Ian Yolles
Of Counsel: Sustainable Brand-Building

Depending on the season, Ian's office is either in his kayak, on his road bike, surfboard or telemark skis. Regardless of the paddle or pen, Ian extends his extensive entrepreneurial and executive level leadership to MarketShift's brand counsel team. His experience managing brand building and marketing activities for some of the worlds most influential consumer product companies gives him sharp insight and innovative ideas. He is an acknowledged thought leader and has direct experience building and stewarding highly successful brands that have defined and differentiated themselves based on their strong commitment to sustainability.

Ian co-founded Nau, an innovative retail-direct, outdoor lifestyle apparel company. As Vice President of Marketing and Brand Communications, Ian oversaw the full spectrum of marketing activities that defined the Nau brand and associated customer experience. By establishing awareness of Nau’s core values and differentiated product proposition, he built deep and lasting relationships with customers and brought Nau’s brand narrative to life in a compelling way via a digitally centric approach to marketing and storytelling.

 


  • "If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade."
    Stephen Chu Interview with Reuters (2007)
  • "If you don’t risk anything you risk even more."
    Erica Jong
  • "What you risk reveals what you value."
    Jeanette Winterson
  • "MarketShift brings a passion for discovering the dynamics of new, uncharted market opportunities and the skills for translating those into effective product marketing strategies. Their support was key in the success of ClearEdge Power’s initial launch of a whole new product category in the cleantech space. "
    Bill Sproull, SVP for Business Development at ClearEdge Power
  • "There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction."
    John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963)
  • "MarketShift Strategies analysis made us entirely rethink our web presence"
    Nik Blosser, President, Celilo Group Media
  • "MarketShift is filling a critical need in helping the first generation of sustainability oriented businesses find their way in a dynamic marketplace."
    Rob Bennett, Executive Director, Portland +Oregon Sustainability Institute
  • "Working with MarketShift resulted in a very pleasant surprise. The capabilities assessment they delivered turned out to be the catalyst for beginning development on a new product launch."
    M. Sami Khawaja, Ph.D., Vice President, Cadmus
  • "MarketShift Strategies provided us with incredible insights into improving our web presence, including how to drive revenue to our bottom line"
    Nik Blosser, President, Celilo Group Media
  • "Stephanie and Ruby bring years of experience and pragmatic thinking to help grow sustainable industries.”"
    Rob Bennett, Executive Director, P+OSI
  • "Gaining traction and results for NEEA’s industry-wide energy efficiency initiative requires a strategy that is part art, part science. MarketShift Strategies has the keen business acumen required to deliver both"
    Sharon Peterson, Marketing Manager, Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance
  • "Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle. "
    William McDonough, author "Cradle to Cradle"
  • "The real art of conducting consists in transitions."
    Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911)
  • "If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will NEVER be built."
    Van Jones
  • "Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steelmaking."
    Richard Florida, Economist and Author
  • "Blogging is intellectual prototyping. You put the ideas out there and start a conversation that leads to something… or not."
    Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
  • "It's no longer a zero-sum game -- things that are good for the environment are also good for business."
    Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO, General Electric
  • "The economic crisis that’s going on right now doesn’t represent a cycle, it represents a reset. And people that understand that will prosper and people who don’t understand that will get left behind."
    Jeffrey Immelt, Chair and CEO, General Electric
  • "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
    Steve Jobs
  • "The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas. "
    Linus Pauling, Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his work on above ground nuclear testing.
  • "It might be sobering for the country to realize we're in a completely new era."
    Bill Clinton
  • "Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds."
    Alexander Graham Bell
  • "The Beetles didn't invent teenagers, they merely led them. Hugo Chavez did not invent the disenfranchised and disaffected Venuzualans, he stood up and and led them. "
    Seth Godin
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