Hardie Grant appoints new board members
Janey Martino (left) and Shirley Chowdhary (right) with Hardie Grant's Sandy Grant (middle)
Hardie Grant has appointed Shirley Chowdhary and Janey Martino to its board.
The publishing, marketing and media group made the announcement on Friday morning.
Martino has set up and scaled businesses within the fintech, martech and media sectors over the past two decades. She currently serves as chief executive officer (CEO) of women’s wellness and fitness app Kic, and is the co-founder and chair of mental health not-for-profit Smiling Mind.
She also serves as an advisor for educational app Learna, coach-sourcing platform Match, and psycho-social risk monitoring system Refresh.
“I am thrilled to be part of the Hardie Grant Board using my personal experience spanning business, publishing and technology alongside my passion for igniting a deeper sense of creativity and innovation into a business like Hardie Grant – that has such significant cultural influence and growth potential,” Martino said in a media release.
Chowdhary’s career has seen her work in social impact, governance, finance and law, including acting as a corporate lawyer at the Tokyo and New York offices of international law firm Cleary Gottlieb, and Asia Pacific regional counsel at investment manager JP Morgan Investment Management.
Additionally, her resume contains several advisory, board and executive positions at cultural, education, for-purpose and financial services companies. In late 2016, Chowdhary was named the inaugural CEO of the Go Foundation — an organisation dedicated to empowering Indigenous youth through education.
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The foundation was founded by ex-IBM business process services leader James Gallichan, and former Sydney Swans players Michael O’Loughlin and Adam Goodes.
Chowdhary is currently a University of Sydney Senate fellow and pro-chancellor, on top of being a faculty member at the Australian Institute of Company Directors and chair of women-in-politics support initiative Women for Election.
“Australian publishing and media play a critical role in shaping how our stories, ideas and creative capability are understood globally,” Chowdhary said in the release.
“Hardie Grant has demonstrated that Australian companies can build distinctive cultural and commercial propositions that travel well beyond our shores, and I am thrilled to support the next phase of that ambition.”
Hardie Grant chair and founder, Sandy Grant, said: “As we move into a new era for the company, Janey and Shirley bring contemporary leadership, global perspective and deep experience that will help guide the business forward.
“Their insights will be invaluable in supporting CEO Nick Hardie-Grant and his leadership team.”
Martino and Chowdhary’s appointments come in the wake of “strong performance and strategic investment across Hardie Grant’s publishing and media businesses”.
Hardie Grant’s publishing division garnered revenue growth of 20% year-on-year. The result is attributed to the sales of children’s, lifestyle and non-fiction titles in the United States and Australia, and its 2024 acquisition of Sydney-based publisher Pantera Press.
On the company’s marketing and media side, Hardie Grant Media’s full-funnel offering expanded after the acquisition of creative communications agency Keep Left in August 2025.
The deal allowed the comms business to retain its staff, leadership and operational independence, while sitting within Hardie Grant Media’s agency portfolio, which includes PR agency Tide, creative studio Sherpa, content agency Heads and Tales, and digital marketing business Reload Media.
When speaking to Mumbrella on the acquisition last year, Keep Left’s founder and managing director, Caroline Catterall, described the business move as a long-term strategy, not an exit plan.
“We’re in it for the long term, so this isn’t an exit strategy,” Catterall said at the time.
“It’s funny when you go through something like this, people think, ‘oh, what are you gonna do next?’ And it’s ‘I’m gonna work for Hardie Grant Media’. That’s the plan, that’s the intention.
“So this is not an exit strategy on our behalf.”
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