Strategic Growth Leader.

I spent almost 6 years at Amazon scaling enterprise vendors, recovering nine figures in suppressed revenue, leading teams managing $2B CPG portfolios, and building the AI tools that helped them move faster. In January 2026 I joined Simpli-Magic as Director of E-Commerce, where I now own the full omnichannel program across Amazon, Home Depot, Sam's Club, Lowe's, Wayfair, and direct-to-consumer, turning complex catalog data into compounding channel growth.

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Venessa M. Johnson
$93.7M
Revenue opportunity identified across 84,000+ suppressed Amazon listings
43.6%
YoY growth delivered on a $2B CPG vendor portfolio
175 hrs
Weekly capacity unlocked for the team through VAMOS, an AI tool I built
$16M
Incremental revenue from a Premium A+ content rollout across 5,000+ vendors
About

I enjoy combining my creative and analytical sides to scale growth.

After almost 6 years at Amazon I had to make a tough decision: stay and relocate from LA to Seattle, or leave. I have a 93-year-old grandma who was diagnosed with cancer last year, and I wasn't willing to be that far from her right now. So I made the tough decision to leave, and joined Simpli-Magic as Director of E-Commerce in January 2026.

Before Amazon, I spent 10 years at Bay Area high-growth startups leading business development, sales, and strategic partnerships. Then I joined Amazon Vendor Services and spent almost 6 years there, which became the core of my career up to this point. I started as an Account Executive managing 75 vendors (ranked #1 of 11 on my team). After two promotions I was managing the Customer Success team on Amazon Grocery: 16 CSMs and 24 enterprise CPG vendors doing $2B in annual sales. In those years I became an Amazon expert at driving growth through product detail page optimization, backend SEO to lift organic search, selection prioritization, promotional strategy, advertising (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and DSP), supply chain efficiencies, and navigating the Amazon ecosystem end-to-end.

After leaving Amazon, I joined Simpli-Magic as Director of E-Commerce in January 2026. I own their full omnichannel program across Amazon, Home Depot, Sam's Club, Lowe's, Wayfair, and their direct-to-consumer site. In seven months, I've grown customer sales to $14.3M year-to-date (up 23%), scaled D2C revenue 642% by standing up an owned marketing channel from scratch, launched Wayfair from zero, and shipped a Claude-powered inventory forecasting tool that improved Amazon confirmation rate by 14.46%.

I'm exploring what's next. Details in the What I'm Looking For section at the bottom of the page.

Leadership

How I manage the teams I build.

I try to manage the way I'd want to be managed: collaborative, supportive, and data-driven. What I care about most is that my people are growing, feel supported, and want to stay on my team.

On the Amazon Grocery team I led 16 Customer Success Managers and managed 24 enterprise CPG vendors, including Peet's Coffee, Lavazza, Campbell's Soup, Keurig Dr Pepper, Ferrara, Ferrero, and Four Sigmatic. The stat I'm most proud of: my team hit 100% retention during my time as manager. People don't stick around in hard roles at big companies unless they feel supported, coached well, and like the work they're doing actually matters.

I set goals with my team, not for them. We look at the data together and talk through the levers we can pull. If someone's off-pace, we dig in and figure out why together. If they're hitting their goals, I let them run. Most of my time as a manager goes into making sure my people have what they need to do their jobs well: context, coaching, and the space to make decisions without me in the room. The other big part of the job is removing roadblocks and spotting gaps in our processes. When my team is consistently hitting the same obstacle, I'll partner with a dev team to build a tool that solves it across the org (VAMOS started that way).

Partnership development is a big part of how I operate, too. I was the Consumables lead for Amazon's inaugural Vendor Summit, which meant I planned which vendors attended, managed the content, and coordinated directly with CEOs and VPs of Fortune 500 companies. Those senior relationships are usually the thing that makes the biggest category wins possible.

Case Studies

Six problems I solved, in the words of the work itself.

