https://www.elliottrains.com/contact daily 0.75 2020-08-06 https://www.elliottrains.com/elliotts-face daily 0.75 2024-04-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/e25b2ffe-e87e-4915-8ac4-99d68f1ed496/Elliott+Rains Hello https://www.elliottrains.com/work daily 1.0 2026-02-08 https://www.elliottrains.com/work/helen-of-troy monthly 0.5 2022-08-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1627327407602-IAQO3CLRDTYG7FB3ZAYR/costco+volumizer.jpg Work - Helen of Troy - Volume, but make it Titanium. In all seriousness, I worked with my team to develop a compelling, differentiated product offering for Costco’s unique customer set that aligned with our internal team’s channel and product strategy. This item saw continued success far outpacing our Costco buyer’s forecasts, which enabled us to get another item on-shelf and drive revenue for multiple quarters in a row. In total, we expanded our shelf presence by 200% year-over-year which helped our organization blow past its top and bottom line goals while I was on the team. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1627327346293-V5GUATCVD9GJK7JMH0GT/warehouse.jpg Work - Helen of Troy - Amazon and Costco are wildly different retailers (not only because one sells a hot dog/soda combo for $1.5). My job was to make sure their orders were handled with the same level of detail. Although both retailers operate incredibly large businesses in the US, their ordering cadences, volumes, and communication processes were wildly different. I served as my team’s point person with our warehouse to ensure orders for both retailers went out on-time, never went stranded, and were received in-full by our customers. During my time managing our accounts, I helped reduce the number of stranded Amazon orders by 70%, freeing up warehouse capacity and bandwidth to better serve all of our other customers. For Costco, I developed a budget accrual process that gave leadership visibility into both order size/timing and financial assets that could be later used in contract negotiations and promotions. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1627327230999-TR9JEQFXSFIE6ICLOUEC/drybar+picture.jpg Work - Helen of Troy - How do you make a Drybar-achieved blowout even better? Let customers get the tools to enable said blowout through Amazon Prime! Being one of Helen of Troy’s newest beauty brands, Drybar was previously on Amazon only in a limited, 3P capacity. My team’s job after I came onto the account was to transition from a 3P-managed business run by an outside agency to a 1P, fully in-house operation akin to our other already-successful Amazon brands (like Revlon and Hot Tools). During the transition, I ran inventory visibility projects that helped us seamlessly transition our buy boxes from our 3P offers to our 1P offers, reducing the amount of lost revenue that can sometimes occur in such business moves. After our transition, I led order management workflows, including on-time and in-full analysis, which led to 15% monthly sales improvements for our newly-launched 1P items. https://www.elliottrains.com/work/packable monthly 0.5 2023-04-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/c2ac8fdf-1216-4f1a-a2bf-7628b616a948/nature%27s+bounty.jpg Work - Packable - Managing brands across multiple channels requires skill, attention, and a healthy amount of Biotin. Okay, the Biotin bit is obviously a bit of a joke, but in actuality my role had me oversee brands within Nestle Health Science (including Nature's Bounty, Puritan’s Pride, and Solgar) and 3M (think Command, Scotch, and FUTURO) across multiple major eCommerce channels. My previous experience working for Walmart and selling 1P on Amazon gave me the skills I needed to help these brands grow on both platforms, and my industry knowledge helped me help them succeed on Target, eBay, and our D2C site. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/e66a7bcf-be5c-4b0c-a9da-0161751fedf2/warehouse.jpg Work - Packable - 2022 was a rocky time for Packable. I helped organize the negotiations that drove our biggest, most successful KPI improvements. When the SPAC market dried up and the economy tightened due to inflation, the financial model of our company had to change almost overnight. Our entire CPG organization was tasked with pivoting on a dime from a revenue-at-all-costs business model to a bottoms-up, profit-driving assortment of brand partnerships. This dramatic shift had to happen quickly to ensure financial solvency and required all of our business leaders to renegotiate contracts, trade rates, assortment offerings, and fundamental cost structures with every onboarded supplier. I developed a negotiation tracker that enabled these conversations and gave leadership quick but insightful visibility into the progress we were making. As a result of this work and the organizational structure I helped develop, we exceeded our goals for revamped contracts, cost improvements, and retained partnerships. