Vol 37. Insights from PatPat’s Head of US Marketing Ranu Coleman

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Meet Ranu Coleman

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their career, insights, and accomplishments. This week, that marketing leader is Ranu Coleman.

Ranu Coleman is a brand marketer who’s built her career at the intersection of fashion, retail, and DTC. She’s often stepped into companies during moments when the brand needed legitimacy, clarity, or a reset. 

Throughout Ranu’s career, her throughline is tactile brand building. She’s consistently helped brands get close to the product, the customer, and the real-world context where buying decisions happen.

Here are the need-to-knows about Ranu:

• She led brand and growth initiatives at Azazie during a period of significant scale, growing daily dress sales from ~500 to ~3,000 while reshaping brand perception.

• She built and scaled marketing teams across multiple fashion and retail businesses, often as the first or most senior marketing hire.

• She currently leads brand marketing at PatPat (a family apparel company) overseeing creative, social, PR, influencer, and go-to-market strategy across a heavily licensed, global DTC business.

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Stumbling into marketing through fashion

Ranu studied political science at UC Irvine with plans for law school. But pre-law classes made it clear that path wasn’t for her. What was clear early on was her interest in retail and fashion. 

Ranu pursued this interest through the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles, where she studied visual communications and got her first exposure to marketing through store-level storytelling and presentation.

Her first internship at Kenneth Cole was about as hands-on as it gets: styling mannequins, merchandising accessories, and making sure products looked right on the floor. “I got firsthand knowledge of the store level,” she said. It was an experience that shaped how Ranu thinks about marketing for the rest of her career.

That foundational experience followed Ranu to her next experience at a watch company in San Francisco. This role brought closer to product marketing and licensing, pitching to big retailers like Walmart and Target. Eventually, a client hired her directly and brought her to New York into a brand manager role. “I was overseeing 30 different licensees and making sure all of their product and marketing was on brand,” she recalled, noting that it was complex, messy, and formative work.

Learning markets and law

Across her early roles, Ranu leaned into being a generalist. Rather than optimizing for a single channel or function, she was learning everything she could about how brands actually come to life. That mindset paid off when she joined Dreamwear as its first marketing hire, reporting directly to the founders. 

“They didn’t have a background in marketing,” she said. “So a lot of it was me learning and scaling the business.” She owned everything from packaging and hangtags to brand marketing and retail execution, while also supporting business development and licensing. Over five years, the company grew from about 20 employees to nearly 80.

Licensing, in particular, became a long-running thread in her career. She learned the mechanics by working closely with the legal council. “I learned the most from our attorney,” she said. “How to read contracts, how to negotiate them. That was huge.”

Ranu took a similar learning approach at Ariat International. As Global Brand Marketing Manager, she led strategy across equestrian, hunting, workwear, and fashion categories. These markets were far removed from her own lived experience so to learn the ropes, Ranu immersed herself. 

She attended hunting trade shows, spent long days at Shot Show in Las Vegas, and went to equestrian events to understand how these customers thought, shopped, and talked. “You really have to get in the weeds,” she said. “You have to live it.”

Repositioning brands by building trust

When Ranu joined Azazie in 2018, the brand was known primarily as a “cheap bridesmaids dress” option. Her mandate was to change that perception. 

Ranu approached this from multiple angles at once. She rebuilt the marketing team, invested heavily in PR and influencer relationships, and focused on trust-building for an online-only bridal business. 

One of her most impactful moves was introducing a sample program that allowed customers to try dresses at home. “How else do we get the product into people’s hands when we don’t have stores?” she asked.

Measurement mattered, too. With a CEO who cared deeply about data, Ranu tied brand work to signals like Google Trends and traffic spikes tied to press moments. “We could see it clearly. When we hit the Today Show or major bridal publications, traffic followed.”

Building PatPat’s brand from the ground up

Today, Ranu applies all these learnings and principles at PatPat. When she joined, the brand looked like a marketplace. It was broad, undifferentiated, and unfamiliar to many consumers. 

Her early focus was on fundamentals: fixing customer experience issues like returns, improving NPS, and listening closely to what parents were actually saying online. From there, she narrowed the brand’s focus. 

“Family matching is where we could make the biggest impact, especially around holiday pajamas and licensed collections,” she said. That clarity now drives both brand and performance, with family matching becoming one of the company’s strongest sales drivers.

A standout campaign

One of Ranu’s proudest campaigns came to life through a PatPat holiday activation in Los Angeles called the PatPat Holiday Lounge. What started as a small seasonal event evolved into a full-scale brand moment designed to put real families and real emotion behind the brand.

The event featured PatPat’s Disney styles and holiday pajamas, with kids decorating cookies and watching Frozen on a large outdoor screen overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Influencers and celebrities like Audrina Patridge and Chanel West Coast attended with their kids, creating organic social momentum throughout the evening.

The results were significant: over 59M Instagram impressions, 98M earned media impressions, and post-event coverage in outlets like E! Online, US Magazine, and Entertainment Tonight. More importantly, the activation became one of PatPat’s biggest awareness drivers of the year, proving that tactile, in-person experiences still matter deeply, even for DTC brands.

Advice and Takeaways

1) Get closer to your product.

Ranu’s career shows that strong brand instincts are built at ground level: stores, customer forums, trade shows. And the more tangible the product, the more important that proximity becomes.

If you’re leading marketing from behind a dashboard, consider where you can physically immerse yourself. Visit stores. Attend events. Put the product in your hands if it’s tangible and if it’s not, consider the ways you can materialize the pain points it solves.

2)  Focus on earning brand legitimacy.

Whether it was Azazie’s sample try-on program or PatPat’s Holiday Lounge, Ranu consistently focuses on trust-building before growth. Rather than trying to out-message skepticism, she designs experiences that dissolve it.

Look for moments where your brand can prove itself instead of explaining itself. That could mean experiential marketing or partnerships that lend credibility by association or even just doubling down on the customer experience. Actions like that can go a long way with customer loyalty and affinity. 

3)  Measurement doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful.

Ranu never pretends brand is easy to quantify but she’s thoughtful about proxies. Google Trends, traffic spikes, NPS, and qualitative feedback all play a role in connecting awareness to outcomes.

Rather than chasing flawless attribution, choose a small set of indicators you trust and track them consistently. Over time, patterns emerge and those patterns are often enough to guide smart decisions.

Think long-term: What could help make your campaigns more successful over time? The right agency partner. And Vendry can help you meet yours, for free. Get started.