Terry Lundgren spoke at length with BuzzFeed on these topics and more during last week’s Global Retailing Conference in Arizona. Here are excerpts from the conversation.
Carlo Allegri / Reuters
Macy's has been on a tear since Terry Lundgren took over as CEO a decade ago.
Under Lundgren, the company, which operates more than 800 namesake and Bloomingdale's stores, has increased sales to $27.9 billion in the year through Feb. 1, from $24.9 billion five years earlier, with profits also soaring. Macy's stock, which took a beating from the recession, has rallied 450% since 2008, four times the gain in the S&P 500. According to Lundgren, Macy's is now the 10th-biggest U.S. internet company by revenue after Netflix.
Lundgren believes part of Macy's success in an extremely competitive environment, especially for department stores, stems from its practice of giving district managers the power to stock merchandise they believe will appeal to local shoppers, making each location unique and quick to identify trends.
With more sales moving online and a new generation of consumers to appeal to, Lundgren is still working hard to keep Macy's ahead of the competition. The 62-year-old spoke with BuzzFeed about twentysomethings, the Affordable Care Act, the threat of Amazon, and more in a wide-ranging conversation at the Global Retailing Conference in Tucson, Ariz., on Friday. Here are excerpts from the interview:
You can talk about millennials and the changing character and diversity of the population in the same breath, because as the millennial population is the largest group that we've ever seen, so will be the minority population. It's young people who are the diverse population, so we think about what needs and desires this group will have that's going to be different from my age demographic, what we wanted.
It starts with the product, so we have to first understand that we have to tweak certain products a little bit or emphasize certain brands, or change the fits in some ways.
For an Asian consumer, and this is a generalization, but for many Asian consumers, it's a smaller, tighter fit. For the Latina consumer, it's different for the Mexican-American versus the Mexican national, for example, which is different from the Latin-American [consumer]. So you can't even put all that into one category. It's important to us to listen closely and add a diverse population to our consumer research groups and learn what it is you want from us and how we can provide those services.
Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters / Reuters
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