Each of these was a real operating problem with a complex starting state. I use the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) so the work is legible to anyone, not just e-commerce operators.

Concession Rate Reduction

Cutting Amazon returns from 5.52% to the category benchmark

Director, E-Commerce · Simpli-Magic
An 80/20 returns problem. 10 ASINs were driving 59% of our returns, and Amazon's High Return Rate flag was right around the corner.
Situation
Simpli-Magic's Amazon concession rate had climbed to 5.52%: 8,915 conceded units against 161,498 shipped over a trailing 90 days. That's almost 2x the Hardlines category benchmark of ~3%. Some SKUs were already over 15% concession, which put them at real risk of Amazon's High Return Rate flag. If that flag got triggered, we'd lose search rank and ad eligibility on our top earners.
Task
Get the catalog to our internal 2% target in one quarter. That meant deflecting about 5,700 returned units per quarter, without pulling any listings that were still generating revenue.
Action
I built a three-tier plan based on where the concessions were actually coming from. Tier 1 was the 10 ASINs driving 59% of the problem. I overhauled their PDPs: rewrote the titles and bullets, matched colors to Pantone, refreshed the A+ content, added product videos, and corrected the dimension and weight callouts that were setting the wrong customer expectations. Tier 2 was 33 ASINs driving another 18% of concessions, executed in weekly waves. Tier 3 was 14 ASINs with real product defects: dye transfer on the white towels, wringers breaking on the commercial mop buckets, a mold-odor issue on the shop towels, wheel damage on the janitorial cart. Those went back to the supplier for fixes. I also partnered with operations to run a physical product audit (real measurements pulled from inventory, factory spec sheets for GSM and tear strength, and bag-compatibility testing against Glad and Hefty) so we could stop the listing errors at the source.
Result
Concession rate moved from 5.52% toward the 2% target. Tier 1 alone brought the catalog-wide rate down to about 3.3%. At a blended ASP of $25 to $35, the plan took $570K to $800K of annualized returns off the table, protected ad eligibility on our top earners, and we avoided the High Return Rate flag.
5.52% → ~2%
Amazon concession rate
$570K–$800K
Annualized returns eliminated
10 ASINs
Drove 59% of the problem
Retail Media Turnaround

Turning a stalled Home Depot ad program into a 22% growth engine

Director, E-Commerce · Simpli-Magic
22% growth in ad-driven revenue in under two months. Zero declining campaigns. ROAS as high as 6.0x.
Situation
Simpli-Magic runs paid product ads on Home Depot's retail media platform (Orange Apron Media) across eight campaigns spanning multiple product categories. The program had been running on autopilot: original keyword sets and bids largely untouched since launch, no regular cadence for reviewing performance, and at least one major listing quietly generating zero search visibility because of a title error nobody had caught.
Task
A closer audit surfaced the real problem: this wasn't a demand problem, it was an operations problem. One campaign's top product had a mistitled listing pulling essentially zero search impressions. Keyword targeting hadn't kept pace with how people actually search: high-volume, high-converting terms like "garbage can" were going completely unboosted while a weaker synonym ("trash can") absorbed the budget. Negative keyword lists were incomplete. And there was no standing process for reviewing bid performance, so winning products were underfunded and losing products kept spending at the same rate month over month.
Action
I rebuilt the program around daily, data-driven optimization instead of a set-and-forget launch. I pulled keyword-performance reports to see what shoppers were actually searching and rebalanced bid multipliers toward the terms that converted, not the terms that sounded intuitive. I traced underperforming products back to their real cause (bad title, missing color swatch, weak image) instead of just adjusting bids around the symptom. I moved from static bids to a standing cadence of raising spend behind proven winners and cutting it from consistent underperformers, campaign by campaign. I audited and expanded negative keyword exclusion lists to stop paying for traffic that would never convert. And I extended the same audit discipline beyond the flagged ad campaigns to the broader legacy catalog, correcting outdated images, incomplete details, and mis-categorized listings that were quietly suppressing visibility across the site.
Result
Combined ad-driven sales grew 22% (from $32,915 to $40,212) across the eight campaigns during the optimization period, with zero campaigns in decline. ROAS reached as high as 6.0x on the strongest-performing campaign, with most holding steady at 3.0x or better. One campaign's flagship product went from a mistitled, zero-visibility listing to a 3.2x ROAS performer: after fixing the title and imagery and refreshing the keyword set, ROAS climbed from 1.70x to 2.20x within 10 days and to 3.2x within a month, with sales up 72% over that stretch. This isn't a one-time fix. The same audit-and-optimize model now runs continuously across the full advertising portfolio, turning a flat, neglected channel into a compounding growth lever.
+22%
Ad-driven sales growth across 8 campaigns
6.0x
Peak ROAS with zero campaigns declining
3.2x
Turnaround ROAS on the flagship listing
Revenue Recovery

