Corporate Governance

Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) is launching a wide-ranging corporate growth and efficiency initiative, with omnichannel technology at the center.  Building on its purchase of Saks Inc. in 2013, HBC seeks to deliver an enhanced omnichannel customer experience, accelerate financial performance and drive future success.

Academy Sports and Outdoors named former Meijer president James Kevin Symancyk to the role of president and CEO in a move that suggests the retailers private equity owners could be eyeing a public stock offering.

Symancyk, 43, will assume his new responsibilities on Nov. 2, when current president and CEO Rodney Faldyn steps down after 10 years with the operator of more than 200 large format, full line sporting goods stores.

The online giant is launching an Uber-like program, called Flex, that uses on-demand independent contractors to deliver Amazon packages.  The service is now available only in Seattle (and only to members of Amazon’s Prime Now same-day delivery service), but the company  expects to  roll it out  to other cities where Prime Now is offered, including Manhattan, Baltimore, Miami, Dallas, and Chicago.

Walmart has extended its grocery pick up service to eight additional markets and is alluding to the possibility of a more significant roll out in the months ahead.

Jill Stanton was named interim president of Old Navy after the top executive at Gap Inc.’s fastest growing division left the company to become CEO of Ralph Lauren.

Nordstrom plans to relocate its Nordstrom Rack store from 280 Metro Center to the redeveloped Serramonte Center in Daly City, California.

The approximately 40,000-sq.ft. store is scheduled to open in fall 2017. The redeveloped property is owned by Equity One.

Nordstrom will join fellow anchors Target, JC Penney, Macy's and Dick's Sporting Goods. The new location is just across Highway 280 from the current Nordstrom Rack.

Whole Foods Market says it is slashing more than 1% of its workforce in an effort to lower prices for its customers and invest in technology upgrades.

The grocery chainsaysit will cut about 1,500 jobs, or 1.6% of its workforce, over the next eight weeks. The company says many of the reductions will come through attrition.

Proponents of the motto “image is everything” will be pleased with a new partnership eBay Inc. is launching.

The online retail platform is teaming up with visual commerce platform Curalate to give publishers the ability to drive traffic and revenue from images sourced from Instagram. 

The partnership offers Curalate Like2Buy, which allows users to directly click to purchases from Instagram images, to more than 100,000 publishers in the eBay Enterprise Affiliate Network.