The Set Up

In 2021, Saks spun off its e-commerce business into a standalone company with a bold vision to build a modern, tech-driven retail engine that could carry the brand’s standard for the next 150 years. To realize that vision, Saks brought in a new slate of technology leaders to build and scale in-house development capabilities.

The task was immense: separate and assume ownership of all technology platforms from the parent company, build four new development groups from the ground up, and drive revenue growth in support of an aggressive IPO target for the following year.

My Role

SVP, Customer Experience (Product)
I was responsible for building the organization that owned the full customer journey on site/app, and store-connected experiences. This included discovery, personalization, checkout, payments, and post-purchase engagement. My remit combined vision, product strategy, and execution, while collaborating closely with peer SVPs across Marketing, Fulfillment, Customer Service, and IT/Store Technology to incorporate new capabilities developed by their teams into the shopping experience.

The Work

1. Building a New Organization from Scratch: With only a small “seed” team transferred from the parent company, my first priority was establishing the recruiting and hiring infrastructure needed to attract top-tier talent. I partnered with leading recruiters and sourced world-class candidates from companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn, building an integrated organization that included:

• Product Management (8)

• UX Design (5)

• User Research (3)

• Engineering (60)

• ML/AI (7)

• Site Operations (8)

• Contractors (10)

2. Separation

As part of the spin-off, my team had six months to take complete ownership of the e-commerce stack, DevOps, and SiteOps from the parent company’s centralized technology group within the first 6 months. This put the deadline just before the major holiday shopping season.

3. Stabilizing the Present and Driving Growth

When I arrived, Saks.com had just completed a two-year migration to a rigid, monolithic platform plagued by latency issues, bugs, and technical debt. Our immediate focus was to stabilize the migrated site, resolving critical defects, improving performance, and adding missing baseline commerce features.

In parallel, I implemented a structured intake and prioritization process to integrate initiatives from other tech groups and marketing into a cohesive customer journey.

This dual-track approach produced measurable results, delivering immediate experience improvements and enabling Saks to exceed its aggressive growth targets ahead of IPO readiness.

4. Building the Future

The larger mission was to reimagine what a luxury shopping experience could be online, differentiating Saks not only from other retailers but from emerging modes of discovery on social media and AI-driven commerce.

To shape this vision, we conducted in-depth research (online and in-store surveys, more than 50 qualitative “shop-along” studies), and laid out a unified metrics framework). We also implemented Saks’ inaugural A/B-testing platform and experimentation process.

At the platform level, we began developing a modern, headless microservices based architecture that decoupled the front-end experience from the e-commerce platform. This gave us the flexibility to build custom web, mobile, and omni-channel applications, enabling faster iteration and innovation.

Impact

• Built a world-class product and engineering organization from scratch.

• Delivered 500 + site and app improvements in the first 18 months.

• Increased conversion by 120 % driving 2X revenue increase in two years.

• Improved known-customer vs. anonymous conversion by 80%.

• Launched a new site architecture that enabled rapid release cycles and development of new front end experiences.

• Established Saks’ first A/B-testing infrastructure and in-house user-research team.

• Defined the long-term product vision and foundational architecture the company continues to build on today.

Looking Back

My time at Saks was one of the most defining chapters of my career, bridging my entrepreneurial roots with large-scale executive leadership. It was my first senior role inside a multi-billion-dollar organization, combining product vision with operational transformation at enterprise scale.

Together with an extraordinary team, we laid the architectural and product foundations that continue to shape Saks’ digital future. I chose to move on in 2023 once the core vision and groundwork were in place, leaving behind a strong base for the next phase of iteration and growth.

The New Saks Experience

Our vision for the future of Saks re-imagined the online shopping as a complete experience that combined content based discovery, curated collections, holistic personalization, loyalty, interactive browsing, and social dynamics. The goal of these advancements was to make Saks a complete destination where customers didn’t just come to transact, but to explore, get inspired, and be entertained.

Content Driven Shopping: A rich, interactive, content based experience featuring shoppable editorials, photo spreads, videos, quizzes, and polls.

Brand Pages: We partnered with major luxury brands to create elegant brand home pages, giving them control to curate featured products, collections, and tell their story inside of the Saks experience while adhering to the overall site aesthetic.