He holds a BA from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management.
Prior to joining Miller Zell, he was a founding partner with Authentic Retail Group in Pasadena, Calif., an integrated brand development firm and the creative director at Envision, the full-service environmental design studio of Palladeo and WD Partners.His diverse client list includes General Motors, BMW, Best Buy, Whole Foods Market, Walmart, Longhorn Steakhouse, Kroger, Office Depot, Red Robin, 7-Eleven, ExxonMobil and The Home Depot.
Rafael brings over 20 years of experience in understanding the challenges faced by today's online retailers. With a consultative focus, Rafael works side by side with retailers and industry leaders to leverage the maximum results and growth in the US market through the success of its clients.
Pamela Eyring is the president and owner of The Protocol School of Washington®, (www.psow.edu), an accredited school focusing on international protocol, business etiquette, and communication skills training. With more than four decades of public and private sector experience in operational protocol and educational development, Pamela has extensive knowledge of U.S. and international practices and is a global thought leader in the etiquette and protocol industry.
Jennifer Farmer has more than 15 years of experience in the retail, ecommerce, loyalty, and payments industries. She is a seasoned expert in how merchants can leverage technology to engage, retain, and attract customers through innovative and data-driven marketing software tools. Serving as the Director of Merchant Development at Valuedynamx, a leading provider of loyalty and rewards solutions for merchants and consumers, Jennifer advises retailers in the DTC, subscription, grocery, CPG, restaurant, and travel/entertainment verticals on how to optimize customer experiences.
Ziv Fass is the CEO and Co-founder of Package.ai, an AI-based platform transforming last-mile delivery from a cost center to a customer engagement gold mine, leading to 10X growth in brand loyalty, advocacy, and customer lifetime value.
Mike is the President and third-generation owner of Strader-Ferris International, a Canadian & U.S. customs brokerage, cross-border logistics, and warehousing company. Founded in 1953 by Raymond Strader, SFI was built around his beliefs of an honest and straightforward approach to helping clients succeed. Strader-Ferris has been in business for 70 years and successfully handled millions of cross-border shipments.
Disciplines include: progressive leadership and decision making, responsive data and analytics, nimble sales effectiveness, and agile customer data and business intelligence technology assessments. Additionally, Michael is on the board of directors of TheCustomer.net.
Mike Ford is the founder and CEO of Skydeo, a high-performance audience targeting platform for advertisers and agencies serving auto, retail, tech, and mobile gaming industries. Before Skydeo, he founded TownConnect, a social media startup that connected local communities. He served as Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Did-it Search Marketing, leading business development for Quigo Technologies, acquired by AOL for $330 million. In 1999, he founded Computer.com in his garage, which became a prominent computer portal website for novice users.
His decades of experience help businesses make better sense of their customers' needs and expectations, in order to drive experience improvement and business outcomes.
Justin Fredericks is the Co-Founder and CEO of AR/T HOUSE, an industry-leading augmented reality publishing platform that frictionlessly powers branded AR experiences, all without an app. Clients include some of the world's leading companies, such as Paramount Pictures, Compass Real Estate and WME. Justin combines learnings from 10 years in tech and 7 years in visual marketing to forecast a flourishing future for the AR industry. Also a nerdy academic, he received a B.A. in Sociology from UCLA and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Dean Frew is CTO and senior VP of RFID solutions at SML RFID, an RFID solution provider.
Nate Frick, Enterprise Strategy Director at Marigold, is a seasoned digital business leader and a zero party data innovator. Today he consults for many of Marigold's global roster of clients, providing strategic, omnichannel marketing recommendations and best practices.
Skye is a go-to-market leader with 15 years of background in advertising effectiveness and brand strategy. He has spent his career helping brands use predictive analytics to guide how they deploy marketing resources to grow their brands. Prior to Incremental, he held roles at BERA, Neustar, and comScore leading brand strategy, marketing science, and media measurement.
Mark is Modulate’s Director of Customer Success, leading a team in partnering with customers in the gaming and retail delivery space, including Activision, Ubisoft, Rockstar Games and Fortune 400 companies. Mark oversees Modulate's customer success strategy, ensuring smooth onboarding and ongoing successful outcomes for customers, helping them to detect and prevent abuse and fraud in their voice channels and phone lines.
Edward Funnekotter serves as the Chief Architect and AI Officer at Solace. Leading the architecture teams for both Cloud and Event Broker products, he also leads the company’s strategic direction for AI integration within products and internal tools. In 2004, Edward began his journey with Solace as an FPGA architect. He later transitioned into management and led the Core Product Development team for several years before ascending to his present position.
He is also a retail and eCommerce expert and while at Loqate, has worked with leading eCommerce brands including Nordstrom, Sephora, Kohl’s, Ralph Lauren and Michaels. Before joining GBG, Matthew cofounded Global Address (later acquired by Trillium Software) and helped to create a single platform model for a global location validation service.
Dafna is focused on helping clients realize the most value from their data, whether they are retailers and/or brands, by leveraging data to develop insights for timely decisions and optimized business and loyalty outcomes. Dafna has over 25 years of global experience in consumer, shopper, and business insights along with strategy, category management, and analytics/data science expertise working with both retailers and suppliers in the CPG industry. Dafna earned a Master’s degree in Statistics from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.