MITX Innovators, Creators, Doers and Thinkers,

As many of you know, I am off to a new adventure at Havas Media to lead their fantastic Boston office. Thanks so much to all of you who have reached out to me with your good wishes and kind congrats. It’s an exciting opportunity for me, but it is certainly bittersweet to leave my post as President of MITX. It’s been an incredible 3 ½ years. It’s funny how you don’t realize how much has changed until you have reason to look back to where you started and feel proud of what’s been accomplished. Hearing from the people you’ve impacted with your work and vision is the greatest reward I can think of.

Awards season is in full swing here at MITX and we hope if you haven't already entered you are getting your submission ready, they are due in exactly 2 weeks! Alex Cote, Founder & CMO of Cloze writes a great post about their experience at a past MITX awards show and some advice for those entering this year. 

What's Next Awards entries are due March 7th! Enter now.

Alex Cote (@AlexCote) is the Co-founder of Cloze, a free app that helps you keep track of the people and posts that matter. A well rounded, customer-focused marketing executive with strong technology background capable of juggling the many responsibilities found in a startup environment. Alex has 15+ years of Product Strategy, Marketing & PR experience in both a start-up and mature product setting and has led product strategy/definition, launches and marketing programs for several Software-as-a-Service and business information based products.

Just in time for Valentine's Day we have an awesome post from Shauna Gallagher, Content Marketing Strategist at NorBella! Shauna takes a look at the various impacts that digital has had on the upcoming holiday. Interested in guest blogging? E-mail taylor [at] mitx [dot] org. 

Shauna started her career in Public Relations, journeying through the ever-changing communications landscape into social media and content marketing. Shauna boasts experience with brands like BJ’s Wholesale Club, Grey Goose, JetBlue, Bertucci’s and Purina. Her work has been seen locally on Boston.com and The Boston Globe and nationally on The Today Show and Fox & Friends.

February is a month about love so this month our blog theme is all about spreading the MITX love! We get stories from members all the time about their experiences with MITX and we want to share some of that with you. To kick off our month of MITX love we have a post from Devlyn Brisson, Director of Category Management at Wayfair about her involvement with our Future Leaders Group.

Devlyn(@dbriss) is the Director of Category Management at Wayfair (@wayfair), the world's largest pure play e-commerce company for home furnishings and décor. During her five-year tenure at Wayfair, she has had multiple opportunities to grow professionally in a host of vertically aligned positions. She is presently responsible for overseeing a $150+ million P&L and seven product categories, as well as managing a team of Category Managers, Merchandising Managers and Buyers.