Bluecore Sets Out to Play Transformative Role in Retail With Expanded Executive Team

March 22, 2022 at 09:00 AM EDT

Retail Technology Company Appoints Sherene Hilal as Chief Product Officer, Ryan Deutsch as Chief Customer Officer, and Arvind Krishnan as SVP, Engineering

Bluecore, the retail technology company transforming casual shoppers into lifetime customers for the largest and fastest-growing direct-to-consumer brands, today announced the expansion of its C-Suite and executive team. Sherene Hilal has been promoted to Chief Product Officer (CPO), Ryan Deutsch joins as Chief Customer Officer (CCO) and Arvind Krishnan has been appointed as SVP of Engineering. Each brings a specialized skill set honed at leading technology and retail companies, including Oracle, Persado and Salesforce. Together, they will fuel Bluecore’s vision to define the next era in commerce, where retailers will win only by activating data in real-time to predict where and what shoppers will buy next.

Retail is entering a new state of Personal Commerce defined by a shift beyond traditional acquisition tactics and toward highly personalized experiences that result in loyal relationships with shoppers. Because retailers are now competing not only with each other, but with every other digital experience, there’s heightened pressure to get personalization right, at scale, to grow. Bluecore achieves this by transforming first-party shopper and product data into insights and predictions, and predictions into actions. By executing on the exact experience each individual shopper should receive–across owned and paid digital channels–Bluecore’s retail-specific solution consistently gets shoppers to buy and then become lifetime customers.

With a laser focus on growing retailers’ businesses through increased customer retention and repeat purchases, Hilal, Deutsch and Krishnan’s experience across data, personalization and platforms will be critical to realizing Bluecore’s shopper-centric approach to maximum profitability.

Hilal joined Bluecore in 2018 from Oracle Data Cloud. Now, as Chief Product Officer, she is leading Bluecore’s transformation from product suite to shopper-first platform. Hilal is building Bluecore's performance-driven approach to DTC retail growth directly into the platform by putting first-party shopper and product data at the core. This enables retailers to create personalized experiences for shoppers throughout the entire lifecycle, no matter what channel they’re on. This approach is in contrast to the channel-specific and volume-driven approach taken by traditional technologies, which aren’t built specifically for the challenges and opportunities of retail. Hilal most recently served as Bluecore’s SVP of Product Marketing & Business Operations.

Deutsch joins Bluecore as Chief Customer Officer after two decades working in digital and retail. He was most recently at Persado, as both a provider and user of enterprise marketing technology. He has led Personalization and Customer Relationship Management functions, where he executed best-in-class customer experiences focused on acquisition, retention and growth. In his new role, Deutsch will work directly with Bluecore’s 400+ retail customers to increase identification, first purchase and repeat purchase rates, and ultimately, revenue–all by activating first-party data they already have.

“Bluecore is the first retail-specific platform I’ve encountered that’s built to natively understand and achieve the goals that directly impact retailers’ businesses,” said Deutsch. “My focus will be to demonstrate how, by driving personalization at scale, and therefore performance, for retailers, shoppers will feel more connected and loyal to brands–not years from now, but tomorrow.”

Completing the talent trifecta is Arvind Krishnan. Krishnan joins Bluecore following a 14-year tenure at Salesforce, where he was responsible for scaling products and platforms for the enterprise. At Salesforce, he led the engineering of the Einstein Bot platform, as well as Salesforce’s Digital Engagement platform, which enables companies to engage customers with personalized messages on their favorite communication platforms.

As SVP of Engineering at Bluecore, Krishnan will bring together the volume and scale of enterprise technology with the intelligence of Bluecore. Bluecore has already achieved a level of real-time personalization that established technologies have not and can process data at the scale necessary to solve complex problems specific to retail. Krishnan’s focus will be to expand the platform to directly support retailers as they look to these capabilities to double down on personalization across channels. He will additionally be responsible for growing and leading the engineering and data science teams to support these efforts.

“As we think about the next five years at Bluecore, we want leadership that understands data, personalization and scale, specifically as they relate to commerce,” said Fayez Mohamood, CEO of Bluecore. “We have made big bets on the future state of commerce and have an incredible opportunity to continue building for direct-to-consumer retail. By using technology to activate the data they already have, retailers can build meaningful and long-term relationships without sacrificing lifetime value. With Sherene, Ryan and Arvind, we’re excited about what we’ll build next and confident in our ability to deliver our Personal Commerce vision for everyone.”

Bluecore’s C-Suite and executive team expansion follows the company’s $1B valuation and close of its $125M Series E funding round in August 2021.

About Bluecore

Bluecore is a marketing technology company that’s transforming casual shoppers into lifetime customers for the world's fastest growing retail brands. Through its patented shopper and product matching and the release of Bluecore Communicate™, Bluecore Site™, and Bluecore Advertise™ brands are now able to personalize 100% of communications delivered to consumers through their email, ecommerce and paid media shopping experiences. Bluecore replaces manual processes with an intelligent, AI-driven workflow, allowing brands to manage these communications through a single interface. In 2019, the company bet big on itself when it introduced the industry’s first shared-success pricing model. It’s now credited with doubling email revenue, and increasing customer retention, lifetime value and overall speed to marketing for more than 400 brands, including Express, NOBULL, The North Face, Teleflora, and Bass Pro Shops.