Welcoming Damien Huang as Tether’s Strategic Advisor
Tether is building the modern operating system for CPG brands – bringing together demand planning, inventory, and operations so teams can make confident decisions without relying on brittle spreadsheets and stitched-together tools.
As that vision expands, having leaders who have scaled complex, omni-channel brands in the real world becomes essential. That’s why Tether is excited to welcome Damien Huang as a strategic advisor.
Damien is a seasoned executive with decades of experience leading iconic outdoor and apparel brands – including senior roles at Cotopaxi, Eddie Bauer, Patagonia, and The North Face – where he’s helped guide businesses through growth, wholesale expansion, DTC evolution, and significant operational change.
Why Damien
Across his career, Damien has been at the intersection of:
- Brand and product – defining what a brand stands for and how that shows up in the product line.
- Merchandising and inventory – making the call on what to build, how much to buy, and where it should live across channels.
- Wholesale and DTC – balancing specialty, retail partners, and direct channels while maintaining brand integrity and healthy unit economics.
He has led teams through:
- Scaling from emerging brand to established player
- Navigating inventory and supply constraints while maintaining growth
- Building more resilient, values-driven operations
Those are exactly the kinds of challenges Tether is focused on solving for modern CPG operators.
How Damien Will Support Tether
As a strategic advisor, Damien will work with Tether across several key areas.
1. Translating real-world apparel needs into product
Damien brings a deep understanding of how merchandising, planning, and allocation work inside apparel brands:
- How line plans, buys, and size curves actually come together
- How inventory decisions ripple through wholesale, retail, and ecomm
- How leadership teams think about risk, cash, and growth at the same time
His perspective will help Tether continue to design workflows that match how operators already think and work – and make it far easier to move beyond spreadsheet-driven processes.
2. Challenging the product through an omni-channel lens
Modern brands rarely live in a single channel. Damien has seen the complexity of:
- Supporting wholesale, DTC, and marketplace simultaneously
- Managing very different inventory needs by channel, region, and door
- Aligning demand plans, lead times, and inventory around growth and profitability targets
He will help Tether pressure-test how the platform handles:
- Multi-channel demand planning
- Inventory allocation and replenishment
- The realities of wholesale commitments, lead times, and production cycles
The goal: ensure Tether stays useful not just for a single-channel operator, but for brands navigating a truly complex channel mix.
3. Connecting operational excellence with values and long-term brand building
Damien’s experience spans brands that are not only commercially successful but also values-driven and sustainability-focused. He understands that:
- Inventory and planning decisions are financial and brand decisions
- The way a company buys, produces, and distributes is a reflection of its values
- Long-term brand health requires discipline in both storytelling and operations
His guidance will help Tether keep that bigger picture in mind: building tools that support better decisions for the business and the brand over the long run.
What This Means for Tether Customers and Partners
For Tether customers and partners, Damien’s advisory role reinforces a few things:
- Deeper support for complex, multi-channel apparel businesses
Tether will continue to invest in features that support brands selling across wholesale, retail, and DTC – where demand planning, inventory, and operations are tightly intertwined. - Stronger alignment with executive-level decision-making
Product strategy will be informed not just by day-to-day operators, but also by leaders who have owned P&Ls, navigated turnarounds, and scaled into new stages of growth. - A focus on durability, not just dashboards
The ambition is not to add one more reporting layer on top of existing systems, but to help brands build more resilient, transparent, and scalable operations.
Why Advisors Like Damien Matter at This Stage
Tether is tackling the hardest problems in CPG: misaligned forecasts, cash locked in the wrong inventory, fragmented tools, and lack of a single, trusted operational picture.
Advisors with real operational scar tissue play a critical role in this phase:
- They distinguish what’s genuinely useful from what only looks good in a demo.
- They recognize how processes and constraints change as brands grow.
- They help prioritize what actually moves the needle for operators and leadership teams.
Damien joining as a strategic advisor is a deliberate step toward building not just great software, but a system that can stand up to the reality of fast-growing, omni-channel consumer brands.
Looking Ahead
The bar for modern CPG operations keeps rising. Brands are expected to:
- Plan more precisely
- Move faster across more channels
- Do more with less – less cash, less time, fewer people
Tether’s goal is to give teams the clarity and control needed to meet that bar.
With Damien’s experience and perspective, Tether is better equipped to build a platform that connects demand, inventory, and operations in a way that reflects how world-class brands actually run.
The team is excited to partner with Damien and to bring the benefits of that collaboration to Tether’s customers, partners, and the broader CPG community.
Tether