Marc Lore in the Jet.com office in Hoboken, N.J.
Marc Lore, the architect of Walmart Inc.’s digital ascent, responsible for accelerating growth by creating a seamless shopping experience across Walmart.com, stores and apps, will leave his role as president and CEO of Walmart U.S. e-commerce at the end of January.
The move comes nearly five years after the retail giant acquired Lore’s startup e-commerce site, Jet.com for $3.3 billion, in what was widely seen as a bid to tap his e-commerce expertise, as well as his insight into Amazon, where Lore had worked with Jeff Bezos earlier in his career. At the time, Walmart, like most retailers, was looking for a way to compete with Amazon’s massive product range, delivery speed and prowess, and compelling Prime package for loyal customers.
Lore will become a strategic advisor to Walmart through September, fulfilling a five-year obligation that began when the mass behemoth bought Jet.com. He’s believed to be in line for a payout of $150 million when his contractual obligations are fulfilled. His team will report to John Furner, CEO of Walmart U.S.
Like several other tech visionaries, Lore has his work cut out for him. He plans to build a city of the future, an endeavor that likely won’t violate any non-compete clause, and hey, it sounds cool. Described as a city with the vibrancy, diversity and culture of New York City, the efficiency, safety and innovation of Tokyo, and the sustainability, governance, and social services of Sweden, Lore is passionate about the project.
In a memo to employees today, Walmart chairman and CEO Doug McMillion said, “Marc’s leadership helped ensure we were positioned to respond to the demand driven by the pandemic this year. All of this progress is the result of good work from a lot of people, of course, but Marc’s expertise and aggressiveness have been game-changing. We have learned a lot from him. I have personally learned a lot from him.
“Marc led the redesign of Walmart.com,” McMillon added. “He made the choice to shift all of our resources to Walmart.com rather than the original plan for two brands [Walmart and Jet.com], because he became convinced of the potential of the Walmart brand.”
During Lore’s tenure, Walmart.com expanded its online assortment from around 10 million items to more than 80 million items, including adding thousands of new brands, expanded and transformed the e-commerce fulfillment network, and ramped up to same-day delivery on thousands of items and two-day delivery on millions of items, whereas only four years ago, the company didn’t even offer free two-day delivery.
Walmart’s e-commerce sales rose nearly 80% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2020, as it continued to be one of the retail industry’s biggest success stories and a bellwether of consumer shopping trends during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I’m really proud of what we were able to do for our customers – our rapid growth in online Grocery, the new app experience, and next-day delivery are a few that I’m most proud of on that front,” Lore said in an interview. “It’s also been really great to see what’s possible when we look three-to-five years out. I think in-home delivery is a great example of what we can accomplish when we think big and innovate. And, of course I’m proud of our associates and all they do, now more than ever. It was an honor to serve as the executive champion for Walmart’s PRIDE associate resource group.”
Walmart learned many things from Lore, and vice versa. “One of the most admirable traits of Walmart is everyone’s focus on the customer and how mission-driven they are,” he said. “I’m huge on the concept of being a missionary and Walmart has that nailed. For me personally, it was a real learning experience to work at Walmart’s scale.”
A year after Lore joined Walmart, he said in an interview that he felt empowered in his role. “Doug and the board have been very trusting of me and the team to move fast,” Lore said. “The only way you can move fast is if you feel empowered. There’s not a lot of red tape in between getting things done. It actually feels very much like a start-up. We’re running fast. It’s only been a year and l think just looking back that we’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit.”
“Marc’s tenure was marked by kind of a decentralization and more of a diffused model of leadership and operations to the point of extending to acquisitions and all of those tentacles,” said ” said Carol Spieckerman, president of Spieckerman Retail, noting that Walmart has been breaking through silos and consolidating operations to the point where there’s greater visibility between online and in-store.
