Marla Metz
Marla is a business builder with 13 years of experience turning early-stage ideas into scalable organizations — building the strategy, financial model, and operating structure that turn a blank-page vision into market reality. She has spent her career building and scaling consumer brands, from household names like Kashi and RXBAR to, most recently, the social enterprise Who Gives A Crap, which she helped build into a category-defining household goods brand donating 50% of its profits to clean water and sanitation charities.
As Head of Product Strategy and Innovation at Who Gives A Crap, a wildly successful and innovative international B-corp eco-friendly toilet paper company. Marla built the company's first-ever three-year strategic roadmap and secured executive alignment behind it within six months, then led the company's first new-category launch from concept to market in under ten months, scaling it to $5M+ in Year 1 revenue.
Earlier, as the first hire at baby food startup Nosh Foods, she worked directly with founders to build go-to-market and product processes from scratch in a lean, resource-constrained environment — experience directly relevant to organizations in startup mode. Across roles at Kellogg's Natural Brands and Plum Organics she has repeatedly been the person brought in to bring structure, strategy, and executional discipline to organizations that had passion and opportunity but lacked the systems to scale.
A former U.S. Naval Officer, Marla led operations and navigation aboard a Navy destroyer and managed a $20M counter-narcotics assistance portfolio in a diplomatic role at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS from Georgetown University, and has done pro bono strategy consulting for nonprofits through the HBS Northern California Community Partners alumni program.
Marla is half-Japanese, and over the past several years has navigated elder care and cross-cultural family logistics firsthand while supporting her elderly Japanese mother. That experience gave her a personal, close-up understanding of the gaps Ohana Village Foundation is working to close — and it's a core part of why she joined the Advisory Council: she believes the organization's mission deserves the same rigor and builder's discipline she has brought to every venture in her career. She lives in San Diego with her husband and two young children.
