Julie Thurlow, whose career began by accident, is making waves at Reading Cooperative Bank

Boston Globe

17-02-2025

Now she has found a way to fill it, by merging with a smaller bank between those areas,
Wakefield Co-operative Bank
. The depositors of Reading Cooperative approved the merger last week, following a similar vote at the smaller bank. The deal is slated to close this spring, and will bring Reading Cooperative into Wakefield, Melrose, and Lynnfield. Wakefield chief executive
Jeff Worth
will join as president, and Reading Cooperative will have $1.2 billion in assets across 14 branches.
With a few other midsized banks north of Boston getting swallowed up, Thurlow said, her team is in a good position to take advantage of the market disruption.
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Even before these deals, Thurlow had become one of the most prominent women in the Massachusetts banking scene. Her career began by accident: She graduated college in the 1980s with a music degree, but school music budgets were being cut, and a career as a performer seemed out of the question. So she took a low-level job at a community bank in Winchendon and fell in love with it almost immediately. She then went to work for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and helped manage its oversight of several local bank failures in the early 1990s, before returning to the private sector.
One reason she's stayed at Reading Cooperative for so long: She has had freedom to try new innovations, such as starting to offer Venmo money transfer services on its mobile app in 2022, and becoming one of the state's largest writers of Paycheck Protection Program loans, early in the pandemic. The mutual ownership structure helps, without the quarterly earnings pressure and bottom-line focus of a publicly traded holding company.
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'I didn't have to leave to have an opportunity to experience new things,' Thurlow said. 'The beauty of mutual [ownership is] we can decide what we want to invest in without having to report to shareholders.'
Always be diversifying
SharkNinja
could soon be coming to a supermarket near you.
During an earnings call on Thursday, chief executive
Mark Barrocas
said the consumer products company is broadening its presence in sporting goods stores, such as with its portable grills and coolers. Some products, such as its slushie-maker and its cutlery, will show up in grocery stores, too. This follows a big push into beauty chains, particularly with the launch of CryoGlow, an antiaging face mask that sells for $350 — a new product that could account for $100 million in revenue this year.
This is good news for the Needham headquarters, where SharkNinja's 1,100-person workforce keeps growing. A spokeswoman said SharkNinja has nearly 80 open positions to fill there, most of them new.
The company has come a long way from the days when its primary focus was on Shark vacuums and Ninja blenders. Just last week, it launched a soft-serve ice cream maker, called the Creami Swirl, also with a list price of $350. Barrocas expects revenue to grow by at least 10 percent this year, a slowdown from the 30-plus percent increase reported in 2024, when the company generated $5.5 billion in sales. But the pace of innovation won't slow: The company is launching 25 new products in 2025, a similar amount to last year.
'We have 1,200 engineers around the world. We're constantly developing products across 36 different product categories,' Barrocas said in an interview. 'That's the secret sauce of SharkNinja.'
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Rolling the dice on sports bets
Did
Wynn Resorts
make the right call with sports betting at its
Encore Boston Harbor
casino?
It didn't quite work out as planned, as Encore president
Jenny Holaday
explained during a wide-ranging discussion with
Arun Upneja
,
Boston University
's dean of hospitality administration, at
Responding to an audience member's question, Holaday conceded that Wynn executives thought sports betting would be more lucrative. Massachusetts lawmakers allowed casinos to offer sports bets on their premises
DraftKings
and the like. Wynn converted its 'Buffet' restaurant to a sports bar after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and that area
'We thought that 95 percent of sports betting would be done on the phone, and that 5 percent would be in person,' Holaday said. 'And we were wrong. Ninety-nine percent of it is done on the phone. So . . . we thought we would make more money than we have. We spent $28 million turning our Buffet into one of the coolest-looking sportsbooks. . . . Have any of you been there?'
Holaday didn't seem surprised by the muted reaction to that question.
'It's really impressive [but] that thing is never going to ROIC, ever,' Holaday said, using the abbreviation for 'return on invested capital.' 'It's a great place to watch the Super Bowl, March Madness, a big event. But it is not what we thought it would be because, as I like to say, you can't compete with the couch.'
Upneja asked how she persuades her 3,300-person team to provide a 'five-star' experience. Holaday attributed it to the employees' dedication, their pride in the building where they work, and the camaraderie they developed in the pandemic. (Staffing at the casino, which opened in 2019, still is short of its prepandemic level of nearly 6,000 people.)
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Upneja also asked: How close are flicks like 'Casino Royale' to real life?
'It's just a very high-energy, intense, really really fun business, but it's not like you see in the movies,' Holaday said.
Upneja, smiling, acted disappointed.
'Despite what you said, I still want to protect that image of that glitz and the glamour of James Bond,' he told Holaday. 'Next time I enter, that's kind of . . . what I'll be looking for.'
To which she responded: 'Duly noted.'
Berkshire, Pentera snag Super Bowl slots
Instead of rooting for quarterbacks
Patrick Mahomes
or
Jalen Hurts
on Super Bowl Sunday, some Greater Boston workers cheered on a
Celtics
star,
Derrick White
. Others applauded a CGI goat with computer hacking skills.
Every year, a few slots are made available for ad slots in regional markets during the Super Bowl broadcast. These coveted slots cost nowhere near the $8 million price for a nationwide ad.
This time,
Berkshire Bank
jumped at a regional slot during the game's third quarter, to highlight its Berkshire One digital suite of products — and its new agreement with White. Meanwhile, cybersecurity firm Pentera unveiled Gary, the talking goat, walking through a standard corporate scene boasting about how he finds and fixes 'cyber exposures.' Or make that a talking GOAT, as in 'Greatest of All Time, in cybersecurity, not sports.
Pentera
even produced an online guidebook for IT pros, with quirky drawings of Gary at work. The company was started in Israel, opened a headquarters in Burlington a few years ago, and is building its name recognition here. The ad, 'Scapegoat to Cyber GOAT,' aired in the half-hour before kickoff on Boston's Fox affiliate,
WFXT
.
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'We couldn't hire a Tom Cruise or a Matthew McConaughey,' said
Aviv Cohen
, chief marketing officer at Pentera. 'We didn't want to do babies or cats.'
So a Cyber GOAT it is. Much of the work was handled by Pentera's marketing team, with a script and co-direction by a Florida freelancer,
Aron Fried
, and digital effects from an Israeli firm,
Shortcut Playground
.
Berkshire Bank also used some digital effects, though they're not as obvious: White stood in his Berkshire One uniform, expressing surprise at Berkshire One's numerous benefits on what appeared to be a basketball court, but was really a green screen shot in a Newton studio.
White signed on with the bank last June, in an agreement that lasts until the end of the year. By that time, Berkshire will actually have a new name: The bank is merging with
Brookline Bank
, and the two banks plan to announce a new brand for the combined institution sometime in the second half of the year. In the meantime, marketing director Mark Pedrotti said, 'we'll have a lot more to come with Derrick in the next six or seven months.'
Jon Chesto can be reached at