“If we can’t build it, we don’t need it, was the DNA of Walmart in the past,” Spieckerman said, noting that the retailer had been more insular prior to Lore’s arrival. “Most retailers swing between buy, build or bridge. His departure marks the end of a very acquisitive era for Walmart. They can accomplish a lot more and have a lot more agility by pursuing a partnership model, particularly on the brand front.
“The more tentacles you extend, particularly from a brand perspective, the better,” Spieckerman added. “Every day there’s a new announcement from Walmart. They’re very much on a test and learn path. The Marc years were more about the buy equation and it now seems Walmart is leaning into bridge. More of its recent announcements have been about partnerships, which gives them the ability to flex in and out of partnerships or even use them as a trial run.”
Lore seemed to have wide latitude across Walmart to iterate and innovate, and had a major impact on the way the Bentonville, Arkansas-based behemoth viewed digital and competed with its rival, Amazon. Lore had an insider’s knowledge of how Amazon worked because he previously cofounded and operated Quidsi, a collection of online shopping sites best known for Diapers.com, which Amazon acquired for about $550 million in 2011. Lore worked at Amazon for a few years before leaving to launch Jet.com, and reportedly there was no love lost between him and Bezos, who subsequently closed Quisdi, saying it was unprofitable.
Walmart last year repositioned the Jet.com site. “Across most of the country, we saw we could get a much higher return on our marketing investments with Walmart.com, so we’ve dialed up our marketing spend there,” Lore said. “In specific large cities, [like New York], where Walmart has few or no stores, Jet has become hyper-focused on those urban customers. It added iconic local brands and brought in products from Apple
Other initiatives include leveraging Walmart’s stores for order pick up, and helping to orchestrate the acquisition of last mile solution firm Parcel. Store No. 8, a platform he created that incubates new technology, attracted well-known talent from other brands, including Jennifer Fleiss, the cofounder of Rent-the-Runway. Fleiss developed and ran a Beta test of Jetblack, a voice-enabled shopping service for well-off urban dwellers with children.
Lore helped to identify and direct a string of smaller acquisitions such as Shoebuy, Moosejaw, Modcloth, Elloquii and Bonobos. The brands were expensive and it at times Walmart seemed to be at pains to leverage and/or integrate them.
“They were buying digital native brands not just because of how buyable the brands themselves were,” said Spieckerman, “they were getting user bases and affinity groups that they pulled into the Walmart ecosystem and feeds into the larger e-commerce data pool that Walmart owns. It was groundbreaking.
“Moosejaw gave them instant access to lifestyle branding in important lifestyle categories like outdoors,” she said. “It allowed Walmart to have much more robust online lifestyle branding rather than being just an online marketplace crammed with categories and items, which is the perception of Amazon
The retailer in September launched Walmart+, a $98-a-year membership program featuring grocery delivery and other perks similar to Amazon Prime.
Spieckerman said, “some of that Amazon expertise and knowhow migrated to Walmart at a really critical time. It was such a synergistic play, that it would be unfair to judge the so-called success or failure of certain initiatives. Walmart has learned to fail fast. That’s been a cultural shift at Walmart, that goes beyond Marc.”
At first glance, McMillon and Lore seemed like an odd couple, the Walmart lifer who rose from a job as a summer associate in high school to become the retailer’s fifth CEO, and the New Jersey native and cum laude graduate, tech geek and entrepreneur.
The Bentonville, Arkansas culture never seemed to have rubbed off on Lore, who appeared at Walmart’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Fayetville, Arkansas, an annual orgy of associate and corporate pride and big name entertainment, in jeans while other executives wore suits.
Lore in a recent article on LinkedIn recalled the time he and McMillon were scheduled to appear together on CNBC’s Squawk Box shortly after the acquisition. “For the first time in a while I put on slacks and a dress shirt,” he said. “Doug showed up in jeans. We didn’t plan this sartorial role-reversal, but there was common messaging in our individual efforts. We wanted to reassure people that we got each other, that a Midwestern brick-and-mortar giant and a coastal digital upstart were compatible. The fate of any merger is as much about culture as the bottom line. And this was a good start.”
