The Origin Story
An operator who lived inside the problem.A systems thinker who saw what was missing.CirqTerra is the answer we built.
CirqTerra grew out of a conversation between two friends. When Erika Carter, founder of Ambit Attic, brought Annette Brown in to think through how to scale what Ambit was building, Annette saw the infrastructure problem underneath it. Together they realized the solution wasn't just for Ambit. It was for every business like it.
Annette is the co-founder of CirqTerra and the founder of Uplift Consulting, a practice she built to bridge innovation, strategic partnerships, and community voice for nonprofits and social impact organizations. At Delta Consulting Group she led the firm’s rebrand and messaging strategy, and helped shape the holistic business structure it uses to serve social impact organizations working to balance their data, their systems, and their people. Annette also manages development and individual giving for a local nonprofit that provides free legal services to low-income seniors.
Long before CirqTerra, she spent an extended period in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, an experience that shaped how she thinks about systems, interconnection, and the kind of patience that produces genuine clarity. Each summer, she and her family live in the Sierra Nevada mountains. From that ridge she has watched wildfire smoke blur skies that were once clear, and felt the forest absorb losses that compound quietly and irreversibly. The urgency she brings to this work is not theoretical.
Erika brings more than 20 years of e-commerce, merchandising, and category leadership to CirqTerra, with a track record built at some of the most demanding consumer brands in the world. At Nike, she drove $122M in revenue managing over half of kids' footwear volume and more than doubling it year over year, while building the Nike Direct Concepts team from scratch, a cross-category initiative she identified, proposed, and built without a roadmap.
Before Nike, she spent a decade at Zappos building the kids' performance footwear category into a leading online destination, developing and mentoring merchant teams, and mastering the intersection of data, consumer behavior, and brand experience. Her background spans omnichannel strategy, DTC execution, product development, vendor negotiation, forecasting, and the kind of P&L ownership that turns vision into measurable growth.
She is also the founder of Ambit Attic, a sustainable fashion and home goods e-commerce business and the first enrolled partner in the CirqTerra network. Building Ambit gave her direct experience with the limitations of what a single mission-aligned store can accomplish alone. That realization brought her to CirqTerra. She doesn't come to circular commerce as an idealist. She comes as someone who has built a business around trying to solve the problem and now has the infrastructure to actually change it.
Advisory Board
Member bios coming soon!
We Can't Build This Alone.
This is a big undertaking, and we're building the team to match. We're actively seeking a technical co-founder to lead engineering, alongside mission-aligned operators, advisors, and brand and retail partners who see what we see. If that's you, the Get Involved page is where our tracks meet.