Nov 21, 2019

TrueBlue

Willis

Lynch

Quinn

Owen

Staffing Industry Analysts named four executives at TrueBlue companies to its Global Power 150 Women in Staffing list. They are: Taryn Owen, president of TrueBlue's PeopleScout; Jill Quinn, president of Centerline Drivers; Loree Lynch, senior vice president of operations for Staff Management SMX; and Kristy Willis, chief sales officer for PeopleReady. Tacoma-based TrueBlue operates several companies that provide workforce solutions. TrueBlue recently announced that Owen will become president of PeopleReady on Dec. 30.

Tineco

Tineco, a maker of smart cordless vacuums, opened its first U.S. office in Seattle. Todd Manegold, general manager of North America, heads up the office. Manegold is a seasoned executive in smart home and consumer electronics. Tineco is part of the Ecovacs Robotics Group, a Chinese maker of home service robots.

Amazon

Seattle-based Amazon plans to open its second Mississippi fulfillment center, in DeSoto County. The center will top 1 million square feet and create 500 full-time jobs starting at $15 an hour. Workers will pick, pack and ship large items, such as sports equipment, patio furniture and bicycles. Hillwood Investment Properties is the project's developer.

Smart Foodservice

Smart Foodservice Warehouse Stores on Saturday will open a 20,000-square-foot store at 1560 N. Hickory Ave. in Meridian, its sixth store in Idaho. Portland-based Smart Foodservice is a chain of 70 warehouse-format stores in the western U.S. catering to the food service industry. It used to be called Cash & Carry.

Nov 20, 2019

Nike

Duckett

In Beaverton, Oregon, Nike appointed Thasunda Brown Duckett to its board. Duckett is CEO of Chase Consumer Banking, a division of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Prior to that, she was CEO of Chase Auto Finance and was a director of emerging markets at Fannie Mae.

PacStar

Miller

Pacific Star Communications CEO Peggy Miller won the Executive of the Year award in the 16th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business, held last week in New York City. Miller won in the Business Products (11-2,500 employees) category. Portland-based PacStar develops and supplies communications solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Qumulo

Michael Cornwell is the new chief technology officer at Qumulo, a Seattle-based provider of hybrid cloud storage. Cornwell was general manager of storage technologies for Microsoft's Azure Infrastructure. Prior to that, he was a founding engineer at Pure Storage, developing the company's first all-flash hardware platform.

Picnic

Seattle-based restaurant tech startup Picnic added former Amazon and Microsoft hardware leader Kennard Nielsen as vice president of engineering. Nielsen led development of the first four Kindle Fire tablets for Amazon, Xbox Kinect for Microsoft and FuelBand for Nike. He is a registered professional engineer who holds seven patents. Picnic also said it raised $5 million in a seed funding round by Creative Ventures, with investors Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital. That capital will support product development, staffing and marketing. The company makes a robot that assembles pizzas.

T-Mobile

Bellevue-based T-Mobile plans to open a customer experience center in New York's Nassau County once its merger with Sprint is completed. It will be the fourth of five planned centers, joining Overland Park, Kansas; Rochester, New York; and Kingsburg, California. The fifth location hasn't been announced yet. The Nassau County center is expected to create up to 1,000 jobs. T-Mobile says it will use project labor agreements for construction of both New York centers.