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/bbfb06bb-5974-47d0-8223-4cf51ca3dce3/content+improvements.jpg Work - Packable - Flipping a business model requires you to know your business inside-out. I had the processes and recurring analyses in place to make this happen for my brands. There’s probably a Scotch-related pun I could put in here, but it’s escaping me at the moment. In addition to helping lead our CPG organizations overall negotiations and tracking efforts, I had to run my own businesses under our new financial model. In order to effectively negotiate and make the interventions in my businesses necessary to succeed, I had to set up and maintain recurring and in-depth financial analyses. In addition to company-wide workstreams on profit analysis, cost validation, and supply chain forecasting, I developed replicable financial analysis tools that drove channel expansion within my brands (specifically to Walmart Fulfillment Services and Fulfilled by Amazon channels, which were our most profitable channels), as well as competitive assortment expansion (by identifying already-successful marketplace items that Packable was not actively competing on). These tools helped me retain revenue within my brands and support my division’s newly identified profit-oriented mission. Oh, I’ve got it: My financial analysis held together my businesses better than Heavy Duty, Guaranteed to Stay Sealed, Scotch Packaging Tape™. (Okay not my best work, but you get the gist.) https://www.elliottrains.com/work/flywheel monthly 0.5 2026-02-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1713294598736-DTG41M2VP9SPURLSNPNR/image-asset.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1713294663043-JX2IOM7B9BUOQYAE3IZJ/image-asset.jpeg https://www.elliottrains.com/work/pmg monthly 0.5 2026-02-08 https://www.elliottrains.com/work/walmart-ecommerce monthly 0.5 2020-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596677896781-J8O5P46FHND88FOBN6MJ/clear+american.jpeg Work - Walmart eCommerce - The best store brands aren’t any good if you can’t buy them online. My job was to fix that. These are the Walmart eCommerce brands. They’re all pretty cool. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596678536948-O5ORB5K796HIFGRX23E3/revlon+one+step.jpeg Work - Walmart eCommerce - Once in a blue moon, there’s a product that goes viral seemingly at random. This hair dryer was my blue moon and it’s one of my proudest work moments so far. Even if I don’t have enough hair to use it. While managing the hair appliances business as a category specialist for Walmart, I recognized the importance of the holiday shopping season both for my customers and for my business. Normally, these customers are in search of a good deal and aren’t super picky about the specific product. The Revlon One Step was the exception to this rule, spiking right at the holiday shopping season in my business. I worked closely with the supplier to secure inventory and competitive pricing, as well as with my supply chain and marketing teams to make sure customers knew Walmart was the place to get that year’s must-have beauty item. Again, bummed I don’t have enough hair to use it because I know it’s an amazing product, but still super proud to have delivered it to our customers when they needed it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596679032111-OL82AMO3M5YOOZY0XPIA/flat+iron.jpg Work - Walmart eCommerce - Beauty customers wanted choice when shopping for hair appliances. My job was to give them the opportunity to choose… even if I couldn’t use the appliances myself. When I came onto the hair appliances business, there was a large gap in the assortment I was offering to customers. Key brands were selling items on Amazon, Target, and in other major retailers, but didn’t want Walmart.com to carry the same offering. I built trust with these brands, establishing relationships rooted in shared success and respect for transparency. This trust led to my vendor partners opening up their assortment catalogs and serving our customers with their best products. In under a year, I doubled the size of my major brands’ assortments and grew my business over 50%. What I was most proud of, though, was giving our customers more colors, more technologies, and more choices for their hair styling regimes. https://www.elliottrains.com/work/other-work monthly 0.5 2020-08-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596500596713-G2YPR4FNK1X19ONO8FR4/statement.jpg Work - Other Work - I’ve always loved technology. I got way more opinionated when I went to college. Writing for The Michigan Daily helped me work out both of those interests. I contributed to The Daily’s opinion section as a columnist during my junior year, writing about technology, politics, and student life. My columns brought me a memorable interview with one of my favorite communications professors, an opportunity to check out an attention-management wristband, and a Facebook comment section about the 2016 presidential election I’ll never forget. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596501523355-Y33ZM0XM1Z1VUKXXUE8G/second+to+none.jpg Work - Other Work - Every professional career starts somewhere. My start was …second to none… *ba dum tss* But, seriously, my first professional experience was at the customer experience and market research company Second To None, based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I managed the company’s social media accounts, contributed website copy, wrote industry-focused blog posts, and produced internal video projects for company leadership. