Jill Thomas

Background

About Jill Thomas

I’m a curious straight shooter with a big laugh. I love big ideas and beautiful stories and believe in having fun, even on hard days. I am the Founder of Sole Sister Ramblers, a joy-filled global community of women, mid-life and beyond, celebrating active lifestyles, friendship, and community while challenging negative stereotypes about women and aging. Sole Sisters is a truly global community that taps into our member's mutual and individual wisdom, skills, talents, passions, and life experiences to enrich each other’s lives. We define rambling as exploring the world joyfully and without purpose. I also help e-commerce businesses build kick-butt digital marketing programs. I work closely with an intimate group of clients, helping them build creative multi-channel digital programs underpinned by smart strategy and robust internal capacity. My expertise is social, email, website, and digital advertising management for e-commerce, and I am a Shopify and Klaviyo expert. Before this, I spent nine years as the Chief Marketing Officer at Innisfree Hotels. During my tenure as CMO, Innisfree grew annual hotel revenues from $50 million to $150 million, while food and beverage and spa revenues grew from $2 million to $19 million. As CMO, I built a full-service in-house hotel marketing agency called Bee Loud. Our 13-person team moved Innisfree from having no marketing program to owning one of the country's best digital hospitality marketing agencies. I started my career in broadcasting, working for several national Canadian television shows as a researcher, head researcher, and field producer. After that, I spent a decade doing strategic planning, organizational development, fundraising, and communications for nonprofits. In I traded everything I knew for the exciting uncertainty of restaurant ownership - spending over a decade building and then selling two very successful restaurants. While owning restaurants, I honed my digital skills as a partner in a digital marketing start-up and as a successful food blog owner. It’s funny how life leads you right where you need to be, however roundabout the path.