By All Means

“I didn’t start The Stable for it to be big. But it probably had to be big because we had a big idea.” Chad Hetherington is the co-founder and CEO of The Stable, a “next generation” retail rep group that was acquired by Accenture in the summer of 2022, after just seven years in business. The Stable takes an omnichannel approach to launching products and has help digitally native brands such as The Ring and Quip go to market both online and in stores. Hetherington shares his path from Adaliade, Australia to sales rep for Quirky, a platform that crowd sourced product ideas and developed them. That experience opened his eyes to the need for a new approach to retail rep groups that would take multiple channels into a account. The Stable launched in Minneapolis in 2015 and within two years expanded to Seattle and raised venture capital—a rarity for a service agency. By the time Accenture made an offer, The Stable had grown to more than 500 employees with offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Bentonville, Arkansas,