Big Lots - Women In Retail 2022

THE ASSERTIVE & COURAGEOUS LEADER

Emily Taylor has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Merchandising Officer since September 2020. She joined Dollar General in 1998 and held roles of increasing responsibility in investor relations, financial planning and analysis, merchandise planning, pricing and merchandising operations prior to her promotion to Vice President, Pricing & Merchandise Data Optimization in March 2011. She served as Vice President, Merchandising Operations (March 2012 to April 2014) and was subsequently promoted to Senior Vice President, General Merchandise Manager (April 2014 to September 2019), a position where she had a variety of category responsibilities, including Health & Beauty Care, Home, Seasonal and Apparel. She most recently served as Senior Vice President, Channel Innovation (September 2019 to September 2020), where she helped lead the launch of Dollar General's newest format store, pOpshelf.

Emily Taylor

EVP / Chief Merchandising Officer, Dollar General

March 2022

Emily Taylor

Melissa Wong, CEO

COVER STORY

Deborah Hall Lefevre

EVP, Alimentation Couche-Tard

Erica Fortune

VP eCommerce, Big Lots

07/05/2024 19:55:44

THE ASSERTIVE & COURAGEOUS LEADER

Erica is the Senior Vice President, eCommerce, at Big Lots, where she oversees the teams responsible for the company’s eCommerce operations, strategy, and innovation as well as the business’s customer care function.

In her role, Erica’s leadership has developed Big Lots’ strategic eCommerce expansion including the introduction of buy online, pick up in store and other key omni-channel growth capabilities like curbside pickup and same day deliver.

Before joining Big Lots, Erica developed and lead eCommerce and Merchandising in roles at Express, The Limited, Bath and Body Works, and Abercrombie & Fitch. Erica holds a Bachelor of Science in fashion merchandising from Kent State University.

Erica Fortune

Senior Vice President, eCommerce, Big Lots

March 2022

Erica Fortune

Melissa Wong, CEO

COVER STORY

Emily Taylor

EVP, Dollar General

Esther Castelo

Group Vice President, H-E-B

07/05/2024 19:55:44

The Trustworthy Leader

Change leadership, the power of effective communication, empathy, and relationships—four key learnings that changed the game for me as a leader at H-E-B.

From scanning turkeys to building the next wave of retail, Esther Castelo has had an incredible 29-year journey at H-E-B--from part-time cashier to Group Vice President of eCommerce eStore/Retail Operations.

Just a few days before Thanksgiving of 1993, Esther started working as a front-end checker at the San Antonio Marketplace store. Encouraged by her manager, Esther enrolled herself into a training program (H-E_B's School of Retail Management) to develop skills in H‑E‑B store operations. On completion of the program, Esther became Service Director. After couple of years she stepped into the role of Manager of Grocery department.

When H-E-B was opening a new store in Fredericksburg, opportunity opened up for Esther to serve as Assistant Store Director. After a two-year run in Fredericksburg, she returned to San Antonio as a Top Store Leader.

She then went on to open two other stores, trained other leaders before being roped into a productivity project on the corporate side and was instrumental in starting Continuous Improvement & Design (CID) department, which looked into H-E-B's processes from end-to-end to find out how to make them more streamlined and efficient.

Having spent several years at various stores, Esther had understood the power of relationships at the store level, but she had never invested in the relationships at the corporate level. On one of the projects she was working on, she had to get everyone on board. "It was quite challenging," she describes. "I had to quickly learn about change leadership, the power of effective communication, empathy, and relationships—four key learnings that changed the game for me as a leader at H-E-B."

After eight years on the Continuous Improvement & Design team, she went back to store operations as a Director of Retail Operations in Houston in 2016. The very next year she was called back to the headquarters to run the Store Operations side of H-E-B Digital. "It has been the most rewarding and most challenging job and this role is stretching me and so many others in ways we just could not have imagined. I guess that's why this one is called a 'digital transformation.'" notes Esther.

"The biggest challenge for us right now is that we are learning while we are also working to win. There is no time to slow down and we have to build a business in a space that we haven't spent a century in. We have experts in tech, experts in store operations, experts in delivery, and experts in product development—the challenge is sharing that expertise across all areas of a very complex business to bring the absolute best experience to our customers," said Esther in 2019 during an interview for internal newsletter with H-E-B Careers.

Today, Esther's team drives nearly 200 H-E-B eStores, which is eCommerce online business. Amidst the pandemic, Esther oversaw the H-E-B is rolling out a number of automated micro-fulfillment centers to support the chain’s curbside pickup and delivery business. Her team actively manages nearly 14000 partners in the Curbside and Delivery departments.