This is a unique dynamic in the industry. Nike caused a stir in early 2022 when it said it would reduce business with Foot Locker, among other partners. (Ulta’s currently has about 32 million members.) Our e-commerce needs to be better and have less friction, whether you’re shopping on the app or the website, and we need better inventory visibility. We also need to develop our loyalty program, which has 500,000 members. So we are about to start investing in a multiyear road map to modernize our tech infrastructure. So what was Foot Locker not doing adequately before your arrival? I love that a segment of our customers is sneakerheads. We just need to unlock this idea for people that Foot Locker is a place to meet all their needs. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been a runner all my adult life. Since I already understood retail companies with multiple brands, my approach has focused more on getting to know our brand partners. I’m still learning, and I will be a student forever because there’s so much innovation and newness in sneakers. How did you learn about this new-to-you industry and how to be that better partner? Still, running shoes are very different from hair products and lip balm. It is time to really modernize and reinvigorate the brand and be an even better partner for our brand partners. Foot Locker is also a more complex business than Ulta there are multiple banners, and it’s global. There are tailwinds for sneakers, like mass casualization, fashion, and fitness. They’re an $80 billion industry just in North America. Another similarity is that sneakers, like beauty, are a great growth category. In 2013, the business was performing well, but we needed to go through an overhaul process to help Ulta hit its potential. Was retirement not for you?įoot Locker might not be the most obvious place for me to show up, but there are many parallels between the sneaker and beauty categories. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.įortune: Not even a year into retirement, you land the top job at Foot Locker. (Foot Locker’s namesake corporate parent also owns and operates the Kids Foot Locker, Champs Sports, WSS, and Atmos chains.)ĭillon, a brand-building guru and marketing data expert whose successes at Ulta include getting Estée Lauder to sell its luxury products at a strip-mall retailer, has called 2023 a “reset year.” She told investors in March that Foot Locker has “reestablished joint planning, as well as data and insight sharing” with Nike. She was hired in large part to repair Foot Locker’s crucial relationship with Nike, which generated 65% of Foot Locker sales last year but which in 2022 said it would reduce its presence at the shoe store over time. Much as she did at Ulta, which was weak in e-commerce and had too much product overlap with competitors when she took the reins in 2013, Dillon has set about differentiating Foot Locker from sports footwear rivals and improving its digital business. Poppe ( CMS Energy and PG&E) and Meg Whitman (Hewlett Packard and eBay). In taking another CEO role, Dillon became the third woman to ever run two Fortune 500 companies, after Patricia K. “I didn’t realize how much I would miss having one big thing to focus on and how much I would miss leading a retail company,” Dillon told Fortune in a March interview at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. Instead, Dillon, unable to resist the challenge of restoring an illustrious company’s luster and still feeling too energetic for a slower-paced life, accepted the CEO job at Foot Locker last year, a retailer that, while not broken, has been underperforming for years.
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