Brightpearl, a provider of cloud-based business management software, today announces the addition of two key executives to its leadership team. The company which is backed by Doug Richard, one of the stars of the UK version of the Dragon’s Den TV show, has experienced strong growth in the last 12 months and is looking to build for the future. The drive to raise brand awareness and lead generation will accelerate with the appointments of Harriet Fletcher from Rackspace as Marketing Director, UK and James Scott, formerly MD of ChannelAdvisor in EMEA, as a senior consultant on the company’s ecommerce strategy.

Harriet Fletcher joins from Rackspace where she was Head of Online Marketing and Lead Acquisition, driving significant lead and revenue growth across the EMEA region. Her in-depth knowledge of the European small business market will play a key role in supporting Brightpearl’s sales strategy. Prior to Rackspace, Harriet worked for Adax and Sun Microsystems. She has 13 years’ experience marketing IT to small businesses.

Salman Malik, Brightpearl CEO says: “We’re absolutely thrilled to have Harriet and James on board – Harriet is a proven, talented marketer, with an in-depth understanding of small businesses and their challenges and James brings invaluable experience in multi-channel ecommerce to our product team. We’re dedicated to hiring the best talent at Brightpearl and we’re really pleased that we’ve attracted executives of Harriet and James’ calibre.”

Harriet says, “After a phenomenal time at Rackspace, I was picky about my next challenge and was looking for a company that offered something really unique. I was hugely impressed by Brightpearl with its vision and the cost and efficiency benefits being delivered to SMEs. I truly believe Brightpearl will transform business software.”

The new hires follow a number of other high profile appointments in the last year. Ben Halstead who was previously at BskyB and Lastminute.com joined as Brightpearl’s CTO in 2010 and Dave White joined in April of this year as the company’s Director of Services and Support having previously run all client account management for Symantec Cloud (formerly Message Labs) across EMEA.

Brightpearl headed up by CEO Salman Malik, a former executive at Siebel Systems, offers integrated software to run a multi-channel retail, wholesale or ecommerce business: including inventory management, an ecommerce platform, electronic point-of-sale (EPOS), accounting, and CRM. The Brightpearl solution was originally created by Chris Tanner and Andrew Mulvenna in 2006 whilst working together at Lush Longboards and becoming frustrated by the many disparate systems for accounting, inventory management and CRM. Customers today include Subway, Evolve Beauty and Oak Furniture.