Lauri Morrow Crawford
Founder, Crawford Growth Partners
A seasoned operator with a distinctive way of seeing how to create and deliver growth.
Lauri Morrow Crawford has spent her career leading growth, marketing and commercial transformation across complex B2C, B2B and B2B2C organizations. Her work has consistently centered on connecting strategy, customer insight, capabilities, people and execution to create measurable business results.
SEEING THE WHOLE SYSTEM
Growth rarely lives within a single function. Neither do the opportunities to create or compound growth.
Lauri’s strength is the ability to see how the pieces of an organization work together—strategy, customers, people, capabilities, data, partners, decision-making and execution—and where greater value becomes possible when those pieces are better connected.
She has led enterprise brand transformations, scaled shared-services organizations, built high-performing teams, and helped complex organizations rethink how they go to market and execute across global, matrixed environments.
SELECTED EXPERIENCE & IMPACT
Across industries and business models, Lauri has led growth from strategy through organizational activation to market execution.
Higher Education
New England College of Optometry (NECO)
Interim/Fractional Executive Leadership • Growth Strategy • Business Model Innovation • Brand Transformation
Originally engaged to help develop the nation’s first remote-option Doctor of Optometry degree program, Lauri led the market, growth and communications strategy supporting NECO’s proposed Hybrid OD model. Over an extended interim/fractional leadership engagement, she became part of the institution’s broader strategic planning process, helping identify, scope and activate growth levers across enrollment, continuing education, fundraising, alumni relations, clinical services and industry relations. She also led NECO’s brand repositioning—shifting from “The Most Important Decision of Your Life” to “We Change The Way People See the World”—while rebuilding the digital experience, integrating communications and more than doubling PR impressions in industry publications.
Athletic Footwear, Apparel & Equipment
Nike
Growth Strategy • Consumer & Account Strategy • Orchestrated Go-To-Market
With broad distribution already in place—including 27 points of Nike distribution in a single mall—Lauri identified the opportunity to make the existing marketplace more productive by aligning consumer shopping behavior with the distinctive strengths of major accounts. She developed differentiated product, sport and athlete strategies around those account roles, initially using high-value retail windows to attract consumers into stores and then extending the strategy across the total retail experience. She orchestrated Nike’s brand, sports marketing, product, merchandising, education and account-marketing capabilities around those strategies—expanding coordinated retail execution from roughly 300 stores to more than 6,000 monthly.
Residential HVAC • Independent Distribution & Dealer Network
TRANE / American Standard Residential Systems
Consumer-Centric Growth • Channel & Sales Transformation • Product & Go-to-Market Innovation
With more than 700 SKUs requiring redesign and launch within 18 months, Lauri led the market activation of a customer-centric transformation across Trane and American Standard. Her work spanned positioning, product naming and messaging, dealer sales-process redesign, training, claim substantiation and launch orchestration across internal teams, agencies and partners. Trane CleanEffects® generated approximately $40 million in first-year revenue with full payback in year one and was recognized by the 4A’s as a leading integrated-marketing case study.
Industrial Automation
Invensys Process Systems / Invensys Operations Management
Enterprise Integration • Growth Strategy • Operating Model Transformation
Five geographically dispersed global businesses were selling separately to the same customers within the same industrial plants. As they came together under Invensys Process Systems, Lauri led product portfolio rationalization, marketing integration and go-to-market planning—creating a more unified market approach while restructuring the product and marketing organization to operate with roughly half the prior team. She later led a 90-day global planning process for integrating three businesses into Invensys Operations Management, rationalizing the combined portfolio and defining how it would go to market across regions. The work identified approximately $70 million in efficiencies and $1 billion in growth potential that were incorporated into multi-year business plans.
Eye Care • Medical Devices
Essilor (now EssilorLuxottica)
Consumer-Led Brand Transformation • Partner Model Innovation • Integrated Go-to-Market
Lauri led a consumer-led brand transformation that unified Essilor’s fragmented product-brand presence under a single consumer platform and established Essilor as the mark of quality behind better vision. She also launched Essilor Experts as a performance-based growth model connecting consumer demand with independent eye care practices. The transformation doubled Essilor brand awareness and generated double-digit growth in Essilor lens sales.
STRATEGY TO MARKET
Selected examples of how strategy, customer insight and organizational capability translate into market execution and results.