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596502218083-8OMJHMGRL403VUAH0RV1/8770566820_71b6e0b947_o.jpg Work - Other Work - I wrote about technology in college, but got my first professional experience with tech in high school. It was the coolest job you could get as a high school student. During my junior and senior years of high school (and part of my freshman year of college), I worked for the Sand Creek school district’s technology department, helping maintain our elementary and high school computer networks. I gained experience in basic networking protocols, Windows workgroup setup, and scaled hardware installation. It was an incredibly educational job that also allowed me to give back to my school while I was still a student. https://www.elliottrains.com/work/non-work monthly 0.5 2022-08-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596722698714-N35OI3HOBNIMWCUOHOE3/dorak+sign.jpg Work - Non-work Stuff - I didn’t discover kindness or hugging in college. But I did learn about a dope club that was strictly focused on those things. It was awesome. During my time at the University of Michigan, I joined a student group called “Do Random Acts of Kindness” or DORAK for short. The group was made up of teams that met once a week to literally just do random acts of kindness on campus. The team I led was specifically oriented around the “free hugs” concept, but added some interactive diversity, including free high fives, fist bumps, jokes, and fun facts. In addition to leading a team, I joined the organization’s executive board to be publicity chair, running our fundraising and marketing efforts. Though it wasn’t an academic group or even all that formal, we did strive to generate positivity in our community while also organizing an annual fundraiser for rotating charities. It’s hard to explain how much I enjoyed my time in the group given how abstract it sounds in writing, but it was truly one of my favorite memories. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/b9560b16-c3f8-4c0d-be9f-9d333babbb8b/ill+fayze+director.jpg Work - Non-work Stuff - I’m by no means a full-time, professional photographer. But I have been lucky enough to work on some really cool projects with some very talented people, all while improving on my photography skills. I had to do a lot of ad-hoc food and drink photography when I first got into the social media marketing world. As a result, I have maintained an informal interest in photography (that, as my Instagram demonstrates, has largely stayed focused on food and drinks). However, because I am lucky enough to be surrounded by a number of talented friends and colleagues, I’ve had the opportunity to help shoot content for a music video, headshots for a book launch, and even some engagement photos. Though I still have a long way to go in refining this skillset, I am incredibly honored to have helped out my amazingly talented friends with something that started out as a very, very small side hobby. https://www.elliottrains.com/work/pakmode monthly 0.5 2020-08-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596739652020-FP86ZVCTGI9B1CPPUO4K/20161008_001458.jpg Work - Pakmode Media + Marketing - Good Times Charley’s is best known for its iconic fishbowl cocktails. I leaned into that as a central pillar for the brand’s social media strategy. Side-note: they look super cool when lit up. Despite being well known for its large, cheap cocktails, Charley’s had previously underutilized one of its most iconic assets when it came to its social media marketing. Rather than using the striking visual of a 64oz cocktail to stand out on Instagram, the brand’s account was filled with screengrabs of University of Michigan-related assets. I introduced a new fishbowl-centric strategy that used the drink, along with some of its Charley’s cousins like the beer pitcher, pepperoni styx, and outdoor patio, to drive home what made Charley’s a unique on-campus destination. Social engagement was consistently higher after I took over the accounts and followers increased around 30%. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596739724673-YVBTEF9JKF07N16C8MWS/IMG_20161223_223231_01.png Work - Pakmode Media + Marketing - Pakmode had a large library of high-quality stock photo and video assets for both Charley’s and Cantina. I repurposed those assets in new, fun ways. Merry Christmas! Because my role was more ground-level marketing, I didn’t have access to a lot of high-end equipment to produce content. Luckily, Pakmode’s large asset library gave me a lot of tools to work with. I altered stock photos to fit seasonal and thematic moments (like this holiday themed shot), edited full length commercial videos down for use on social media, and reformatted short form videos into Twitter-friendly GIFs. This collection of high-quality assets allowed me to add diversity to the aforementioned fishbowl-centric strategy. Even the coolest brand needs to show people it can dress up well for the right occasion. