Walmart eCommerce
I served as a digital brand specialist, managing Walmart’s private label grocery business on Walmart.com. I worked with product developers, sourcing managers, and creative teams to make the best possible products available to our customers.
Prior to this role, I was a category specialist, overseeing the hair appliances business. I worked with my awesome supplier partners to broaden our assortment, develop customer-centric promotions, and improve the site experience for our customers. I was also responsible for site experience projects across my vertical, including competitive analysis, creative project management, and site audits.
The best store brands aren’t any good if you can’t buy them online. My job was to fix that.
Customers have come to expect high quality and (excuse the immediate pun) great value from Walmart’s private brands, including Great Value, Sam’s Choice, and Clear American. However, many of these brands were designed with brick & mortar sales as a primary goal.
During my time as a digital brand specialist, I led product development initiatives to bring these brands to Walmart.com, meeting customer demand and building a sustainable business. This item is one of my favorite examples: it brought the Clear American brand to Walmart.com for the first time in over a year and was an immediate success.
Once in a blue moon, there’s a product that goes viral seemingly at random. This hair dryer was my blue moon and it’s one of my proudest work moments so far. Even if I don’t have enough hair to use it.
While managing the hair appliances business as a category specialist for Walmart, I recognized the importance of the holiday shopping season both for my customers and for my business. Normally, these customers are in search of a good deal and aren’t super picky about the specific product.
The Revlon One Step was the exception to this rule, spiking right at the holiday shopping season in my business. I worked closely with the supplier to secure inventory and competitive pricing, as well as with my supply chain and marketing teams to make sure customers knew Walmart was the place to get that year’s must-have beauty item. Again, bummed I don’t have enough hair to use it because I know it’s an amazing product, but still super proud to have delivered it to our customers when they needed it.
Beauty customers wanted choice when shopping for hair appliances. My job was to give them the opportunity to choose… even if I couldn’t use the appliances myself.
When I came onto the hair appliances business, there was a large gap in the assortment I was offering to customers. Key brands were selling items on Amazon, Target, and in other major retailers, but didn’t want Walmart.com to carry the same offering.
I built trust with these brands, establishing relationships rooted in shared success and respect for transparency. This trust led to my vendor partners opening up their assortment catalogs and serving our customers with their best products. In under a year, I doubled the size of my major brands’ assortments and grew my business over 50%. What I was most proud of, though, was giving our customers more colors, more technologies, and more choices for their hair styling regimes.
Timeline:
Digital Brand Specialist: March 2020 - November 2020
Senior Category Specialist: August 2019 - March 2020
Category Specialist: August 2018 - August 2019
I worked out of Walmart’s awesome Hoboken, NJ office, which is where Jet.com was founded.