Sittercity.com Names Melissa Underwood Director of Marketing & Public Relations
January 1, 2007FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Chicago, Ill.) - Chicago-based Sittercity.com, the Web's largest, most accessible database of babysitters and caregivers, has appointed Melissa Underwood to the position of Director of Marketing & Public Relations.
Underwood brings more the 15 years of experience in strategic marketing and communications to Sittercity, most recently at Cold Stone Creamery, where she served as Senior Director of Marketing. While at Cold Stone Creamery, she also led the Brand Management and Research & Development teams, overseeing the development and launch of all new Cold Stone product lines. Cold Stone Creamery is an international ice cream franchise with almost 1,400 stores domestically.
Prior to her work with Cold Stone Creamery, Underwood held executive positions at relationship management agency Intrasight as well as at advertising agencies Moses Anshell and Pearson Crahan Fletcher England. She holds an MBA from Arizona State University.
"Melissa is a key addition to the Sittercity team," said Sittercity founder and CEO Genevieve Thiers. "We're very impressed by her leadership, vision, creativity and ability to communicate with customers to build great brands and great companies. Our current customers will benefit from her insights as will the millions of parents who don't yet know about Sittercity, but are in desperate need of our services."
Underwood joins Sittercity.com just as the company has expanded to become a nationwide service, has added a corporate benefit program, and is preparing for several new and exciting product rollouts over the next year.
"I am so excited about joining the Sittercity team. Sittercity has been providing such a critical service in connecting parents with caregivers, and I look forward to broadening the reach of that connectivity to more people in more places," states Underwood. "With my experience in brand building and marketing, it's paramount to believe in the service you're representing. Sittercity makes that easy since I'm not only an employee, I'm also a customer!"
About Sittercity.com
Sittercity.com is the Web's leading parent-babysitter online matchmaking site and the inventor of online child care, dedicated to making the process of finding a caregiver fast, easy, safe and fun. With access to hundreds of thousands of sitters nationwide, parents can find a wealth of qualified caregivers in their area by using Sittercity's four-step screening process, which includes references, parent-to-parent feedback, personal interviews and background checks. Registration for sitters is free, and parents pay $7.99 per month for an annual membership, which gives them the unlimited ability to post jobs, and search, contact and hire sitters in their areas. A true pioneer in its field, Sittercity.com has been featured by hundreds of media outlets, from the Today Show to the Wall Street Journal. It received a Webby Worthy Award in 2005, won the Women's Business Development Center Rising Star Award in 2005 and won the U.S. Small Business Administration Champion Award in 2006 from President Bush. For more information, visit the company website at www.sittercity.com.