Amy Hilliard

Amy S. Hilliard is an award-winning entrepreneur, successful executive, marketing guru, and self-described "reinvention specialist."

Hilliard honed her leadership skills in consumer marketing, general management, strategy, branding, product development, retailing, capital raising, acquisitions, and global programming from experience with Fortune 500 corporations, legacy entrepreneurial companies, and her own businesses.

The Hilliard Group, her strategic marketing consulting firm, has worked with major corporations and non-profits nationally and globally to help them penetrate multicultural markets. In 2001, she founded The ComfortCake Company, makers of “Pound Cake so Good it feels like a Hug," which gained national distribution with United Airlines, Walmart, a McDonald’s test market, and Home Shopping Network among others using Amy’s own pound cake recipes. Hilliard now licenses ComfortCake’s intellectual property and Sugarless Sweetness®, a patent-pending sugar substitute.

A proven thought leader and international speaker, she is known as “The Reinvention Specialist” and is the author of "Pivot for Success - Hone Your Vision, Shift Your Energy and Make Your Move."

Previously President of Fashion Fair Cosmetics, the global legacy cosmetics company focused on women of color, Hilliard also held executive positions with Bloomingdale’s, Gillette, Pillsbury, Burrell Communications, and L’Oréal/Soft Sheen. Her marketing innovations to build one of Gillette’s brands into a $100 million-dollar business were documented in a case study for the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School. Hilliard has lectured at Northwestern’s Kellogg Business School, Loyola University’s Quinlan School of Business and other universities. She has also been an Associate Adjunct Professor of Strategy at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where she taught MBA’s from around the world a course based on her book, Pivot for Success.

Hilliard served two terms as a Trustee of Howard University, thirteen years on PepsiCo’s Multi-cultural Advisory Board, and was the first African American elected to the board of the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade. Hilliard currently sits on the LeanIn.org Advisory Board and was personally recruited by Sheryl Sandberg.

A native of Detroit, she is an honors graduate of both Howard University and the Harvard Business School.