NARRATIVELY SPEAKING

For accomplished marketer Carla Dunham, it’s all in the story.

From key positions at Kate Spade and Saks to Target and Amazon, marketing maven Carla Dunham has proven herself to be a pro at being both laser-focused and capable of casting a wide net. Driven by a keen curiosity that led her from high-end fashion to mass-market retail to the online world, Dunham is now Chief Marketing Officer at Chicago-based Aspen Dental, a dental care company. With more than 1,000 locations nationwide, it is focused on making going to the dentist easier and more accessible.

Originally from New Hampshire, Dunham first came to the Midwest to get a master’s degree in art history at the University of Chicago. She had planned to continue on to a Ph.D., but realized she was “too extroverted to be in the library 10 hours a day.” Not sure what to do next, but savvy enough to make sure her next step counted, she headed across campus and enrolled in the business school, earning an MBA. “In the course of all this, I really fell in love with retail,” recalls Dunham. “It was theatrical, it was telling a story, it required a strong visual sensibility. Ultimately, I homed in on marketing, because I think to be an effective marketer, you have to be able to tell stories and that is what an art historian does too.”

Like a writer who can craft a poem as well as a short story, Dunham honed an array of skills and strategies as she mastered the marketing game. While working at Henri Bendel in New York (the venerable women’s department store that closed in 2019), she began to understand the sort of alchemy that must be exercised to connect a brand to its customer base. “That’s what really got me interested in marketing,” she recalls, “moving away from product and into the vein of who are you, who do you want to be, and who are you talking to?”

After 12 years in the fashion sector, Dunham shifted to the health and wellness arena, joining Equinox, where she incorporated a focus on meditation and mental health “to expand what it means to be well.” In 2019, her husband, an investment banker, took a job in Chicago, and Dunham was ready to tackle new challenges.

“Moving out of New York to Chicago was a chance to reset and think about what kind of marketer I wanted to be in my next chapter. Frankly, I was thinking about how to market in a way that felt really disruptive. I feel building a brand today is about understanding how your customer finds you, less about a campaign, and more about touchpoints. That’s what has influenced the last six years of my career.”

Within months of arriving in Chicago, Dunham took on the role of Chief Marketing Officer at Foxtrot, the locally based start-up that was out to reinvent the convenience store. “The premise was to create one that was not only digitally convenient, but that delivered superior product—fresh, premise-made food, best-in-class wine and snacks, and always something interesting to discover. My mandate was to make a local brand nationally relevant, and we did that. I helped the team to raise about $170 million and expand from five stores to more than 30.” Dunham followed that with a stint as CMO at Away, the travel lifestyle brand that launched with a smartly designed carry-on. “The challenge there was to evolve the brand beyond the millennial customer, to expand the message with storytelling connected to new product launches.”

Looking over her career, Dunham observes, “Curiosity led to different doors opening and I maximized every opportunity, leaning on that curiosity and tenacity to anticipate where the discipline I love, marketing, was going. I spent a lot of time not only making sure I was relevant but ahead of the emerging conversation.”

That commitment has brought Dunham great success. And success has allowed her to pay it forward. “I view myself as having the responsibility to help develop the next generation of talent, and I spend a lot of time with my team focusing on modeling the type of leader that I want them to know they can be.”