Rachel Gardner

DEVELOPER

A Ski bum, sailor and songwriter; Rachel is the swiss army knife of experiences. From chasing year round winters between the Northwest and New Zealand to racing sailboats in stormy conditions, Rachel is always up for adventure. Born in a music store (yes really) and being raised by two musician parents, Rachel spent much of her childhood backstage learning the ins and outs of performing, putting on productions and marketing events. In college she completed her Bachelor's degree in Botany, mainly because it was the only degree that would allow her both summers and winters off to ski, and then continued on with getting her Master's Degree in Environmental Education. She has interned with guide services in the Pacific Northwest and continued on as a snowshoe and hiking guide with a non-profit working with women in shelters for many years.

While finishing her master's degree Rachel worked as a bicycle mechanic, a deckhand, and a ski instructor. She met an inventor who offered her a job building prototypes and she quickly became Full-time working in the startup. After graduate school she stayed on with the inventor and learned how to build complex inventory systems from scratch. During these years she learned about manufacturing, supply chain, material purchasing, marketing and working with investors. Following this experience she joined the team at Zumiez and worked her way up through the Operations team, managing a distribution center, building and managing a fulfillment center, overseeing customer service, warehousing, technology and more. She led the process to replatform the Magento website and became the Director or Design, Usability and SEO, overseeing operations, front end producers, graphic designers, backend developers and the SEO team.

After her successes at Zumiez Rachel went to evo as the Director of E-Commerce and Marketing. She led a full site redesign, branded print project, brought photography in-house and managed marketing through the grand opening of the Portland store. After this Rachel had become known for large transition projects in the outdoor industry in the Northwest and worked as the Director of E-Commerce for Cascade Designs and then Oiselle. She has completed several platform migrations and website builds and is familiar with Magento, Shopify, Shopify Plus, Big Commerce, Squarespace and Wordpress. Her 10+ years as a Director in the E-Commerce field, specifically in outdoor and action sports, has given her a breadth of experience that she draws on with brands of all sizes.

And when she needs a break from full-scale IT and Operations projects Rachel can be found playing gigs with her band, a 3 piece ukulele group that plays indie-boho-grunge originals at outdoor festivals, and performing venues in Seattle. Rachel is based out of Edmonds, Washington with her family, including two adventurous boys, two dogs, a cat, her trusted old Jeep and their racing sailboat.