LEADERSHIP
Richard Baum is the Managing Partner of Consumer Growth Partners (CGP), a private equity investment and advisory firm with an exclusive focus on middle-market specialty retail and non-perishable branded consumer products companies. He also is a Partner in the advisory firm Founder Solutions (www.founder-solutions.com) that provides a broad range of strategic and operational advisory services to consumer/retail companies that have a transaction in their future but for a variety of reasons may not be ready to take in equity capital at the present time.
Richard currently serves as President of the Retail Marketing Society, a not-for-profit organization that focuses on bringing leading edge topics of interest to the broad retail community via monthly webinars. He also serves as a Board Director for Chair King/Fortunoff Backyard Stores, Factory Connection, Inc., Rolla Coster Inc., and Southern Grace Clothing Company. He served as a board director of Vera Bradley, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRA) for nine years before stepping down in 2020.
Prior to co-founding CGP in 2005, Richard spent more than fifteen years as a sell-side equity research analyst at Sanford Bernstein, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse where he was consistently a top-ranked industry analyst in the annual Institutional Investor and Greenwich Associates polls. Previously, he spent six years in the merchandising organization at Bloomingdale’s and began his career as a strategy consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.
He earned a BA degree in Economics from the University of Michigan where he graduated magna cum laude with Phi Beta Kappa honors and a JD degree from Harvard Law School. He lives in a suburb of New York City with his wife Robin. He is the proud father of two young men, Zachary an attorney in Washington, DC and Ross, a musical theatre composer and songwriter in New York City and Los Angeles.