Meet Our Team

Anita Brearton, Executive Chair

Anita (in middle), Executive Chair of the neighborhood.

A seasoned marketing executive with extensive technology marketing experience, Anita has served in executive and consultative roles for a broad range of successful early-stage, high growth technology companies including A123 Systems, Altruick, Airvana, Azuki Systems, and BTI Systems. Anita served as Vice President of corporate marketing at Sycamore Networks, where she took the company from its infancy through its IPO to become an established player in the Intelligent Optical Networking market. Prior to Sycamore, Ms. Brearton held senior marketing positions with Artel Video Systems, Cascade Communications and General DataComm.

Passionate about supporting women led enterprises, Anita is a Managing Director of Golden Seeds, an angel investment group that provides early stage and growth capital to women led businesses across all industry sectors. Her investments include FashionPlaytes, Carnegie Speech, SweetRiot Chocolate, Gracious Eloise, Honestly Now, Lark and Crimson Hexagon. Anita is also the founder of the Women’s Entrepreneurial Council in Boston, and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Simmons College. In addition to her work supporting female entrepreneurs, Anita serves on the board of the Angel Capital Association, the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, The Sunflower Initiative and the advisory boards of Altruik, Inc. and Connect2 Communications.

Sarah McIlroy, Founder/CEO

Sarah (on right) with best friend Julie on the first day of 1st grade.

Sarah McIlroy is the CEO and Founder of FashionPlaytes.com, an idea that grew out of her own positive experiences designing clothes with her mother, and in turn sharing those experiences with her daughters. Today, Sarah ensures that more than 5 million fashion combinations are made available to girls between 5 and 12 years old in a safe, empowering, and inspiring online environment.

Before starting FashionPlaytes, Sarah worked as a marketing and business development executive for gaming industry leaders like Atari, Hasbro, and Midway Amusement Games. In these roles, she initiated multi-faceted partnership programs with Apple, NASCAR, Yahoo, Pepsi, T-Mobile and other Fortune 500 companies. She has also worked in branding, product design and development, and merchandising strategies. Sarah was recently chosen as one of L’Oreal’s Top 5 Women in Digital 2012, an award that recognizes women leading groundbreaking technology-driven companies.

Jeanne Connon, Chief Marketing Officer

Jeanne Connon is a start-up veteran and proven marketing entrepreneur. She has been building groundbreaking, disruptive consumer and business brands for nearly 20 years, drawing on her passion for creating simply amazing customer experiences. She comes to FashionPlaytes on the heels of her role as Chief Marketing Officer at Daily Grommet where she led acquisition, community, content and brand development to help forge an innovative business model merging the power of video, ecommerce and product discovery.

Jeanne launched her career in Internet marketing as the leader of the founding creative/development team at Monster.com. She was also a core member of the team that launched Family Education Network(acquired by Pearson Education), managing all marketing initiatives as well as partnerships with such brands as AT&T, Yahoo, and AOL.

As a girl, Jeanne demonstrated an early flair for fashion, dress-up and drama, and now spends most of her free time attending her 10-year-old fashionista’s ad hoc runway shows and cheering her teens’ goals from the sidelines.

Theresa Fortier, VP of Merchandise

Theresa, age 8

A merchandise product development professional with over 20 years of experience in apparel and accessory design and manufacturing, Theresa has successfully integrated design and manufacturing with software systems for the apparel industry. Prior to joining FashionPlaytes, she held a wide range of management positions with Liz Claiborne, Inc. including Director of Design, Director of Manufacturing, and Team Leader of product development and production. During her tenure, Theresa helped implement apparel and accessory initiatives as well as software programs across the company’s Hong Kong, Shanghai, and South China offices. She has also held management positions with Crest Foam, Bennett & Company, LeBlanc Company, and other fashion companies.

Theresa has been involved in apparel since a young age and knew she wanted to be a Fashion Designer since she was 7 years old. In her spare time, she still designs and makes clothing for herself and her family at her in home design studio. She’s always been fascinated with how technology can improve the creative process and is excited to bring her practical design experience to social gaming.

Gary Pinkham, VP of Engineering

Gary, age 8

Gary brings over 27 years of software development experience to the role of VP of Engineering.  Over his career, he has worked in a variety of industries including health care, financial services and software.   Prior to joining FashionPlaytes, Gary served as Chief Architect for Exeter Group’s Health and Human Services solution - an innovative solution bringing modern technologies to the aid of those most in need.  Gary also served as lead architect for Kronos’ research and development arm, Kronos Labs. In this role, he led the design of next-generation Kronos products including the award-winning MobileScheduler and NextGenUI products. Outside of FashionPlaytes Gary spends his time chauffeuring his two daughters between ballet and hockey.