EVP – Risk and Resilience — Direct-To-Consumer Organisation

The mandate

The organisation has grown by combining subscription propositions, owned digital storefronts and selective marketplace distribution across several consumer categories. That model creates unusually tight connections between events that are often managed separately. A social campaign can change demand within hours; a fulfilment interruption can trigger cancellations and refunds before a conventional sales report appears; and a customer-data incident can damage both regulatory standing and recurring revenue. Recent planning cycles have exposed how little time leadership has to distinguish a short-lived signal from a threat to cash, service or trust.

The EVP – Risk and Resilience will build an enterprise view of those connections and turn it into operating decisions. The role covers enterprise risk, business continuity, crisis management, third-party resilience, product-supply risk, insurance strategy and coordination of material cyber and privacy scenarios. Specialist functions retain their established accountabilities: information security owns technical defence, legal and privacy teams interpret obligations, product quality controls safety and finance owns treasury risk. The EVP is accountable for making their evidence comparable, testing interdependencies and ensuring executive choices are made before an incident dictates them.

This appointment follows a demand-planning reset rather than a single disclosed failure. Forecast error has amplified inventory and fulfilment exposure, especially around creator-led campaigns, product drops and subscription renewals. The board does not want risk to become a brake on commercial experimentation. It wants clearly defined tolerances, faster warning and rehearsed alternatives so the business can take deliberate risks without confusing speed with improvisation.

Scope and operating context

Based onsite in New York, the executive will influence an operating perimeter of approximately 1,225 employees and material partners across the United States and a wider international region. The direct organisation will include enterprise-risk, continuity, crisis-readiness and assurance capabilities. Critical work also sits with demand planners, digital product teams, customer operations, fulfilment leaders, sourcing, quality, finance and regional management. The role requires credibility across those disciplines without duplicating them.

External parties provide cloud services, payments, marketing, customer support, fulfilment, delivery and selected manufacturing. Some relationships are concentrated because scale economics or proprietary integrations make duplication costly. The EVP must choose where redundancy, recovery capability or conscious acceptance offers the soundest response.

Risk signals also travel at different speeds. Web traffic is immediate; returns, chargebacks, complaints and partner distress emerge slowly. The framework must separate fast noise from serious latent exposure while allowing local escalation before certainty exists.

First-year agenda

In the first hundred days, the EVP will create a risk and resilience baseline anchored to the customer proposition. The work will map essential services from product availability and checkout through payment, fulfilment, delivery, support and renewal. For each service, the executive will establish accountable ownership, material dependencies, recovery expectations, existing controls and the customer or financial consequences of disruption. This service-led view will be reconciled with the corporate risk register rather than replacing it with another inventory.

The EVP will then agree a limited set of risk appetites and escalation thresholds with the board and executive committee. These must be expressed in decisions leaders can use: acceptable concentration for a critical fulfilment lane, maximum exposure to an unconfirmed demand surge, recovery expectations for subscription billing, or the evidence required before a high-velocity launch. Thresholds should distinguish genuine non-negotiables from situations in which management may consciously accept additional risk.

A scenario programme will test compound stresses such as a demand spike with misplaced inventory, a launch-day payment outage, partner data compromise or a product withdrawal affecting subscriptions. Exercises must address authority, customer communication, inventory, cash, notification and recovery. Each finding requires a funded action or explicit executive acceptance.

Third-party resilience will receive early attention. The executive will segment partners by the services they enable and the time the organisation could tolerate their loss. Contract rights, technical recovery evidence, financial health and substitutability will be reviewed in proportion to that criticality. Where an immediate second source is uneconomic, the EVP will develop alternative response options rather than recording an unowned gap.

By the end of year one, the demand-planning reset and the risk framework should reinforce each other. Campaign and product teams should be able to see inventory, capacity and customer-service consequences before approving exceptional demand assumptions. Executive reporting should highlight changing exposure, control confidence and decisions due—not present a static grid of colours.

Leadership responsibilities

The EVP will provide independent challenge while remaining accountable for resolution. They will chair the cross-functional risk forum and support executive and board oversight. Papers must state exposure, evidence quality, choices, mitigation cost and the decision owner; vague risk language will be rejected.

During serious events, the executive will maintain the crisis operating system: activation criteria, command structure, verified facts, decision log, stakeholder coordination and post-event learning. Functional experts must remain the authoritative voice in their domains. The EVP's contribution is to connect them, prevent conflicting actions and keep customer, colleague, regulatory and financial consequences visible at the same time.

The role will also build resilience literacy across line management. Leaders should know which assumptions in their plans are fragile, what early warnings they own and when escalation is expected. The central team will provide methods and assurance, but it cannot become the owner of every risk created in a business decision.

Measures of success

The board will assess the coverage and quality of critical-service maps, closure of scenario findings, recovery performance, concentration exposure, supplier-assurance depth and timeliness of material escalation. Customer cancellation, refund, complaint and contact patterns after disruption will be reviewed alongside operational recovery, because a technically restored service may still have failed the relationship.

Planning resilience will be evidenced through fewer emergency inventory transfers, clearer treatment of exceptional demand, improved fulfilment recovery and lower avoidable losses from forecast-driven decisions. Insurance and risk-transfer outcomes will be evaluated on coverage quality and retained exposure, not premium reduction alone. The decisive test is whether leadership can make a faster, better-informed choice when conditions depart from plan.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring 22–28 years of experience across enterprise risk, operations, resilience or a related executive discipline. Relevant backgrounds may include direct-to-consumer, subscription commerce, consumer platforms, retail, payments, logistics or another environment where digital availability and physical fulfilment converge. Purely financial risk experience will not be enough unless it is accompanied by accountable work in operational and customer-facing crises.

The board will look for evidence of building risk architecture around essential services, governing concentrated technology and fulfilment partners, and leading multi-function responses under public scrutiny. Candidates should be able to describe a risk they recommended accepting, not only risks they eliminated. They must understand that resilience is an economic choice shaped by recovery time, customer consequence and alternatives.

This leader needs independent judgement without theatrical alarm. They must earn trust with commercial executives, technical specialists and board members, ask precise questions when evidence is incomplete, and change position when new facts warrant it. Experience across multiple regulatory jurisdictions and customer-data regimes is strongly preferred.

Compensation and appointment terms

Annual base salary is expected to fall between USD 360,000 and USD 480,000, accompanied by a performance incentive and long-term participation. The final package will reflect the executive's experience, current arrangements and the breadth of the agreed remit. Mobility support or treatment of forfeited awards will be considered where demonstrably necessary to secure the appointment.

Confidentiality

The organisation is intentionally unnamed at this stage because the search touches succession, partner dependency and resilience information. Candidates progressing beyond preliminary assessment will receive controlled disclosure after confidentiality and conflict checks. Applications must not include protected incident records, personal customer data or identifiable vulnerabilities from any present or previous organisation.