Johnnie Matthews

About Johnnie Matthews

Johnnie Matthews serves as Chief Marketing Officer of Home Brands, where he sets the marketing vision for the platform, oversees day-to-day lead generation, and leads a team of in-house marketers and contract partners. His work centers on results, accountability, and marketing that drives real franchisee return.Johnnie began his marketing career promoting DIY concerts in high school, which led to a decade spent as a touring musician and a development deal with Atlantic Records. Building a band required far more than creative output—it meant learning marketing, PR, budgeting, licensing, and legal firsthand, long before he ever worked in a formal marketing role.After his son was born, Johnnie took his first desk role contracting with the U.S. Army, leading development teams that built mobile applications supporting leadership and financial management schools. He later helped grow a branding agency, where he became deeply focused on SEO and performance marketing—and equally convinced that most marketing is inefficient and most agencies deserve skepticism.At Home Brands, Johnnie helped scale Crawlspace Medic from 8 to 25 locations by deploying an aggressive SEO strategy that increased site traffic more than 10× in under a year. He later co-founded Heritage Brands, providing marketing strategy and fractional leadership to organizations including the University of South Carolina, DHgate, FITS Socks, and the City of Columbia.In 2025, as Home Brands entered a new phase of growth, Johnnie returned to the organization full-time as Chief Marketing Officer. He exited Heritage Brands to focus exclusively on building a scalable, performance-driven marketing engine for the Home Brands platform. His strategic clarity, bias toward results, and insistence on a clear connection between marketing spend and franchisee return continue to set Home Brands marketing apart—built not on hype, but on outcomes.

Experience

1. Chief Marketing Officer

   Home Brands

   Jun 2024 — Present · Columbia, SC, US

Education

• Francis Marion University

  Business Administration and Management, General

  2006 — 2009

• freeCodeCamp

  Responsive Web Design Certifcation

  2017 — 2018