Standing up a recovery function that reopened $52M in suppressed revenue

Manager, Vendor Experience · Amazon
Every vendor call I was on had the same question: "why isn't my item buyable?" I got tired of answering it one at a time, so I turned it into a program.
Situation
When I was an AE on the VSP team managing 75 vendors, I'd get on vendor calls and hear the same question over and over: "why doesn't this item have a buy box?" Every time I dug in, the fix was something small. A compliance document was missing. An item needed a slight cost decrease. A catalog error. I'd help that one vendor get their item unsuppressed, but the problem was way bigger than my portfolio. Vendors didn't know their listings were down, and Amazon wasn't proactively surfacing them. Selection is part of the Amazon flywheel. We were losing it, quietly.
Task
Quantify how big the opportunity actually was, and then build something that could surface and recover these listings across the whole vendor base, not just the 75 accounts I could personally touch.
Action
I partnered with a BI team and had them run a trailing 12-month report on every suppression across the vendor portfolio, then annualized the lost revenue. The answer: 84,000+ suppressed listings representing $93.7M in opportunity, and all of it traced back to 10 root causes. I took that data to leadership, secured headcount, and was given my own team to build out. I hired 4 Account Executives and 1 Product Manager. I wrote SOPs for each of the 10 suppression categories so the work was repeatable. I set up automated emails that would go out to vendors the moment a listing got suppressed, with the exact next steps to bring it back live. And I partnered with BI again to build Salesforce reporting that surfaced recovery opportunities by vendor, so prioritization ran off data instead of guesswork.
Result
We returned 52,000 listings to active status and recovered $52M in revenue. The automation and SOPs meant the work could scale across a 5,000+ vendor portfolio without us hiring proportionally. I was promoted on the back of this program.
$93.7M
Revenue opportunity identified
$52M
Revenue recovered
52,000
Listings returned to live
AI Solution Design

VAMOS: the AI joint-business-plan tool built for a 16-person team

Manager, Amazon Vendor Services Grocery · Amazon
16 Customer Success Managers tracking 24 enterprise JBPs in spreadsheets wasn't working. So I built something better.
Situation
I was managing 16 Customer Success Managers and 24 enterprise CPG vendors on the Grocery team. Every joint business plan had quarterly revenue, margin, and media targets, and we were tracking all of it manually in spreadsheets. Nobody updated on the same cadence. My CSMs were spending hours a week pulling numbers instead of pulling levers, and when a vendor was off-pace mid-quarter, we were usually finding out too late to actually do anything about it.
Task
Give my team a single system that tracked JBP KPIs in real time, flagged accounts that were drifting, and (most importantly) told the CSM what to do about it.
Action
I partnered with a development team and built VAMOS, a dashboard that ingested each vendor's JBP goals and pulled live KPI data against them. Then I layered AI recommendations on top: if a vendor was off-pace on trailing-90-day ad sales, for example, VAMOS would surface the specific internal levers the CSM could pull to turn it around (campaign adjustments, supply chain moves, promotional slotting, category strategy plays). I ran a 5-person pilot first, iterated on the recommendation engine based on CSM feedback, then scaled it to 35 users across the broader org.
Result
VAMOS freed up 175 hours a week of manual tracking work across the team, made mid-quarter course-corrections actually possible, and was a real contributor to the 43.6% YoY revenue growth the portfolio delivered. That's 3.9x the category benchmark.
175 hrs/wk
Manual tracking eliminated
5 → 35 users
Scaled from pilot to org
43.6% YoY
Portfolio growth (3.9x benchmark)
Content at Scale

