What you'll find in this case
How we hired NIMBEL’s CEO & Marketing Director in 8 weeks
Our strategy for building a commercial leadership team from scratch
Lessons on hiring top executives in a stealth-mode startup
NIMBEL Baby Carrier is a startup that designs and manufactures baby carriers, comfortable and ergonomic for both parents and babies. Their carriers are designed to provide a safe and secure way to carry babies while keeping them close to their parents. The company is dedicated to providing high-quality products that promote bonding and make parenting easier. The product was developed in stealth mode, and the company was preparing for their launch through retail channels and direct-to-consumer in multiple countries in 2023.
The challenge
Setting up a solid commercial leadership team
With product development and testing entering the final stages, 2023 was the year NIMBEL launched their innovative product to the market.
They already had a strong advisory board in place and lots of technical product knowledge in the leadership team. Nonetheless, there was a need for more commercial leadership to lead the company through this product launch and put together an international go-to-market plan.
The CEO and Marketing Director roles were very specific and crucial to the future success of the company. Hence, the search needed to be conducted by specialists. This is where we came in!
The approach
Hiring multiple leadership roles, within the same management team, at the same time is not easy. The profiles needed to be the best of the best within the industry, while they also needed to be complementary to each other. Besides that, the searches needed to be run simultaneously in order for the final candidates to meet each other before signing.
Another factor that added to the difficulty of the search was that the product imagery and specifications of Nimble were still confidential. This made it very important to understand everything there was to know about the company and product vision in order to create a strong storyline for potential candidates.
We allocated an experienced Executive Search specialist who did an extensive onboarding with the NIMBEL founding team, ensuring the success of the project by understanding what was expected of each profile before we started the search. In order to get to the best candidates, we activated our current network, and in addition, we also activated leaders from strong brands within relevant industries.
Through intensive headhunting activities, we were able to introduce enough strong candidates to the hiring team at NIMBEL within days. Together with Stefan, the founder of NIMBEL, we then started an intensive interview process with more than 5 qualitative candidates on the first interview per role. Interviewing different types of people was crucial to find the exact right fit in this case. The close collaboration made it possible to iterate the search criteria throughout the process, which meant we could quickly adapt to new learnings coming from interviews held.
The result
After several interviews and effective negotiations on both ends, we were able to hire Steven Tol to the team as Marketing Director. Steven is bringing in brand and marketing experience from a-brands like Oatly and Coca-Cola and will help the team create a strong brand and campaigns.
A few weeks later, Angelique de Rond was hired to become the CEO. Her commercial mindset and experience at brands like Marlies Dekkers will help her build a high-performing company and execute an effective international go-to-market strategy.
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Hiring two crucial roles in 8 weeks for Nimbel
1
CEO hired
1
Marketing Director hired
8
weeks
average time to hire
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