Leadership

We started with soundwaves.

Cumberland Coast started in an Atlanta spare room, selling thousands of framed waveform prints we designed and shipped ourselves. Twelve years later, the work has evolved but the team is the same.

Jonathan Corley

Co-Founder

Jonathan Corley

Jonathan spent nine years at Sitecore helping some of the largest brands in the world (United Airlines, Carnival, Emirates, Omni Hotels) work out how their customers actually experience them. He finished as Industry Principal for Travel, Transportation & Hospitality, and in 2024 was named the company’s Global Solution Engineer of the Year out of roughly sixty consultants worldwide.

The last stretch was almost entirely about AI. He was Sitecore’s Global AI Champion for Presales, sat on its cross-department AI council, founded the global AI Advocates working group, and rebuilt the company’s maturity model into an agentic assessment that’s since been completed more than two hundred times. It’s the difference between having a view about agents and having deployed them somewhere that had to answer for the results.

Before the martech consulting years he played bass in a band that toured for the better part of a decade. That’s where he learned the parts of this job that aren’t in any framework: how to build an audience from nothing, how to make something good on a deadline with people you like, and how fast attention disappears when the work is boring.

He left Sitecore in 2026. He writes at PersonalizeCX, publishes The Catalog newsletter, and still shoots, edits, and records.

Jonathan is actively looking for his next full-time role leading experience strategy or AI transformation. Cumberland Coast is where the advisory and studio work lives, and it continues either way.

  • Sitecore, 2025-2026 – Industry Principal – Travel & Hospitality (Global)
  • Sitecore, 2022-2025 – Director of Experience Strategy (Global)
  • Sitecore, 2021-2022 – Senior Manager, Head of Business Value & Strategy (Americas)
  • Sitecore, 2017-2021 – Senior Marketing Technologist, SBOS
  • Board Member, TAG Marketing Society, 2025-2026
  • Delaware Consulting, Senior Digital Consultant, 2014-2017
  • Arke Systems, Digital Marketing Analyst, 2013-2014
  • Manchester Orchestra – founding member, 2004-2012
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Norcross Social Club

Six hundred neighbors, every week, for five years.

Kristen started writing the weekly Young Norcross newsletter in 2021. Rebranded “Norcross Social Club” in 2026, it’s past six hundred subscribers, with an Instagram following and an active Facebook group.

Kristen’s passion for community and attention to detail are skills she brings to client work. Norcross Social Club →

Kristen Corley

Co-Founder

Kristen Corley

Kristen has spent twelve years in content marketing, most of it inside technology companies (an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, a security software company, a healthcare startup) where the job was making genuinely complicated things make sense to busy people. She’s done it agency-side too, at Brown Bag Marketing, across both B2B and consumer accounts.

It’s a harder discipline than it sounds, and it’s the backbone of everything the studio makes. Good content marketing isn’t writing. It’s working out what a business is actually trying to say, and who needs to hear it, before anyone writes a word. The writing is the easy part once that’s settled, and most of the work that fails, fails before the writing starts.

She co-founded Cumberland Coast in 2014, back when it was waveform prints the two of us made by hand and shipped ourselves, more than fifteen hundred of them, across our own store, Amazon, Etsy, Wayfair, and regional arts festivals. Running a product business teaches you things advising one never will.

At the studio she leads editorial writing, social media, and community work, the parts of a brand that only get better with someone paying consistent attention to them. She’s the reason the work here tends to arrive with a reason attached rather than as a deliverable.

  • Norcross Social Club – Content Creator, 2021-present
  • Brown Bag Marketing – Content Marketing Manager, 2019-2020
  • RapidFire Tools – Content Marketing Manager, 2017-2018
  • Relus Cloud (now Cloudreach) – Content Marketing, 2016-2017
  • Next Wave Connect – Online Community Manager, 2014-2015
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The full record with brands advised, engagements, recognition, and projects lives on the work page.

Together

Norcross Porchfest

In May 2026 Kristen and Jonathan founded the inaugural Norcross Porchfest: 35 bands, 12 porch stages, 1,500 people, and an 11Alive news segment. The city of Norcross issued a mayoral proclamation recognizing them both.

Together Kristen and Jonathan organized a team of volunteers, and then worked to build an audience, produce the festival, and get the whole town to turn up. Norcross Porchfest →

The studio

51 South Peachtree Street.

The Cumberland Coast studio sits in the middle of the walkable town square in Historic Norcross. It’s where we shoot, record, edit, and meet clients.

It’s a quick, 20-min drive from Atlanta. Schedule a time to drop by and say hello.

Other places we show up