A Premium A+ content rollout that generated $16M in incremental revenue

Account Executive, Vendor Success Program · Amazon
Premium A+ was a high-conversion lever sitting unused across 5,000+ vendors. The problem wasn't that vendors didn't want it. It was that nobody was prioritizing who should get it first.
Situation
Premium A+ content (the richer module set with video, comparison tables, and interactive modules) had a measurable lift on PDP conversion for vendors who adopted it. But across a 5,000+ vendor portfolio, adoption was totally sporadic. Account Executives didn't have a way to figure out which vendors would benefit most, and most vendors didn't even know the feature was available to them or what the upside would be.
Task
Turn Premium A+ from an ad-hoc ask into a real, managed rollout that reached the right vendors first and maximized incremental revenue across the portfolio.
Action
I led a rollout that combined prioritization logic with automated outreach. On the prioritization side, I ranked vendors by catalog size, conversion gap, and revenue headroom so we knew exactly who to reach first. On the outreach side, I built sequenced enablement emails that explained the program, the expected lift, and the exact next steps vendors needed to take. That way the rollout could scale across thousands of vendors without an AE having to manually touch every account. I also worked cross-functionally with the content and PDP quality teams to keep the adoption path clean and the rollout on pace.
Result
The rollout reached the full 5,000+ vendor portfolio, raised PDP quality and conversion at scale, and generated $16M in incremental revenue attributable to the program.
$16M
Incremental revenue
5,000+
Vendor portfolio reached
#1 of 11
Ranked AE during this period
Partnership Development

Leading the Consumables track for Amazon's inaugural Vendor Summit

Manager, Amazon Vendor Services Grocery · Amazon
Amazon stood up its first-ever Vendor Summit to deepen relationships with our most strategic enterprise partners. I ran the Consumables track end-to-end.
Situation
Amazon launched its inaugural Vendor Summit to bring our most strategic enterprise vendors into the room with Amazon leadership for executive-level programming. Consumables is one of the biggest and most complex verticals at Amazon, and it needed its own dedicated track with senior-caliber content, the right guest list, and real engagement from the C-suite of the brands we worked with.
Task
As the Consumables lead, own the full track end-to-end: which vendors to invite, what the content should cover, and how to get real, meaningful participation from the CEOs and VPs of the Fortune 500 brands in our category.
Action
I curated the vendor list based on portfolio size, growth trajectory, and strategic importance to the category. I built the content agenda around what actually moves the needle for enterprise CPG vendors: supply chain, media investment, category strategy, joint business planning. I worked cross-functionally with Amazon leadership to line up the right speakers and sessions. And I coordinated directly with CEOs and VPs of Fortune 500 companies to align on their participation, understand what they wanted out of the summit, and make sure their time was respected and well spent.
Result
We delivered a successful inaugural Consumables track, with Fortune 500 executives engaging directly with Amazon leadership and 97% of attendees reporting they found value in the summit. The playbook set up a repeatable structure for future summits and deepened the relationships behind some of our biggest category accounts, which compounded into the joint business planning and media investment wins the portfolio delivered afterward.
97%
Of attendees found value in the summit
Fortune 500
CEO and VP engagement across Consumables
Repeatable
Playbook established for future summits
Experience

A career built around enterprise growth engines.

