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.
- Sitecore, 2017-2026 – Industry Principal, Travel & Hospitality
- 2024 Global Solution Engineer of the Year · President’s Club
- Global AI Champion for Presales, 2025 & 2026
- Board Member, TAG Marketing Society, 2025-2026
- Manchester Orchestra – founding member, 2004-2013
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. [[NEEDS: her magazine bylines – publications and links]]
- 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
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 innaugural Norcross Porchfest: 35 bands, 12 porch stages, 1,500 people, and an 11Alive news segment. The Norcross city issued a mayoral proclamation recognizing us both for it.
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.
[[NEEDS: exterior signage photo and studio interior photos]]
Other places we show up
- Experience strategy and thought leadership at PersonalizeCX.com
- Video, music, studio projects, and writing at JonathanCorley.com
- Kristen’s community newsletter, Norcross Social Club