eventually through college at Tufts University where Joe studied Computer Engineering and refined his ability with logic based programming languages. Attempting to get in on being paid for his hobby, Joe entered the foray as a sub contractor in Massachusetts. After relocating to Brooklyn he became the webmaster at a Williamsburg real estate company. He then moved on to a marketing and branding company where he began specializing with CodeIgniter PHP framework to build a platform that powered several client websites.

Joe is best known for his antics with a PHP and MySQL backend combined with an HTML, CSS and JavaScript front. However, he has been known to dabble in various periphery projects including Backbone.js web apps, a Heroku deployed Hubot with custom CoffeeScript plugins, developing iOS applications, creating custom server stacks with Vagrant or just watching sports on tv (I can like other things!).

Vivek Dhar, Developer

Vivek has been programming for over ten years. He was worked on a diverse set of technologies, from integrating systems using various middleware products to building intuitive enterprise and public web applications using Java, and other front end technologies like, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX, and CSS. He was worked for an equally diverse set of companies, like 2Wire, OmniSky, Raley's, and various clients as a consultant with Wipro.

His interests include building products for the web, UX, UI, photography, and golf. He also serves on the advisory board of an education non-profit. He has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Phil Rivers, Brand Relations

Phillip is the Brand Relations Manager at 72Lux where he is responsible for developing new business and partnerships with brands and retailers. Before relocating to New York Phillip worked at startups and growth stage companies within e-commerce and fashion in Los Angeles. He specialized in Business Development roles and focused on user acquisition, revenue growth, and cultivating meaningful partner relations.

While at NightTap he developed key vendor partnerships in order to maximize brand exposure and grow the user base. He also grew a nation wide sales team and sourced business development partnerships focused on acquisitions and growth while at the social commerce company Beachmint.

There is more to Phillip than a passion for business and marketing. He often spends his free time eating charcuterie or having an espresso, but most of all keeps it real.

Amanda Vogt, Sales Coordinator

As the Sales Coordinator for 72Lux, Amanda Vogt is responsible for acquiring new publishing partnerships while servicing and expanding on existing client relationships. She has always had an innate sense of creativity and a strong interest in technology, and her diverse background lends itself to the up and coming ‘content and commerce’ environment.

Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Amanda moved to New York after graduating high school where she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and earned her Associate Degree in Fashion Design. While at FIT, she had experience working with a fashion photographer and also at Harper’s BAZAAR, where she learned first hand how major magazines operated. Realizing that she had a passion not only for fashion but also for publishing, Amanda decided to obtain her Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism. She headed to Ohio University to attend the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism where her studies focused on magazine and online disciplines. Further honing her publishing skills, she worked on several digital and print publications as a writer, editor and creative director, started her own fashion oriented website and even founded her own fashion magazine before graduation. Since moving back to New York Amanda was previously with Sally Hansen at Coty Beauty where she worked on product development and global marketing and also at a startup fashion e-commerce company doing Creative Operations.

Robin Lewis

Robin Lewis has over forty years of strategic operating and consulting experience in the retail and related consumer products industries. He has held executive positions at DuPont, VF Corporation, Women’s Wear Daily (WWD), and Goldman Sachs, among others, and has consulted for dozens of retail, consumer products and other companies. In addition to his role as CEO and Editorial Director of The Robin Report, he is a professor at the Graduate School of Professional Studies at The Fashion Institute of Technology.

Kendra Bracken-Ferguson

There is a reason Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, DBA's Managing Director, was named Mobile Marketer's "Mobile Women to Watch in 2010." She helped create one of the first Cingular and MySpace mobile music studios, before "mobile social networking" as a term was part of our vernacular and went on to become the youngest Vice President at Fleishman-Hillard New York, one of the largest PR agencies in the world, where she was responsible for overseeing the digital consumer team and developing social media strategies for high profile global brands in fashion, consumer packaged goods, and technology. Before co-founding DBA, she worked with Ralph Lauren, one of the largest American fashion design houses to launch its first dedicated global social media department, navigating brand management, marketing, advertising, and public relations to develop and drive a cohesive approach to the online space from the US to Japan. There, she implemented some of the most noteworthy influencer campaigns across multiple brands. Her background includes online interactive and integrated marketing with specialties in mobile marketing, influencer relations, digital communications, and viral/Word-of-Mouth marketing, event management and youth marketing. She is also on the Board of New York Women in Communications and Vice President of the Integrated Marketing Committee.

Marc Gobe

Designer, photographer, filmmaker, respected author and sought-after public speaker Marc Gobé focuses on connecting brands emotionally with people in a positive way. As President of Emotional Branding LLC, an experimental think tank, Marc and his daughter Gwenaelle Gobé, Creative Director, offer insight into the trends that move consumers and ideas that inspire marketers through their website EmotionalBranding.com.

An innovative brand design pioneer, Marc authored the bestselling book Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People. In 2002 he followed up with Citizen Brand: A Treatise on Corporate Responsibility and in 2007 he released Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design. Marc's books champion the role of design and creative collaboration in building successful brand innovation that taps the roots of human emotion. In Emotional Branding Sergio Zyman, then the CMO of Coca-Cola is quoted saying, "Over the next three years, the aid Marc gave me was instrumental in helping us take the volume of The Coca-Cola company from nine billion to fifteen billion cases a year."

Clients such as Coca-Cola, Air France, AOL, Estée Lauder, Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Ann Taylor, Victoria’s Secret, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Bath and Body Works, Procter and Gamble, Nordstrom, Unilever, Samsung and many others have employed Marc Gobé’s integrated design approach to help foster their brand’s emotional relationship with consumers.

Thomas Varghese

Thomas Varghese is an entrepreneur with an unique combination of business and technical skills. Thomas serves on several corporate boards including San Francisco Classical Voice and is very active as a mentor and angel investor, sharing his proven ability to set strategies and business models in rapidly emerging markets and create global companies that are thought leaders and visionary. He has successfully grown companies from zero to profitability by recruiting key talents and providing vision and strategic direction. Most recently he was a Vice President at Oracle Corporation driving business, technology and product strategy.

Peter Ashley

Peter Ashley is the COO of Talenthouse, which leverages the connections between creative artists and their audience to put brand messages into content shared online. Prior to Talenthouse, Peter managed fundraising for 500 Startups, the venture accelerator founded by Dave McClure. Peter began his career in Silicon Valley at PayPal, where he was the Director of Business Development, and launched PayPal’s Merchant Services business, which has grown to more than $1 Billion.