Justin Sullivan

Product Lead for Collab, Future's creator program

I pitched Ember, a platform for independent creators to publish under Future's brands, and won the CEO's backing. It merged with a parallel concept from senior leadership and became Collab, one of the company's top initiatives. I led its product and operations from plan to launch in September 2025, and it grew to eight brands in the US and UK.

• Directed the creator research, from requirements and questions to interview design, to define our creator segments and pain points.
• Mapped the roadmap so features and the business model would grow in lockstep, from a paid contributor program into a self-service creator platform and new media network.
• Designed the business model (display, affiliate, sponsorship, revenue share) and the creator agreement terms with Legal.
• Built the operating model (editorial QA, moderation, and legal and finance workflows) and ran it across Product, Engineering, Editorial, Finance, and Sales.

Collab franchisesswipe →

Product Lead for Platform Engineering at Future

I built the product function for Future's platform engineering organization, the site reliability team that keeps the entire portfolio running on AWS and Kubernetes. I worked with engineering leadership to decide where infrastructure investment mattered most, across reliability, security, developer experience, and core platform services.

• Set priorities across the platform, weighing reliability risk, security, tech debt, and developer experience against what the business needed.
• Co-designed the team's planning process with SRE leadership, from problem discovery and architecture review to capability demos and outcome reviews.
• Ran discovery with engineers and internal teams before committing engineering time, and helped move the team from ticket-by-ticket work to planning around capabilities.
• Turned the largest infrastructure migrations, including Consul, configuration management, and secrets management, into sequenced, low-risk roadmaps for a platform running hundreds of production workloads.
• Owned the site reliability work when Who What Wear moved onto Future's platform after the acquisition.
• Helped build AIOps for platform engineering: a RAG knowledge base over repos and docs, an MCP service, and task-specific SRE skills like on-call incident handoff summaries. We started with tickets, toil, and triage, kept a human in the loop, and released to early adopters with a Slack feedback loop.

Head of Operations at Enlighten Candles

I scaled a family-owned home-fragrance manufacturer in Arizona from a 1,000 sq ft space into a 10,000 sq ft factory, supporting $2M in annual revenue with accounts including Whole Foods and HomeGoods. The business had been running on an old WordPress site, Excel, a bookkeeper working by hand, and pen and paper, so I rebuilt it end to end, from the systems to the factory floor.

• Replaced spreadsheets and paper with one connected stack: Shopify and retailer EDI feeding Fishbowl for inventory and production, then ShipStation for shipping and QuickBooks for accounting.
• Designed the factory layout and production process to make 4,000+ candles a week with in-house fulfillment.
• Built the sales channels: direct-to-consumer on Shopify and Amazon, a wholesale marketplace, a trade-show sales agency, email, paid social, and influencer marketing.
• Led three managers and a 10-person factory team.
• Co-led creative direction for the brand; the packaging, designed by Nice People, won a Dieline Award.

The brandswipe →

Product Manager, then Director of Operations, at Clique Brands

Clique Brands owned Who What Wear, Byrdie, and MyDomaine. It grew from $5M to $60M in revenue, and in 2022 Future plc bought Who What Wear for $100M. I spent the first three years building the products that revenue ran on, and the next five building the systems that let the company scale.

As product manager, 2014 – 2017

• Redesigned the three flagship sites for mobile. Pages per session rose 20% and bounce rate fell 41%, so each visit produced more ad impressions, and ad viewability reached 65%.
• Built the native ad products that Clique's branded content studio, CMG Studios, sold to advertisers. More than $40M in campaigns ran on them.
• Built a commerce-integrated CMS used by 100+ editorial staff, with shopping built into the publishing tools.
• Led an eight-person product, design, and engineering team.

As Director of Operations, 2017 – 2022

• Implemented NetSuite and rebuilt quote-to-cash across sales, ad operations, and accounting. Leadership could see revenue by line item for every ad product.
• Ran leases, vendors, software, and budgets for a 300-person company.
• Built the e-commerce stack for Who What Wear Collection, the brand's first direct-to-consumer clothing line: Shopify, NetSuite, and a third-party warehouse for orders, fulfillment, and inventory.

Launches

Co-Founder of The Colorist

A fashion-education brand I co-founded with Sofie Sullivan, who leads creative and hosts. I run the business side: positioning, series formats, the newsletter and site, and a paid cohort course.

Press