Voices of Wonder: Courtney Lawrie, EVP & GM, Growth on Building a Growth Engine, Rebranding Wonder, and Scaling Customer Connection

To spotlight different perspectives and give an inside look at Wonder, we're highlighting leaders from across the organization. This month, we sat down with Courtney Lawrie, EVP & GM, Growth, to talk about building customer habits, Wonder's rebrand, and how her team drives growth through fast experimentation and iteration.

A quick round to get to know Courtney:

• Favorite Wonder order: It's a tie between the hot honey boneless wings and the Royal Greens beet and goat cheese salad. Though if I'm being honest, it's probably the wings more recently.
• Book you've read recently that you'd recommend: I recently read Strangers by Belle Burden. It's a memoir about the collapse of a marriage during COVID-definitely emotional and heavy, but I treated it like a beach read. It let me mentally go somewhere else for a bit.
• Coffee or tea: Coffee. I'm a Starbucks person, and I'm an iced coffee drinker basically year-round. It has to be subzero temperatures to get me off iced coffee.
• Favorite way to unwind after a busy week: After the kids go to sleep on Friday, my husband and I love to sit together for a bit with no phones or TV, and we decompress over a glass of wine. With two young kids, there honestly isn't a lot of uninterrupted conversation time during the week, so it's become a really important ritual for us.
• Favorite productivity hack: I'm very intentional about scheduling (and protecting) focused work time. I try to block at least one or two hours a day where I turn off notifications and focus deeply on a couple of specific things that I want to accomplish.
• What does a typical day look like? Weekdays are a bit of controlled chaos. Mornings are busy getting everyone out the door for school and work, and then the workday itself flies by. I try really hard to protect the 5:30 to 7:30 PM window for family time-dinner, baths, bedtime, all the mom responsibilities. Weekends are also very family-focused. I'm lucky to live in Boston where I grew up, so we're close to a lot of people we love.

You spent over a decade at Wayfair leading brand, growth, and integrated marketing at a massive scale. What drew you to join Wonder, and what felt different about the opportunity here?

The opportunity to build another household brand around a product and experience that felt very unique and valuable to people's lives was incredibly exciting to me. Home was such an emotional category at Wayfair-being able to provide accessibility to an endless selection of home goods in a more convenient way. In many ways, Wonder is doing something very similar, but with food. I've always had a personal passion for food, and I was excited to enter a new industry, a new category, and start building again.

How do you think about the scope of "Growth" at Wonder and the areas of the business your team owns?

At a high level, the team is responsible for driving customer growth, engagement, and ultimately revenue to Wonder. To do that, we bring together a lot of different functions-selection, marketing, the digital product experience, the physical experience in the restaurants, creative, and customer analytics. All of these areas work together to drive customer acquisition and lifetime value.

We're ultimately trying to create a sticky experience where customers come back again and again, with Wonder becoming a habitual part of their lives.

What's been most interesting or surprising about driving growth at a company like Wonder?

The willingness to move quickly and take big bets. Marc says all the time that "most things are two-way doors," and I think what he means is that if something doesn't work, you can always walk back through the door, iterate, and optimize. That mentality creates a really motivating environment, because teams aren't afraid to take smart risks or move quickly.

How do you evaluate success across both new and existing locations? What metrics matter most to you and your team?

There are a lot of metrics we look at, but a few are especially important. Top-line revenue across the business is obviously critical, but customer repeat behavior and lifetime value are probably the most important, because they tell us whether customers are truly building habits around Wonder.

We also look closely at same-store sales for existing locations, specifically five quarters after opening. Are customers continuing to come back? That's really the signal that the experience is resonating beyond the initial excitement of a launch.

You led Wonder's rebrand last year. What were we trying to solve for, and how did you define success / know it was working?

First, I have to acknowledge that the team had already accomplished an incredible amount before I joined. The speed and quality of work that went into transitioning Wonder from the mobile restaurant business into a more digitally forward restaurant and delivery platform was really impressive.

The biggest opportunity I saw was around clarity. Customers were still having a hard time understanding who Wonder was, and that makes sense because no one has really built what we've built. So we focused on simplifying through a customer insight that almost everyone relates to: mealtime can be stressful. What are we going to eat? Who's cooking? Is this going to satisfy everyone tonight?

That insight led us to "Cravings Without Compromise," tied very directly to Wonder's multi-restaurant ordering capability, which is such a meaningful differentiator for us. Then, from a visual identity standpoint, we wanted the brand to feel more digital and tech-forward. The existing identity had been built really well for physical restaurants, but we needed to evolve toward a physical and digital food platform.

As we expand into new markets like Texas, how do you approach building awareness and driving early adoption from scratch?

The first thing is understanding where and how people consume media, because that can vary significantly by market and region. Then it becomes figuring out how to break through the noise in a way that feels authentic and immediately communicates Wonder's core differentiators. We have to show up in ways that are memorable and easy to understand very quickly.

Texas is especially interesting because influencers play a much bigger role there than they do in some other markets, so we'll likely lean more heavily into influencer marketing there. We also know the suburban family dynamic is incredibly important in Texas. Wonder's multi-restaurant ordering capability naturally resonates with families where everyone wants something different, so we'll likely double down on that positioning even more there. A lot of the strategy is still evolving in real time, but those are definitely some of the major focus areas.

Looking at the progress we've made so far, is there a moment or initiative that really stands out to you as a turning point or major moment for growth at Wonder?

Honestly, I don't think there's one singular moment. There have absolutely been milestones-the 100th store opening, the rebrand, the Spyce acquisition-but I think the bigger story is all the little things happening every single day across the company. It's the constant execution, iteration, optimization, and teamwork that collectively move the business forward.

If you could have any other job at Wonder for a day, what would it be and why?

I'd want John Li's job, Chief Culinary Officer. First of all, he gets to eat incredible food most days, which sounds amazing. But more than that, I love the creativity of the culinary side of the business and the physicality of actually creating something for people to enjoy. There's also a really strategic element to it-creating dishes customers love and then constantly iterating and improving when something isn't working.