Danielle Koehler knows a thing or two about finding the right instrument for the job. As the Global Compliance & AI Governance Counsel at Fender (or, as Danielle puts it, Fender’s “Guitar Lawyer”), she’s charged with making Fender’s commitment to customer privacy a reality. And just as Fender’s customers wouldn’t perform on an out-of-tune guitar, Danielle wasn't willing to let Fender's privacy program run on tools that were out of key.
Her standards were high. For Danielle and expert legal professionals like her, privacy isn't a compliance checkbox. It's a core part of what Fender gives its customers. Finding a platform that could match that standard was the mission. Fender chose Osano as their partner in this mission, and the result is a privacy program that finally plays in harmony with the pace and complexity of a global consumer brand.
Fender is committed to customer privacy, but commitment alone doesn't scale. As a global brand with customers across retail and direct-to-consumer channels, Fender operates under a wide range of privacy laws, like the GDPR, CCPA, and a steadily growing list of US state regulations. Keeping pace with all of them isn't a once-a-quarter task. It's continuous.
The team was managing privacy workflows through manual processes and spreadsheets. Without a centralized source of truth, there was no consistent process for reviewing new initiatives and no reliable way to stay organized and proactive as global privacy laws expanded. For one person also covering product compliance and AI governance, that wasn't sustainable—especially for a brand that holds customer privacy to a high standard.
Fender needed a platform that could match the seriousness of their commitment.
Many enterprise solutions checked the boxes in terms of capabilities, but they came with significant technical overhead and steep learning curves—the kind that assume a large, dedicated technical team to operate them. That wasn't the right fit.
Osano offered the breadth of capability a global brand like Fender requires without demanding that a lean legal team become software experts to use it.
With Osano's consent management platform in place, Fender gained the structure and visibility needed to turn their privacy values into consistent, repeatable practice.
Danielle and the legal team were able to centralize cookie consent reviews and build compliance into new initiatives from the start—meaning projects could move forward faster because the guardrails were already in place. The team gained immediate visibility into their consent program across the business, making it easy to identify and prioritize areas of highest risk without wading through administrative work.
For one person already stretched across product compliance, data privacy, and AI governance, every hour spent managing consent manually was an hour taken from more strategic work. Osano gave that time back, and with it, the ability to get ahead of privacy challenges instead of just keeping up with them.
Before Osano, managing cookie consent across multiple storefronts meant coordinating manually and keeping up with regulatory changes independently—a recurring time sink with real risk of something falling through the cracks.
For a small legal team, that kind of operational drag has a real cost. Every hour spent troubleshooting banner configurations or chasing down regulatory updates was an hour pulled away from the strategic work that actually moves the business forward.Osano changed that equation.
That consistency changed how the team operates internally. With the consent layer already in place, evaluating new marketing and analytics initiatives became a fundamentally different conversation.
"It shifted our department from being reactive to being a strategic partner that finds ways to say 'yes' to new projects safely," said Danielle. “One example that comes to mind is the process of evaluating new analytics vendors for our direct-to-consumer sites. Having Osano already managing our consent layer meant we didn't have to rebuild that piece from scratch every time we assessed a new tool. The guardrails were already there, which let us focus the conversation on whether the vendor met our requirements rather than whether we could operationally support the change.”
For enterprise teams managing complex, multi-storefront environments, that shift is the difference between a privacy program that slows the business down and one that enables it to move faster. Osano is already changing how privacy conversations happen across the Fender. Stakeholders across the organization now have a clear framework to reference when new initiatives come to the table.
Privacy by design isn't an aspiration at Fender. It's how they operate.
Ready to make privacy a strategic advantage for your brand? Book a demo with Osano today