Hi, I’m Karen Orlandi, marketing aficionado.
An Engineer Turned Marketer.
I started out my career as a mechanical engineer, designing turbochargers for cars and large trucks. It was a lot of hard work…and a lot of fun. However, it quickly became clear to me that I was more motivated by business aspects than running calculations and tinkering in the lab. So my mentors at Honeywell provided me a series of business-side opportunities and an unparalleled foundation in both B2B and B2C, which included the adjacent list of roles. During nights and weekends, I attended UCLA’s Anderson School of Business to earn my MBA. In the end, I found my passion – marketing.
And I became an expert marketer after decades of projects. I tackled a variety of topics and industries through my consulting business, Lee Davis Consulting, and I experimented through my own eCommerce company, Aabalat Fine & Rare Wines. Hundreds of projects related to go-to-market strategies, paid media plans and execution, website builds, and business growth plans made me the wizard I am today.
- Supply Chain
- Demand Planning
- Analyst
- Competitive Intelligence
- Business Development
- Strategic Planning
- Voice of the Customer
- Turnaround Consulting
- M&A
- SEO
- Digital Ads
- Social Ads
- Influencer Marketing
- PR
I embody entrepreneurial bootstrapping, keen business acumen, and a high bias for action.
– Karen Orlandi, in a nutshell
15 Years of eCommerce Experience
Purchasing Aabalat Fine & Rare Wines, an online retailer of rare wine, in January 2008, I found myself immersed in the new world of eCommerce and Digital Marketing. I learned the art of selling a product that consumers can’t see, taste, or touch before they purchase it. I experimented with different CMSs, paid media, and online marketing strategies. I transformed our eCommerce performance by enhancing the web UX and marketing, employing countless developers, designers, and content creators.
Ready to apply my skills at scale, I sought out Treasury Wine Estates, one of the largest wine corporations in the world. In my five years as Product Manager, I learned the Agile methodology of delivery and honed my technical skills related to hosting and administering websites, as well as all the platforms that support digital marketing.
CMS Platforms
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Sitecore
Drupal
WordPress
Magento
MarTech Platforms
Hubspot
Google Stack
Meta, YouTube
Salesforce/MS D365
Mailchimp
Analytics Platforms
Google Analytics
Hotjar/Lucky Orange
SEMrush/MOZ/Ahrefs
Screaming Frog
Unbounce / Optimize
Self-Taught Digital Skills.
Digital marketing exploded after my MBA concluded, so I sought less formal education. Consumer trends and browser/social algorithms change so quickly that I really never stop learning, which is one of my favorite things about this career path. My favorite sources for learning digital marketing includes websites, forums, YouTube channels, and Google University. But the best learning was from my hands-on learning in my IT role at Treasury Wine Estates. I chose to challenge myself to learn the technical aspects of digital marketing in a way that none of my peers did, by diving into the world of developers and DNS hosting. Now my marketing skills have truly been heightened and I am ready and confident to tackle any marketing problem that comes my way.
Web Marketing
Having worked with several CMS platforms – Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Drupal, Sitecore, WordPress – I am quick to learn new ones. I know basic html, css, and JSON. And thanks to my project history, I’ve learned lots about accessibility and responsible web design.
SEO Skills
My favorite tools to use for SEO analysis and strategy are Moz and SEMRush. I also use Screaming Frog and Google Search Console / Analytics, depending on the task. I am a graduate of Google University courses on SEO/SEM and I attend most major industry webinars.
SEM Skills
Google, and sometimes Bing, offers some of the highest return on advertising spend via paid ads and Google Shopping. I have done lots of both. I prefer custom landing pages, A/B testing, and definitive metric targets and tracking. I’m a data-driven decision maker.
Social Marketing
2020 showed a 150+% growth in social platform eComm, transforming social into a must-do opportunity for retailers. Whether employing an agency or building my own campaigns, I have experience with Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Be where your customers are, right?!
Entrepreneurship was the best education
Not only did the acquisition of Aabalat Fine & Rare Wines expand my marketing skills, it also thrust me from the comfort of marketing strategy and M&A and into the “hard-knock” life of meeting payroll, managing people, IT support, corporate documentation, accounting, legal responsibilities, and even janitorial duties. For the first time, I was taking my fancy strategies and roadmaps and trying them out. And I learned a ton about how to make every penny of marketing investment count!
I am more than just a marketing professional. I can relate to the perspective of every stakeholder in the business.
Education
MBA
I received my Masters in Business Administration from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. Sponsored by my employer, I rarely slept for three years in order to maintain my career success and pursue my degree on nights and weekends.
B.S. Mechanical Engineering
A star high school student with a passion for math and science drove me to seek out Cal Poly, SLO for their premiere engineering programs. After learning about the Society of Automotive Engineers Formula race car team, I was hooked! Nothing is more fun than building and driving a race car you helped to build!