Jan 2026 — Present
Director, E-Commerce
Simpli-Magic · Los Angeles, CA

Own Simpli-Magic's full omnichannel e-commerce program across Amazon, Home Depot, Sam's Club, Lowe's, Wayfair, and direct-to-consumer. Lead marketplace expansion, paid advertising, catalog performance, and inventory strategy end-to-end.

  • Grew customer sales to $14.3M year-to-date, up 23% in five months, by segmenting underperforming SKUs and reallocating ad spend and merchandising toward top-converting categories across Amazon, Home Depot, Sam's Club, Lowe's, and Wayfair
  • Rebuilt Home Depot's paid advertising program over six months, reviving dormant campaigns and growing combined ad-driven sales ~22% across eight campaigns through daily bid, keyword, and creative-listing optimization; ROAS as high as 6.0x with zero campaigns in decline
  • Reversed five consecutive months of decline on Home Depot into sustained growth by auditing product detail pages and rebuilding the merchandising calendar around retailer-specific traffic patterns
  • Scaled D2C revenue 642% by designing an owned marketing channel from scratch and standing up Klaviyo lifecycle email flows (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase) that grew subscribers to 80,000
  • Launched Wayfair from zero and guided Lowe's Marketplace through vendor approval and onboarding by building catalog feeds, pricing rules, and fulfillment setup for each platform's distinct compliance standards
  • Reached $130K annualized run rate within eight weeks on Sam's Club by identifying the merchant contact, cold-emailing a tailored category pitch, and running the entire onboarding and launch process solo
  • Improved Amazon confirmation rate 14.46% by building and deploying a Claude-powered inventory forecasting tool that flags at-risk SKUs ahead of stockouts
  • Eliminated $250K in annual storage fees, recovering 20% of aged-inventory value, through inventory-age analysis and bulk liquidation deals
  • Cut concession rate from 5.52% to 4.0% by auditing return-reason and review data to isolate root causes and rewriting PDPs and packaging inserts
Apr 2024 — Dec 2025
Manager, Customer Success Managers, Amazon Vendor Services (Grocery)
Amazon · Seattle, WA / Remote

Promoted to lead a team of 16 grocery customer success managers, owning enterprise vendor strategy, joint business planning, and double-digit portfolio growth across major CPG accounts.

  • 43.6% YoY revenue growth across a $2B CPG portfolio, 3.9x the category benchmark
  • Secured $1.5M in added media spend from Keurig Dr. Pepper; ROAS 1.4 → 4.7
  • Directed 16 CSMs across 24 enterprise vendors with 100% team retention
  • Selected as Consumables lead for Amazon's inaugural Vendor Summit, owning vendor selection, content programming, and executive coordination with Fortune 500 CEOs and VPs
  • Opened Amazon Business channel for Campbell's, generating 94.8% YoY growth
  • Built VAMOS, an AI JBP-tracking tool scaled from 5 to 35 users, saving 175 hours/week
  • Designed offshore support model, freeing 15+ hours/week per manager and lifting vendor satisfaction 4.3%
Jun 2022 — Apr 2024
Manager, Vendor Experience
Amazon · Seattle, WA / Remote

Promoted to build and lead a new recovery function focused on suppressed listings, vendor remediation, and scalable systems that restored "buyability" across Amazon.

  • Identified $93.7M revenue opportunity across 84,000+ suppressed listings
  • Recovered $52M in revenue by returning 52,000 listings to active status
  • Hired and led 4 Account Managers and 1 Product Manager
  • Built SOPs for the 10 major suppression categories
  • Launched automated vendor outreach for takedowns across a 5,000+ vendor portfolio
  • Partnered with BI to build Salesforce reporting for account prioritization
Feb 2020 — Jun 2022
Account Executive, Vendor Success Program
Amazon · Seattle, WA / Remote

Managed a broad vendor portfolio, drove account growth, and resolved content, profitability, and "buyability" issues across Amazon Vendor Services.

