Chris Bell

Chris Bell is leading one of the fastest-growing unicorns in one of the hottest areas of e-commerce right now: rolling up all the burgeoning online retailers that sell on Amazon, Mercado Libre, and other marketplaces and giving them the firepower to get much bigger. Bell’s Boston-based Perch, which is only 22 months old, has quickly grown its portfolio to include more than 75 brands—from athleisure to teeth whiteners—and recently landed $775 million in funding led by SoftBank to help finance its next phase of development. Bell, a veteran of Bain & Co. and online furniture company Wayfair, says that Perch’s business model is predicated on offering these up-by-your-bootstraps brands the technology and global operations expertise that will vastly improve marketing, manufacturing, and order fulfillment. “Consumer products, at the end of the day, need scale,” says Bell. “That’s where Perch comes in.”