Chris Guerra

My name is Chris Guerra. I've grown up in the retail industry shadowing my dad, a retail executive, who opened Barney's New York & Niketown stores across the country. After college I wanted to become part of the online world and joined Entertainment Media Works, a technology company based in New York City. The company created an interactive marketplace for product placement and identification. Starting in a lower management position, I quickly worked my way up, earning the title of Vice President in a 40 person company. Some of my successes included developing 350 brand and retail relationships, and playing a key role in launching a Facebook application which earned 150k installs. I was able to work with, and learn from several of the best executives in the business.

I decided to leave EMW in order to pursue my dream of starting my own company, Brand Orders. I raised a small amount of funding, recruited a development team and then set out to solve a specific problem in the wholesale buying process. We received solid traction during our beta release and I learned a tremendous amount about running a business end-to end. From business development, to product management and leading a team, I loved it all. I also learned that sometimes difficult situations and decisions need to be made in start-ups. Our biggest challenge was fundraising and our path to success proved more difficult than anticipated.

After much sacrifice I decided to move on from Brand Orders and join Portalis AG, a german based e-commerce company as General Manager of North America. My primary responsibility was to create new shopping concepts for the US market and integrate US trends into their network of sites. This included managing development, daily operations, marketing and sales. My most noticable release was Coupons.tv where I put partnerships together with 12 daily deal sites, including groupon and livingsocial, and built a video production team.

During my time at Portalis I was recruited to Group FMG as Associate Vice President. Group FMG is a digital marketing agency that operating in the US, Europe and Asia.