Walmart Inc.’s push to democratize America’s closets is coming to SoHo on Wednesday.
The discount retail giant will open a fashion pop-up at 210 Lafayette Street in the tony New York shopping district. The pop-up, which will be open until May 10, is the fourth time the retailer has opened a temporary shop in the city and the latest sign that Walmart is for real trading the apparel business for the fashion business — at its price, of course.
Denise Incandela, who joined Walmart in 2017 and has been executive vice president of fashion at the U.S. division for five years, told WWD that the company is “really stepping out” in new ways.
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“We’re offering cashmere at $45, and silk, for the first time ever. And leather shoes. These are all firsts for us,” said Incandela at a preview event for influencers and press. “The strategy is working and, as a result, we are accelerating the strategy and getting bolder.”
Incandela’s revamp of Walmart’s fashion has followed a three-part strategy focused on:
- Covering more of the shopper’s closet with the assortment. Incandela’s initial deep dive into the business found that 80 percent of the Walmart shoppers spending on fashion want goods that were above the discounter’s price range.
- Improving the shopping experience with remodels of 1,800 of the retailer’s roughly 4,000 stores so far. The updates put fashion front and center and showcase the styles better, for instance, adding mannequins for the first time. A 2.0 version of the remodel redesigns the space for footwear, jewelry and accessories.
- The last piece of the puzzle is a push to change the perception of Walmart and broaden its consumer reach, hence the SoHo pop-up. “Thank goodness we’re doing this in 2026 or 2025 versus 20 years ago, because we can leverage thousands, if not tens of thousands of influencers and creators and spread the message and borrow off their credibility to change perception,” Incandela said. “It’s a complete reinvention of Walmart’s fashion.”
It’s been a journey for Incandela, Walmart and the company’s customers.
“She was walking in, buying her underwear and socks from us, maybe denim and a T, and then she was walking out and shopping elsewhere,” Incandela said. “We have 145 million people through our stores and website every week. Why weren’t they buying their fashion? We were winning on price, but we weren’t winning on style and quality.”
To turn things around, Incandela set up a 150-person New York fashion office with designers, branding experts, fit technicians and more.
“All of this is being pulled off because of these new capabilities that frankly we didn’t have five years ago because we didn’t have the design teams, and they’re from the best brands in the country and the best design schools in the country and they all believe in our mission to democratize fashion,” Incandela said.
The team has upgraded, modernized or launched 15 private brands over the past five years — and they aren’t small tweaks or little resets.
Walmart has four brands that top $2 billion in annual sales and another two over $1 billion.
More additions are on the way.
“We’re hitting the accelerator on private brands, we’re hitting the accelerator with the national brands too,” Incandela said. “We’re bringing on new national brands all the time. That’s critically important to our strategy because we want our customer to choose us first, which means we have to have both. It’s always an ‘and’ strategy there.”
Walmart’s push in private brands, though, does keep the pressure on national brands selling through the mammoth retailer.
Incandela pointed to the company’s Avia active private brand, which she said is “on fire.”
“Now we’re going back to some of our other athletic national brands and saying, ‘OK, look at the fabrication, look at the technical, look at all of this, you guys have to take it up,” she said. “But with our scale, we can bring all of this at a price point that no one else could touch.”
The pop-up offers a very different take on Walmart’s fashion focus.
It’s stocked with the company’s elevated private label offering with the new cashmere and silk with wooden hangers and fixtures making the product the hero, the collab with “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and more.
And when Walmart focuses on fashion in a more intimate setting, it does well.
“We sell more per day in a pop-up with three brands than we do in a supercenter with 400 brands,” Incandela said.
Does that mean the world might see some mini Walmarts focused on fashion?
Incandela demurred.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” she said. “That has to go through a lot, but we’ll see if it makes sense.”