Consumer Packaged Goods • Coffee
P&G / Folgers
Consumer Insight • Creative Distinctiveness • Integrated Growth Execution
Leading the $1 billion U.S. Folgers base business, Lauri identified two opportunities to accelerate growth from an already established market position: make the brand’s iconic advertising more distinctive and make existing retail distribution more productive. She challenged the familiar “Wakin’ Up” creative formula, putting musical talent—including Aretha Franklin and Randy Travis—on camera and into the story. In parallel, she developed a pricing strategy that expanded SKU presence at existing retailers. Together, the initiatives contributed to significant share and volume growth.
Athletic Footwear, Apparel & Equipment
Nike / Oshman’s Sporting Goods
Brand Platform Activation • Regional Retail Strategy • Orchestrated Go-to-Market
Nike had a powerful national basketball platform built around Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway and Li’l Penny. For Oshman’s Sporting Goods, Lauri developed a regional growth strategy that translated that national equity into a distinctive retailer and consumer experience supporting Penny’s signature shoe launch. She connected co-branded outdoor and radio, in-store activation, youth 2-on-2 basketball and partnerships with the Dallas Mavericks and Houston Rockets—culminating in tournament finals during NBA game halftimes and awards presented by Penny Hardaway. The program turned a national product launch and brand campaign into locally relevant retail traffic, consumer engagement and sales activation.
Residential HVAC • Independent Dealer Network
TRANE Residential Systems
Consumer Insight • Sales Process Transformation • Orchestrated Go-to-Market
Regulatory changes required the entire product line—more than 700 SKUs—to be redesigned and launched within 18 months, creating an opportunity to shift a dealer-centered category toward consumer-centric growth. Lauri translated that direction into market execution, developing the Trane Air™ concept and repositioning heating and cooling around whole-home comfort and indoor air quality. She then redesigned the sales process around how consumers actually made this complex purchase. Consumer communications, dealer training and new sales-support tools translated technical product performance into clear customer value while giving dealers a stronger way to sell it. A flagship result, Trane CleanEffects®, generated approximately $40 million in first-year revenue with full payback in year one, with its launch recognized by the 4A’s as a leading integrated-marketing case study.
Essilor Experts locator today — an evolution of the consumer-to-practice model launched during Lauri’s tenure.
Eye Care • Medical Devices
Essilor (now EssilorLuxottica)
Consumer-Led Growth • Brand Transformation • Eye Care Network Activation
Consumers buy a pair of glasses—not separate lenses, coatings, materials and technologies—yet Essilor’s consumer presence was fragmented across separate Varilux, Crizal, Transitions and XperioUV websites and advertising. Lauri identified the opportunity to create a unified consumer experience and led the creation of a single Essilor digital platform. She also developed a consumer-facing brand strategy that established Essilor as the mark of quality behind better vision and created one measurable path for consumer engagement. She then built Essilor Experts into a performance-based growth model and established the cross-functional operating structure required to deliver it. Directors and VPs across consumer marketing, IT, finance, research and analytics, product marketing, training, sales and account management led interconnected workstreams spanning geo-targeted media, the “Locate an Essilor Expert” experience, training, product standards, lead management and performance dashboards. The transformation doubled Essilor brand awareness and generated double-digit growth in Essilor lens sales.
BACKGROUND
Built through experience across industries, business models and growth challenges.
Lauri’s perspective has been shaped by experience across organizations including PepsiCo, P&G, Nike, Trane/American Standard, Invensys and Essilor—progressing from formative roles in high-performance organizations to senior executive, interim/fractional and advisory leadership across complex growth and transformation challenges. At Essilor, she served on the company’s Executive Committee, bringing a commercial and consumer perspective to broader enterprise decisions.
Her experience spans B2C and B2B businesses, global portfolios, complex distribution and partner networks, brand and commercial transformation, and direct sales and revenue leadership.
She holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a BS from The University of Texas at Dallas, with additional executive leadership development through INSEAD.
HOW LAURI WORKS
Greater performance often begins by getting people to see the same opportunity—and giving them a reason to act on it together.
CLARITY
Common understanding creates clarity.
People cannot align around an opportunity they understand differently.
COMMITMENT
Honest alignment creates commitment.
Functions, leaders and partners rarely have identical priorities, incentives or risks. Honest alignment makes those differences visible and creates enough shared—and individual—value for people to commit.
COORDINATION
Connectivity enables coordinated action.
The right people, capabilities, data, processes and partners have to be connected so decisions, dependencies, timing and handoffs work across the organization.
ORCHESTRATION
Orchestration makes coordinated capabilities mutually reinforcing.
Capabilities are intentionally combined and sequenced so each strengthens the others—and together they create greater value than they could independently.
Together, these conditions do more than improve execution. They build greater organizational capacity to deliver MORE—now and in the future.
Ready to see what MORE could be for your organization?