Chief Marketing Officer (Remote, USA)

Do you want to join a team that will embrace your motorsports obsession? Are you someone who builds systems and scales measured results? Can you speak the lingo and oversee the development of a brand whose voice is technical and far from fashion? Apex is looking for a Chief Marketing Officer who understands car enthusiasts not as a demographic, but as a community they genuinely belong to. If this sounds like you, read on.

Who are we?

Apex Wheels creates Real Performance wheels for drivers everywhere. That means designing and manufacturing wheels that don’t just look the part, but truly improve performance in a measurable way. Born on the track and raised in California, Apex was founded in 2007 as a passion project by diehard motorsport enthusiasts and has produced function-first, race-proven wheels ever since. Now boasting a team of 40+ staff members, all Apex products are designed by an in-house team of engineers who are just as passionate about motorsports as you.

Objective

Reporting to the CEO, the Chief Marketing Officer is responsible for ensuring that marketing spend is a measurable and scalable driver of revenue growth, brand differentiation, and long-term customer appreciation. You will lead all marketing functions, including Brand, Creative, Audience Growth, eCommerce, and paid media. While working closely with executive leadership to align strategy and execution with company goals, you’ll help the marketing team define where to invest and why, build systems that drive efficiency and accountability, and clearly prove what’s working and what’s not.

Job Summary

Success in this role means that marketing is a clear and measurable driver of Apex’s growth. This requires a leader who can establish focus and make deliberate tradeoffs. Not everything will get done, and that is by design. The team must operate with clear priorities, strong ownership, and speed to execution, and leadership has confidence in marketing decisions because they are grounded in both data and sound experience-based judgment.

To succeed, you must bring a genuine connection to automotive enthusiast culture, because motorsport enthusiasts have a big problem that we’re on a mission to solve. Fashion wheels dressed up as performance wheels have flooded the market. These are under-engineered parts that overpromise and underdeliver, and they’re everywhere. The word “Performance” has been hijacked and watered down. With no watchdogs, little regulation, and almost nothing in the way of objective facts, buyers are easy prey. It should mean something real. Something that’s tested and backed up by cold, hard numbers. It’s time to draw a line in the sand and separate fact from fiction. We call it Real Performance, and it’s the hill we’re willing to die on.  For this reason, you must understand our customers intuitively and have the ability to distinguish what feels authentic from what does not. 

You are able to recognize which ideas are strong and will resonate, allowing you to trust your team without getting pulled into execution. You evaluate decisions through both a brand and consumer lens as well as a financial one. Our Brand is not surface-level fashion; it is technical and speaks truth to industry misinformation. You are tasked with guiding our technical experts to bring extensive education to the masses without falling flat. An education that will get consumers to change their buying priorities. Without a real connection to the consumer, it will be difficult to guide the team and succeed in this role.

You bring meaningful experience to senior marketing leadership roles with direct accountability for revenue, budget allocation, and performance outcomes. If you have not been responsible for Marketing’s P&L before, you don’t have the experience we need. If you focus on the results of your team’s work and not the costs to get those results, then this won’t be the right fit. You have to be allergic to vanity metrics and present defensible data to the executive team.

If you have not led teams through periods of organizational change, you likely don’t have the experience our people need. You will inherit a team that is working through the challenges of its second leadership transition in recent years. This role requires a leader who can quickly establish focus, build trust, and create momentum through decisive action and measurable results. 

You must be fluent in the language of modern marketing performance. You are very comfortable operating in an eCommerce-driven environment and understand how marketing contributes across the full customer lifecycle. You can make sound technical investments and give guidance to e-commerce specialists.  This role requires the ability to interpret the data, assumptions, and tradeoffs coming from your directors, ask the right questions, and translate those insights into clear, defensible decisions at the executive level. You cannot rely solely on your team to tell you what is working. You are expected to understand it well enough to validate it, challenge it, and stand behind it.

We value experience working in founder-led businesses more than experience in highly structured or agency-heavy environments. This role is not a fit for candidates who cannot clearly connect their decisions to business outcomes. Focused, lean, entrepreneurial tactics have given us outsized results. We’re not looking to pivot over to burning big budgets for industry-average results. This role needs to hone in on our secret sauce and scale that up, and not spread us thin with the mundane tactics we’ve missed.

How to apply

In the space provided for your cover letter, tell us about your connection to automotive or motorsports culture. If you’re not an enthusiast, tell us what you are passionate about outside of your 9-5.

Responsibilities

• Marketing Oversight: Develop and execute Apex’s company-wide marketing strategy that supports our growth goals while staying true to our brand. Oversee brand and Creative, ensuring that initiatives represent our brand well, meet interdepartmental needs, support our growth goals, and reinforce Apex’s credibility within the enthusiast community. Oversee Audience Growth & Engagement to enhance digital marketing, including SEO, paid media, and lifecycle marketing strategies that drive customer acquisition, retention, and long-term value. Oversee eCommerce, in partnership with technical experts, to ensure that initiatives are informed by customer behavior and insights, and our website is achieving optimal conversions. Partner with the COO and Director of Sales & Marketing to design and execute high-impact strategies. Partner with the COO and Education Manager to support consumer education strategies. Partner closely with our CFO to ensure that marketing spend is appropriately paced, well considered, and that our dollars are spent on the most impactful initiatives.
• Performance: Translate company goals into actionable marketing plans with defined success metrics, timelines, and ownership. Establish clear priorities across marketing initiatives, making deliberate tradeoffs to focus on the highest-impact work. Establish and enforce planning, prioritization, and execution processes that enable speed and clarity across the organization. Ensure marketing investments are evaluated against expected outcomes. Ensure that our goals and KPI frameworks are accurately measuring success. Lead and coach your team to relying on performance data to drive decision-making through the use of dashboards, and reporting to track performance, inform decisions, and improve ROI. Manage the marketing budget, resource allocation, and vendor relationships to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.
• Leadership: Provide executive leadership, coaching, and development to a multi-functional marketing team, including hiring, performance management, and organizational design. Design and evolve the structure of the marketing organization to ensure the right capabilities exist in-house and that agency spend is efficient and intentional. Ensure the team has the right skillsets and structure to execute at the pace needed to support our goals. Create a culture of ownership, accountability, and performance as informed by our company values.