Insurgent Growth pairs hands-on executive leadership with strategic capital for challenger CPG and retail brands ready to scale — from first retail door to category leadership.
Insurgent Growth works alongside founders and boards as an embedded operator — not a slide deck. Engagements are built around the commercial problem in front of you, backed by two decades of building categories at Amazon, Target, and Chewy.
Embedded, CRO/COO-level leadership through critical growth inflection points — P&L ownership, org design, and the operating mechanisms that make growth repeatable.
Landing and scaling partnerships with the world's largest retailers — Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, Chewy — and building the infrastructure to sustain them.
Reversing revenue decline, rebuilding gross margin, and re-platforming DTC and digital channels for brands that have stalled.
Brand architecture, pricing, and channel strategy for brands entering new territory — DTC-to-retail transitions, category expansion, and international scale.
Alongside advisory work, Insurgent Growth selectively partners with capital — backing category-defining consumer brands with a credible path to retail scale.
Nathan Deno has spent two decades taking commercial organizations into territory they'd never operated in — a disruptor scaling through IPO, the world's largest retailers, and a PE-backed global turnaround. What sets him apart is a pairing rarely found in one operator: the analytical rigor of a technologist and the instinct of a merchant.
At Chewy, he was hired to lead merchandise operations and, within ninety days, was asked to also run the company's largest P&L — growing it from $1.6B to $8B in five years while expanding gross margin nearly 1,100 basis points. That infrastructure carried Chewy through its $15B IPO.
At Amazon, he led multi-billion-dollar businesses and redesigned the negotiation strategy across Amazon Fashion, unlocking more than $175M in free cash flow. At Target, he built Cartwheel (now Target Circle) from scratch — $3B in sales in three years. Most recently, as Chief Revenue Officer of PetSafe Brands, he owned global commercial strategy for a $500M PE-owned portfolio across 70+ countries, reversing a multi-year sales decline and returning the business to share growth.
Nathan is a Limited Partner at Humble Growth and an advisor to Atomic VC and Everyday Goods Inc.
Whether you're a founder navigating a critical retail transition or a board evaluating advisory and capital partners, the fastest path forward is a direct conversation.