Heidi Dillon and Alison Gavin just launched Bloom Talent Studio, a consultancy built on a simple premise: most high-growth CPG and beverage companies don't fail because their strategy is wrong—they fail because their people systems can't scale. After 50 years combined in the trenches at Distill Ventures, Suntory Global Spirits, Pernod Ricard, and Credit Suisse, they've seen it happen over and over.
Dillon's track record speaks for itself. As CEO of Distill Ventures, she took portfolio brands from $50 million to $500 million in AUM, launched the world's first non-alcoholic spirits practice with Seedlip, and helped scale LUNA at Clif Bar from $100 million to nearly $200 million. Gavin brings strategic HR chops from global transformations at Pernod Ricard and succession planning at Merrill Lynch. They've worked with more than 100 brands through critical growth phases, and they know where the bodies are buried.
"As organizations scale, clarity becomes more valuable," Dillon said. "Leadership maturity matters more. Culture stops being abstract and starts showing up in execution, trust, decision-making, and performance." That's the gap Bloom is designed to close. The studio offers tailored services including talent assessments, leadership coaching, team alignment workshops, and what they call a "Plan to People System"—matching strategic plans to the talent capabilities required to execute them.
Gavin put it bluntly: "Scaling a business isn't just about financial capital; it's the human architecture behind it that truly matters." Bloom targets CEOs and executive teams at venture-backed and PE-owned brands who are hitting walls—misaligned leadership, cultural strain, gaps in decision-making velocity—issues that rarely show up in pitch decks but kill momentum in the field.
The timing is deliberate. With capital tighter and margins under pressure, brands can't afford to burn runway on bad hires, weak leadership transitions, or teams that can't execute. Bloom is betting that the next wave of successful CPG and beverage companies will be the ones that get the people side right from the start. For an industry that's spent years obsessing over formulation and go-to-market, it's a long-overdue correction.
