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Connor MacDonald
CMO at Ridge.com
Connor MacDonald is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at The Ridge, a digitally native e-commerce brand specializing in men's essentials, most notably known for their Ridge Wallet.1 Here's an overview of his background and career:
Education and Early Career
Connor studied Business Management & Economics as well as Film & Digital Media with a Production Concentration at the University of California, Santa Cruz, graduating in 2016.2 He began his career in marketing as a Content Marketing Intern at Branding Los Angeles in 2014.3
Professional Journey
After graduation, Connor worked in various marketing roles:
- Content Marketing Manager at Hawke Media
- Digital Marketing Consultant (freelance)
- Managing Partner at Top Hat Ventures, a boutique agency he co-founded12
The Ridge
Connor joined The Ridge in 2017 as part of their Digital Strategy team.2 In January 2019, he was promoted to CMO, a position he continues to hold.2 At The Ridge, Connor:
- Manages all marketing efforts across various platforms, including website design, Facebook, Google, TV, and direct mail1
- Leads a team of 25 people
- Helped grow the company to $32 million in revenue (as of 2020)1
Achievements
Under Connor's leadership, The Ridge has:
- Been recognized as one of Inc.'s top 1000 fastest-growing companies1
- Expanded its product line beyond wallets to include other men's essentials
- Grown to serve over 2 million customers with their flagship Ridge Wallet4
Connor is known for his expertise in digital marketing, e-commerce strategies, and his ability to scale brands effectively in the competitive online retail space.
Highlights
We spent tens of millions on ads in the last 60 days to end a record-setting Q4 at Ridge.
I did a quick exercise to look at share of budget changes YoY, and its a great synopsis of what we're seeing on the performance front.
Here's how things changed and a few of my takeaways and goals for next year.
to note: this is paid social platforms YoY for our EDC business. We spent significantly more YoY, so even % decreases are mostly net $ increases. It also does not include partnerships or TV budgets.
Here's the graph with 1DC ROAS layered in — we saw efficiency improvements on basically all fronts:
To get channel specific:
1/ Meta is always the elephant in the room.
It performed terribly in 2024, and at 42% TTL LY it was at its smallest share of budget for any November.
We saw a 30% increase in ROAS in 2025, including non-purchase optimized campaigns that we've validated drive low 1DC ROAS yet are highly incremental.
It's a huge win getting back to 50%+ TTL
2/ Interestingly, a consistent win across channels is an increase in CTR YoY, reducing cost of traffic while largely maintaining AOV/ECR
Some of these very dramatic shifts are explained by different placements — more search than shopping, more in-stream than YT Shorts, etc etc
3/ AppLovin was extremely underpriced last year and took up a huge % of budget
While its still a 7-figure channel for us, there was no way it would maintain its % of total spend.
I was surprised it essentially maintained ROAS YoY, after being an extremely efficient channel LY.
Overall it is still a seasonal channel for us and mostly activated during gifting periods, but we think we can unlock it on an evergreen basis in 2026.
4/ YouTube is potentially our most significant win YoY,
We came into this year with a focus on horizontal video — unlocking in-stream YouTube Ads & linear TV — and getting to 10%+ of budget well above target makes it a great alternative to Meta and I believe drives a lot of downstream value.
5/ Twitter has performed surprisingly well since October and ended up at 3.6% TTL budget.
They've very publicly improved a lot of the platform, and the ad performance seems to have come along with that.
6/ TikTok was flat YoY as a % TTL despite ROAS improving significantly. I think its probably one of our biggest opportunities for further paid social scale.
7/ Finally, the tiny bars are Reddit and Microsoft!
What are the best KPIs to monitor the health of an email program?
There are obvious ones like list growth, rev/send, unsubscribe rates.
Curious about any more advanced metrics around engagement or reactivation that people find helpful
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