About the Founder

Christy Kettering didn't know she was related to Charles F. Kettering — inventor of the automobile self-starter, holder of 140 patents, and pioneer of point-of-sale systems at National Cash Register — until 2019, when her estranged father told her in one of their last conversations before his death in 2020.

What shocked her was the parallel. Charles revolutionized retail and payment systems in the early 1900s. Christy had unknowingly spent 20 years building enterprise technology for retail and eCommerce — the exact work her famous ancestor had done a century earlier.

Nature versus nurture? She still doesn't know. But she knows this: Ketterings solve impossible problems.

Christy's career began at Liberty Mutual, where as a temp employee she was handed a stack of folders and asked to troubleshoot why workers' compensation premiums weren't calculating correctly. With just fifteen minutes of training, she identified the logic errors — launching her career as a lead Ratabase analyst writing the formulas behind Liberty Mutual's national Workers' Comp systems.

She went on to build enterprise systems for VF Corporation (Timberland, The North Face, Vans), Hitachi Vantara in Silicon Valley, and luxury fashion conglomerate Capri Holdings (Michael Kors, Versace, Jimmy Choo). Most recently, she served as a strategic consultant managing data for Capri's proposed $8.5 billion acquisition by Tapestry and designing a $90 million IT investment strategy.

But before all that — while pursuing her MBA in Business Management — Christy co-owned and operated The Blue Claw restaurant on Portsmouth's waterfront with her late brother Ben Harris. They worked 80-hour weeks trying to solve staffing through phone trees and whoever they could reach through their personal networks. When you can't staff for a week, customers move on. The business didn't fail. The staffing system did.

Ben died in a 2012 brewery accident that led to new workplace safety regulations. Her father died in 2020. Swipe-A-Shift honors both of them.

After leaving Capri in 2025, Christy returned to Portsmouth to build what she and Ben needed at The Blue Claw: a staffing system that actually works for small businesses.

Charles F. Kettering once said: "My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there."

"Restaurant workers deserve better systems. I'm building what Ben and I needed."
— Christy Kettering, Founder