  • #1 ranked AE of 11, managing 75 vendors with 2x YoY portfolio growth
  • Recovered $41M in revenue and $3.5M in profit across suppressed and underperforming accounts
  • Led Premium A+ rollout across 5,000+ vendors generating $16M in incremental revenue
  • Increased profitability on 79% of pet-category items; $4.4M incremental profit in 2 quarters
  • Generated $500K in incremental annual revenue through AVS contract negotiations
May 2019 — Feb 2020
Enterprise Account Executive
Volta Charging · San Francisco, CA

Managed enterprise retail partnerships, led national rollout planning, and coordinated large-scale commercial deployments across major consumer brands.

  • Managed 15+ enterprise accounts including Walgreens, AMC, Cinemark, and Albertsons
  • Led the 100-store Walgreens deployment and built the rollout playbook
  • Oversaw 60+ multi-station installations
Apr 2013 — May 2019
Director of Business Development
Laundry Locker · San Francisco, CA

Grew enterprise partnerships, expanded recurring revenue, and led business development strategy across healthcare systems, REITs, and multifamily operators.

  • Expanded the enterprise client base from 60 to 330 accounts
  • Secured Greystar, Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, and UDR partnerships
  • Produced $5M in new business in 6 months across 25 multifamily accounts
  • Raised retention from 60% to 95% via churn analysis and a 49K-subscriber email program
Beyond the Work

A little about me out of work.

I'm a Los Angeles native, born and raised, and deeply rooted in my family here, including my 93-year-old grandmother, who's a big part of why I chose to stay in LA instead of relocating to Seattle. Time with family and friends is non-negotiable for me, and I try to carry that into how I show up at work too: steady, present, and in it for the long haul.

That said, my heart is still in the Bay Area. It's where I built my adult life, where most of my community lives, and where I ultimately want to be long-term.

I have a shih tzu puppy named Oliver who runs my mornings. Most days that's cuddles and toy time before the world gets going, and I take way more pictures of him than any dog probably needs.

Outside of work, I'm happiest when I'm moving. Lifting, running, hiking, Pilates, and Orangetheory are my weekly staples. Soccer is the big one. I played in college and still love a good pickup game.

I went to culinary school during Covid, and cooking for friends and family is still one of my favorite ways to take care of people. I'm also currently teaching myself guitar and working on improving my Spanish.

Giving back matters to me. I make time for community causes close to my heart and try to leave every room, and every team, better than I found it.

  • Family First

    Rooted in Los Angeles with the people who matter most, including my 93-year-old grandma.

  • Oliver the Shih Tzu

    Resident puppy, chief morale officer, professional cuddler.

  • Movement

    Lifting, running, hiking, Pilates, and Orangetheory. Moving every day keeps my head clear.

  • Soccer

    Played in college, still love a good pickup game.

  • Always Learning

    Culinary school grad (Covid-era). Currently teaching myself guitar and working on my Spanish.

  • Community

    Volunteering and giving back through causes close to my heart.

What I'm Looking For

Let's talk about what we can grow together.

I'm exploring my next opportunity. Almost six years of Amazon expertise, over a decade across marketplaces, e-commerce, and CPG, hands-on management of teams up to 16, and a creative-plus-analytical operating style that turns messy operational problems into compounding growth. I think outside the box, and I back the ideas up with data.

The roles I'm most interested in:

  • Head of Amazon or Director of E-Commerce for a brand ready to grow their online business
  • Customer Success leadership (Manager of Account Managers, Director of Customer Success)
  • Strategic or Enterprise Partnerships lead
  • Any senior role where I can own real growth, lead a team, and build the systems that scale it

I'm based in Los Angeles today, but the Bay Area is where my broader life sits and where I'm building my next long chapter. Ideal setup: fully remote, hybrid in San Francisco / the Bay Area, or a California hybrid role with real location flexibility.

Email

venessamj@gmail.com

Phone

626-548-0473

LinkedIn

linkedin.com/in/venessajohnson