Sports marketing trailhead leads back to Bouder for Emmons

Charity Emmons

Charity Emmons (‘92) said it was a long and winding road from CU to her job as fitness marketing director at Schwinn Fitness in Boulder.

“I spent a year after school thinking the perfect job was going to drop into my lap,” she said. “To make money, I did everything from work on a cruise ship in Alaska to drive a big, yellow school bus full of screaming kids for a YMCA day camp. Fun, but hardly why I went to school and studied integrated marketing communications.”

A year after graduating, she said she landed a marketing job with Information Handling Services in Englewood, a large high-tech company. “The content was boring, but it was a great way to put the skills I learned in college into practice. For obvious reasons, we didn’t get the chance to spend real money on projects in school, so I really needed a place to learn about producing marketing materials as well as learn general business and budgeting processes,” Emmons said.

She said she was introduced to sports marketing when she moved to Southern California in 1995 and worked for a then-hot apparel company, No Fear.

“Because they were doing so well, I had fantastic exposure to national campaigns, great agency help and progressive creative development,” Emmons said. “We worked with everyone from Barry Sanders and Mark McGwire to ESPN and M&M Mars.”

One project she worked on with the National Hockey League ended up turning into a career move as she swapped coasts in 1997 to become marketing director for a hockey apparel startup company named Rival in Raleigh, N.C., and New York City owned by the NHL and a few players.

“It was very exciting to launch a brand from scratch and good experience to be a part of a startup organization.”

Being from Boulder, Emmons kept track of Schwinn, and when her current position became available in 1999, she headed back to Colorado.

“The position has turned out to be a great challenge and great fun, and being in my hometown is definitely a bonus,” she said. cemmons@schwinn.com