Dana Helms Joins Outward In Business Development

Furniture World News Desk on 10/12/2022

Outward, Inc., the independent Williams-Sonoma Inc. company, has hired home furnishings veteran, Dana Helms, as its new SMBR business development executive. Helms will be working with Outward’s team of sales professionals, while spearheading the growth of its business initiative to make the Aperture Platform available to home furnishings retailers nationwide.

Helms, who will report to Richard Sexton, Outward’s senior director of sales, will also be working closely with Leah Kirkland, Outward’s senior director of business development, and the marketing team, utilizing her expertise on outreach to small- to medium-sized businesses to help develop this critical market.

Helms, who has more than a decade of experience in the industry, worked at MicroD in Charlotte, North Carolina, for 13 years, where she held various roles, from social media coordinator to business development executive. Most recently, Helms worked as the director of sales and business development at Myriad Software LLC in San Diego, California.

Helms is also active in the industry, having received various industry awards and accolades, including the Mentoring Award at the 2017 WOW Awards for her efforts to foster mentoring, development and promotion of women in her company and the industry. She is also a member of WithIt, where she served as the vice president of social media from 2012 to 2020.

“As the demand for the Aperture Platform continues to grow, so does our team. Our rapid growth has prompted us to make considerable investments in our engineering and technology, as well as our people, to benefit existing and future customers,” said Gaurav Sethi, co-founder of Outward, Inc. “We’ve also expanded our creative department and our production team. Growth is important to Outward, since it aids our success, and we will continue to invest accordingly.”

Over the past nine months, Outward has added 53 new professionals to various departments to support its dynamic growth and ongoing success of its Aperture Platform.

Outward has placed a large focus on expanding its engineering, production and creative departments – with engineering professionals accounting for one-third of the new hires.

Members were also added to the sales, data, marketing, hardware, IT and administrative teams. The employees are based all over the United States, with offices in San Jose, California, and High Point, North Carolina.

About Outward, Inc.: Outward, Inc. is a visual transformation and technology company. Since 2012, the company has been reinventing the way product photography is created, presented and consumed. Inspired by its deep experience working with home furnishings lifestyle retailers and manufacturers, Outward has developed a fully automated photography solution, the Aperture Platform, which makes it easy to produce and publish high-impact product photography for a variety of visual merchandising uses. After completing an initial training session, manufacturers and retailers of all sizes and skill levels can produce a large volume of product images at the push of a button and publish them in any format — from e-commerce to traditional media. Outward is an independent Williams-Sonoma company. For more information, visit www.outwardinc.com.