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 owned P&Ls, guided strategy, and led real operating teams becomes a critical advantage. That’s why Tether is thrilled to welcome Daryl Kato as the company’s newest advisor.

Daryl is a CPG executive, board member, and advisor with more than two decades of experience leading consumer brands – from high-growth startups to complex turnarounds – across toys and collectibles, food, and health & wellness categories. He has held senior roles including Super7, Kurvana, Glass House Brands, and Nissin Foods, with responsibility for businesses ranging from emerging brands to those exceeding $1B in annual revenue.

Why Daryl

Throughout his career, Daryl has sat at the intersection of:

Strategy and execution – setting direction while staying deep in the details of how plans actually get delivered.
Finance and operations – connecting inventory, demand, and supply decisions directly to margins, cash flow, and long-term enterprise value.
Boardroom and frontline – supporting leadership teams while staying close to the operators responsible for “making the number.”

He has led companies through:

Hyper-growth phases, public listings, and post-deal integrations
Restructurings and turnarounds in challenging markets
Scaling supply chains, manufacturing, and commercial operations across channels

These are the same tensions Tether exists to address for modern CPG operators.

How Daryl Will Support Tether

As an advisor, Daryl will work with Tether across several key dimensions.

1. Bringing an executive and board-level lens to product direction

Tether is used by planners and operators day-to-day, but it also needs to answer the questions that leadership teams and boards ask every month and quarter.

Daryl will help ensure the platform:

Surfaces the metrics that actually matter for executives (not just another wall of charts)
Connects demand planning, inventory, and operational decisions to revenue, margin, and cash outcomes
Feels credible not only to analysts and planners, but also to CFOs, COOs, and CEOs

The goal is simple: when leadership teams ask “Can we trust this?” and “What should we do next?”, Tether should help teams answer confidently.

2. Stress-testing workflows against real-world operating complexity

In high-growth CPG, nothing is truly “simple”:

Demand looks different by channel, region, and key account
Inventory decisions have long tails and real financial consequences
Teams are often under-resourced and over-extended

Daryl will help Tether pressure-test:

How workflows hold up as businesses become more complex
Where edge cases emerge as brands scale into new channels and categories
How Tether can make it easier for teams to move beyond manual spreadsheets and ad-hoc systems without losing nuance

This keeps Tether grounded in the realities of running an actual business, not just an idealized model.

3. Connecting top-down strategy with bottom-up planning

One of the hardest challenges for growing brands is connecting:

Top-down targets – revenue, margin, and growth expectations
Bottom-up plans – what to build, buy, and ship by SKU, by week, by channel

Daryl’s experience aligns directly with this problem. He will help Tether:

Better support the flow from strategic goals into demand plans and inventory decisions
Make it easier for leadership to see how operational plans ladder up to company targets
Close the gap between what’s on the board deck and what’s in the buy plan

The result: planning that feels less like a negotiation between spreadsheets and more like a shared, transparent process.

What This Means for Tether Customers and Partners

For Tether customers and partners, Daryl’s advisory role reinforces several priorities in how the product will continue to evolve:

Deeper support for leadership and finance stakeholders
Tether will keep investing in workflows and views that bridge planners, operators, and executives – not just serve one team in isolation.
Stronger connection between operations and outcomes
Expect continued focus on how demand, supply, and inventory decisions show up in financial performance and risk, not just operational KPIs.
A system built for the next stage of growth
Tether is being shaped not only for early-stage brands but also for companies moving into more complex channel mixes, product assortments, and supply chains.

Why Advisors Like Daryl Matter at This Stage

Tether is still early relative to the size of the problem it is tackling. The company is working on:

Reducing reliance on spreadsheet-driven planning
Freeing up cash tied in the wrong inventory
Giving teams a single source of truth across demand, inventory, and operations

Advisors with deep executive and board experience play a crucial role in this phase:

They help prioritize what really moves the needle for the business
They push for clarity on how product decisions support long-term value creation
They keep the bar high for what “enterprise-ready” truly means

Daryl joining as an advisor is a deliberate step toward building not just useful software, but an operating system that can support brands through multiple stages of growth.

Looking Ahead

Modern CPG brands are expected to:

Operate across more channels with fewer people
Plan more accurately with more uncertainty
Grow faster while staying disciplined with cash and inventory

Tether’s mission is to give teams the clarity, control, and confidence to meet that bar.

With Daryl’s guidance, Tether is even better positioned to build a platform that connects demand, inventory, and operations in a way that reflects how high-performing organizations actually run.

The team is excited to partner with Daryl and to bring the benefits of that collaboration to Tether’s customers, partners, and the broader CPG community.

Toys & Collectibles

Welcoming Daryl Kato as Tether's Newest Advisor

See how Tether replaces spreadsheets