Meet the new CEO of Sam’s Club: Latriece Watkins.
As you’ll hear from my interview with Watkins on the January 15 episode of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies podcast, she is a Walmart veteran who began her career in the real estate division in 2006. Over the next two decades, she rose up through the ranks to become Walmart’s chief merchant in 2023. With responsibility for choosing the $500 billion worth of products Walmart sells every year, that made her one of the most powerful people in the retail industry.
In recent years, Watkins has made a deliberate attempt to woo higher-income consumers into stores by introducing higher-end brands, like Sonos and La Roche-Posay, as well as elevating its fashion, home, and food private labels. Her team’s product curation appears to be working: In recent quarters, Walmart has been gaining market share among households that make upwards of $100,000 a year.
Now Watkins has been tasked with running Walmart’s membership club, which generated $90.2 billion in net sales across its 600 stores in 2024—making up roughly 13% of Walmart’s total revenue. In many ways, her promotion makes sense, since Sam’s Club customers tend to be more affluent than those from Walmart. Watkins has proven she’s skilled at meeting the needs of these customers.
Watkins will aim to steal market share from Costco, the biggest player in the membership warehouse club industry, which generated $269.9 billion last year, an 8.1% increase over its 2024 sales. Part of Costco’s success has come from its private label, Kirkland, which drives roughly a third of its total revenue.
Watkins is skilled at developing successful private labels. It was under her leadership that Walmart launched Bettergoods, its first new private-label grocery brand in two decades. Every aspect of the brand—from its chic, colorful packaging to its focus on global flavors—was carefully designed to win over today’s consumers. And yet 90% of products in the line cost less than $5.
Sam’s Club has its own private label, Member’s Mark, which also generates about a third of its revenue. Part of Watkins’s mission will no doubt be to ensure that Member’s Mark grows as a business and continues to evolve to keep pace with changing consumer tastes.
In some ways, Watkins has the opportunity to be more experimental at Sam’s Club than she was at Walmart. As a smaller, nimbler brand, Sam’s Club has become something of an innovation lab to test out retail concepts that, if successful, may be adopted by Walmart.
For instance, in 2024 Sam’s Club unveiled cashierless checkouts in a few stores: Customers simply scan products themselves on their Sam’s Club app, pay for them using their credit card, then walk out the door. (Entrances now have arches equipped with computer vision to check what’s in a person’s cart, avoiding manual receipt checking.) In 2022, Sam’s Club set out to remove 40 potentially harmful ingredients in the Member’s Mark line—a goal it achieved last week. Walmart used learnings from this process to make Bettergoods products free of those ingredients.
Watkins has helped Walmart navigate through difficult times, from a volatile economy to new tariffs to inflation. She’s well-equipped to steer Sam’s Club through these choppy waters.
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