This holiday season, as you browse the aisles of your local bar Walmartyou might come across a five-foot tall Nutcracker ornament. At Sam’s Club, the glint of a lab-grown diamond might catch your eye. And abroad, wasabi macadamia nuts can be found in your shopping cart.
These products are just three small examples of the bets being made by top retailers and purchasing executives in Walmart Inc.’s major divisions. to win the extremely competitive holiday season. Of course, these items didn’t land on the shelves randomly.
They and hundreds of thousands of other products on store shelves and online were selected, often at least a year in advance, by buying teams led by Latriece Watkins, chief merchandiser at Walmart US, the company’s largest division with 69% of its $650 billion in sales; Megan Crozier, chief merchandiser at Sam’s Club, and Andrea Albright, whose responsibilities include serving as executive vice president of purchasing, Walmart. The role puts her in charge of a worldwide team that works with suppliers and seeks new ones for the entire company. (Abroad, each market has its own main trader.)
“The master retailer is leading the personal shoppers of America,” says Watkins. There are 100,000 different individual items in a typical Walmart store (and countless more online), and Watkins’ teams work with retailers, influencers and a wealth of data to decide what will make it to store shelves and online. For the holiday season, the process starts a year in advance, including finding out how much more to order of an item that has proven popular and getting a feel for the latest trend to jump on. This is the case with those Nutcrackers, items so popular that they even exist Facebook groups to share tips on decorating them.
While a successful holiday season takes a whole village—including COOs to ensure efficient movement of items through the retailer’s system, CFOs to ensure sound cash management, and CTOs to ensure IT systems work together—the role of the chief retailer is especially important. After all, a retailer can’t make money if customers don’t like what’s being sold there. While consumers are giving up non-essential items (leading to weak sales in chains such as GoalMacy’s and Kohl’s), Walmart deftly outperformed those competitors this year. But to keep doing that, its traders have to make the right bets.
Personal buyers by power of attorney
So what exactly does a CMO (not to be confused with a Chief Marketing Officer) do? Of course, these managers do not choose everything. But they oversee large teams of working buyers and enable those salespeople, who are expected to be experts in their product category, to do their thing.
Sam’s Club’s Crozier cites as an example a general merchandise manager, or retail GMM, named Spencer who has bought roses for a warehouse retailer at nearly 600 locations over the past seven years. His whole job is to buy roses and know all the details about rose types, sources and so on. One of the common requests a few years ago among Sam’s customers, who need a membership to shop there, was for the roses to be more fragrant. Spencer has worked with seed producers for a number of years to meet these customer needs. “My job as a master trader is to create an environment where traders can really become experts and excel at their craft,” she says.
Crozier herself was a shopper at Walmart’s eponymous banner for much of her career, including a period focused on buying Apple iPods. (She was later relegated to the camera category, which made it difficult for her as Apple’s iPhone decimated camera sales.) She became a food buyer for Walmart, eventually landing at Sam’s Club.
Watkins started her career as a lawyer, but says she was one of those kids who kept ringing her stuffed toys at the toy cash register. It now also relies on the expertise of its customers. “I’m the head marketer and I have a lot of ideas about what customers should do,” she says. “But customers have a lot more ideas about how to bring products to life. Brands come to us, but our retailers also look at what customers want and the trends they see, and they are in the environment.” A CMO is similar to a conductor who makes his musicians shine in their specific instrument and makes the whole orchestra work together.
For Albright, whose team sources 300,000 types of items from suppliers in 120 countries, a successful retailer is one who is curious. “You have an eye for what’s going on around you and see those customer trends, and there’s also an element of understanding people’s hopes, dreams and problems,” she says.
Albright’s team, which serves all three Walmart divisions, sets out to find new and existing suppliers to meet the needs identified by retailers, and then the team vets and onboards those suppliers. For Albright, Walmart is a family affair: Her father worked for Walmart for decades (they were four years apart), and Albright has a framed photo of him with Walmart founder Sam Walton in her office.
Given the complexity of Walmart’s and Sam’s Club’s operations, most of what you see now in one of their stores (or, in Sam’s case, “clubs”) has been decided for a long time. But the retailer leaves itself little wiggle room to increase purchases when an item suddenly becomes popular.
Sam’s Club’s Crozier says lab-grown diamonds are one such trend. For several months, Crozier had her team come up with ways to improve Sam’s Club’s jewelry line for the holidays. The seller has a group of 50,000 members—a steroid focus group—consulted regularly for insight. The supply of lab-made diamonds, which are considered to have less impact on the environment, has been popping up all the time. Soon, Sam’s began selling diamonds online, and then in 100 of its clubs. “I like the idea of moving with speed, but it’s always calculated. We were able to do it here because the members had already given us their permission,” says Crozier.
For all three executives, there is reason to believe that their positions have a career growth trajectory: Costco Wholesale General Manager Ron Vachris is the former CMO, and he is leaving Michaels Kohl’s CEO and CEO-to-be (as well as Walmart alum) Ashley Buchanan, while Walmart Inc CEO Doug McMillon and Walmart US CEO John Furner were also senior retailers earlier in their careers.