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596739778147-JAF28DPY6FJLSZ4P5RG0/IMG_20170331_122122_860.jpg Work - Pakmode Media + Marketing - Cantina was previously known as BTB Cantina, home to greasy burritos and cheap drinks. When they rebranded, their social media had to undergo a rebrand of its own. Reinventing a campus mainstay can be tough when that mainstay’s legacy is so well known. But during my time managing Cantina’s social media presence, Pakmode helped the bar rebrand itself as a new-age, locally sourced taqueria and cantina. This shift meant the bar’s content strategy had to shift from college humor to high quality, food-focused messaging. Lighting had to emphasize freshness and pictures of the bar area had to show that, while still a place for dancing and memorable nights, it was a premium bar. https://www.elliottrains.com/work/michigan-dining monthly 0.5 2020-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596496495256-RSSEMT01K0LIHJCVXVHE/Frank.jpg Work - Michigan Dining - Food pictures are worth a thousand drools. I led Michigan Dining’s media operations, including working with U of M’s in-house photographers to generate multi-purpose assets for creative promotions and internal storytelling purposes. This event took place at Michigan’s student-run Campus Farm and led to multiple placements in industry media. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596733169915-3KWPTZL6HM9DT5S79CAN/planet+blue.jpg Work - Michigan Dining - Public universities should serve their communities and their planet. A university’s food system should play a big role in that service. As one of the largest employers, business units, and resource drivers on campus, Michigan Dining had a unique opportunity to influence sustainability initiatives on campus. Housed within our organization was the Student Life Sustainability brand, a marketing and communications team focused on driving environmental and social change within our division. In my work on the Student Life Sustainability brand, I led projects like a multi-channel marketing push around Michigan Dining’s new partnership with the student-run Campus Farm (which I mentioned further up). I also publicize student events, led on-location brand messaging, and spoke with media outlets regarding our efforts. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596498020837-MZ1SYC8KOUUVMO3BUF1A/darwins.jpg Work - Michigan Dining - The University of Michigan is one of the biggest brands in education. That means its supporting brands better be good. I led the brand creation process behind four unique, proprietary retail restaurant operations during my time at Michigan Dining. Darwin’s, a cafe within our Museum of Natural history that showed respect to the father of evolution, was one of those brands that came about from the community input, design feedback, and impact vetting processes I organized. Other brands we launched included Maizie’s Kitchen and Market (our first food hall concept), Blue Cafe and Market (a line of community-centric coffee shops), and a refreshed Bert’s Cafe (named after a lifelong Michigan donor). https://www.elliottrains.com/work/michigan-lsa monthly 0.5 2020-09-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596741289468-BQ6KZ2BV9DWTX7ET7VYJ/20161008_150513.jpg Work - University of Michigan - College of Literature, Science, and the Arts - Running the social accounts for a college is a really cool gig when you get to cover awesome events. Along with my fellow social media intern, I covered live events on Instagram stories, live tweets, and Facebook Live. Our goal was to bring niche or invite-only events to our LSA students and alumni community. One of the coolest events we covered was the Fab 5 @ 25, a panel discussion with three of the five members of the University’s famous “Fab 5” basketball team. We organized a pre-event social strategy that attracted a notable crowd and gave day-of followers backstage access to the event pre-, during-, and post-event. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596741383436-N9SYD488I23H6T2EQ2DA/giving+blueday.jpg Work - University of Michigan - College of Literature, Science, and the Arts - Fundraising is a huge part of higher education social media work. #GivingBlueDay was Michigan’s most successful annual fundraising effort. Every year, the University tags onto the Giving Tuesday holiday, repurposing the name to #GivingBlueDay to generate funds for student scholarships, research grants, and other public-serving purposes. Being the biggest college within the University, LSA had a strong presence in the day’s social marketing strategy. I helped create pre-event content to build excitement and executed day-of strategies to engage our alumni community. In total, our work helped raise over $170,000 for the College’s students and programming in the 24-hour period. I needed a lot of coffee to get through the day, but it was definitely worth it in the end. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ea0a91746f89f42064084e6/1596741454879-WFAEXHJSKE18VWN2XRKO/IMG_20161214_151414.jpg Work - University of Michigan - College of Literature, Science, and the Arts - The faculty and staff of the University of Michigan are some of the smartest people in the world. Condensing down that knowledge into a tweet was tough, but incredibly rewarding. LSA faculty and staff put out a ton of amazing work every school year (and over the summer). Sharing those achievements with our students, alumni, and University community was one of the core functions of my job and comprised a large portion of our content. Balancing educational seriousness and social media trends was a challenge, but we found ways to balance the two, given credence to our esteemed faculty and staff while embracing a light tone/on-brand visuals where appropriate.