Maria Carlton
Founder & Principal Advisor,
Forth & Forward Advisory
Maria Carlton is the Founder & Principal Advisor of Forth & Forward Advisory, an operator-led advisory practice helping retail and brand leaders turn vision into velocity across ecommerce, marketing, AI, and commercial execution. Her current focus sits at the intersection of ecommerce, marketing, AI, operating model design, and retail transformation, helping leaders make growth and emerging technology practical through clearer decisions, workflows, accountability, and cross-functional execution.
Maria brings more than 20 years of retail and consumer brand leadership experience, including 15 years at Under Armour, most recently leading Global Go-To-Market and Digital Commercialization. While there, she built the "Commercial Chase" process, credited with approximately 8% incremental revenue, alongside leading go-to-market and digital commercialization efforts across global markets. Her earlier career includes roles at Macy's, Fashion Accents, and Jos. A. Bank, and she draws on executive education at MIT that informs her current focus on AI, operating models, and retail transformation.
Maria also serves on the leadership team for Retail Women in Tech, a nonprofit advancing women across retail, technology, ecommerce, and digital transformation. Her broader experience spans ecommerce, marketing operations, merchandising operations, commercial execution, transformation, and operating model design, giving her a practitioner's view of how strategy actually moves through people, systems, and technology.
Through Forth & Forward Advisory, Maria helps leaders make strategy practical: clarifying decisions, aligning teams, strengthening operating rhythms, and redesigning how work moves through people, systems, and technology. Her approach to AI starts with the operating model itself, decision flow, adoption, governance, workflow, and human judgment, before tools.
As moderator of The Retail Growth Playbook at eCommerce Expo & Technology for Marketing, Maria brings a grounded operator's lens to the panel: what retailers should stop doing to protect margin, how to lift conversion and average order value without relying on promotions, and the KPI set that keeps trading, marketing, and operations aligned. Her background running go-to-market and cross-functional execution at scale, rather than observing commerce from the outside, keeps the conversation concrete, fast-moving, and useful for the retail and brand leaders in the room.
Sessions
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
