Office Depot & OfficeMax President on Transformation & Omnichannel Innovation | Live at eTail 2025

Yes, we finally get to meet. Yes, we tried to connect a couple of times. It's great to meet you here at Etail.

Yeah, so I lead our B2C business, but I like to put a little twist on that and call it B2C and B2B. We have a tremendous number of small business customers, and it's a market that is underserved typically because B2B companies are looking at much larger organizations and enterprises, and in traditional retail, the focus is on consumers. So that middle tier is a really interesting group of folks. Their needs are so complex. They have very similar needs to large businesses, and they're often doing many of the tasks that would be generalized in a larger company themselves. So anything that we can do to help increase their efficiency, increase their effectiveness at juggling multiple tasks at the same time is usually very appreciated.

Yeah, absolutely. 95 plus percent of businesses in the US are small businesses with less than 20 employees, and a huge chunk of those are sole proprietorships, just one person, often bringing in their friends and family to help support when needed. But the small business entrepreneur is really the backbone of our communities. They're the local restaurants, the local insurance companies, they're providing services that are so important to all of our lives. So creating a real focus from an assortment perspective, from a go-to-market perspective, even our services. Most people know us for paper, ink, toner, the basic office supplies, but not everyone knows that every single one of our stores is a full-service print facility that can do custom flyers, signs, business cards. You name it, we really can support many different business needs.

Yeah, so for us, it's such a fascinating time. We saw just an incredible transformation in workspace management, right? Remote, hybrid. People were working remote before the pandemic, but we're still seeing only about 50% occupancy in office buildings across the country. So there's a tremendous amount of momentum behind managing your own work environment. It used to be called work-life balance. Some people are still using that term. I find it very interesting because I just think work and life have blended together. For us, trying to really think through as folks enter the workspace now, most of whom will have experienced remote learning for at least a full year during the pandemic, we're working, we're learning from home in makeshift classrooms on their bedroom floors. They just have a different perspective of how to integrate technology into their workday. It comes so naturally. What I think we're really focused on is how do you avoid completely taking the human factor out of your work? Even how we take it out of retail. You've seen the trends in retail that many, even large retailers, are moving away from that final mode of human face-to-face interaction at checkout. Now you have self-checkout. You don't even have a smile and a hello anymore in a retail environment. And we're really proud that the vast majority of customers who walk into one of our stores will have someone welcoming them, someone asking them what brought them in that day, how we can help them. And it very often goes way beyond that into really getting to know their business and their needs. I think that in-real-life factor, we dismiss it as the younger generations are pure digital. I'm not so sure. I have four children, and luckily they keep me connected to what's going on out there. I think that this need for human-to-human interaction as well as tangible experiences does not go away. In fact, it may be more important to the younger generations.

Well, I wouldn't go that far, but I would definitely say we are much more of a balance than you might think. Certainly we have tremendous growth opportunities within the services side of our business. Here's a great example: I bet you don't know that you can get your TSA PreCheck done at our store.

Yeah, 200 of our stores actually offer that service, and more to come. But we're constantly thinking about how we can leverage our physical assets to help support customer needs. Obviously business customers are traveling, and now it seems like if you've been to an airport lately, they're traveling more than ever. So being able to help facilitate that process is just another example of how we can use our real estate to support our customers.

I think, look, having spent a lot of time in retail and even more time in digital and e-commerce, I think the constant need to evaluate how you can leverage technology, not just as a solution in and of itself, but really how it helps to transform the customer experience. We have been major advocates of omnichannel integration for many years. We are a leading-edge provider of those capabilities. I mentioned it during my panel: we have the fastest in-store pickup program in the world. At least I think we do until someone proves me wrong.

There you go. It's 20 minutes. We have a 20-minute promise. So if you place an order on our website, you will within 20 minutes, often much faster, get an email saying it's ready to pick up. And if you don't, we'll automatically send you a $20 coupon off your next order.

We leverage technology in very smart ways. Here's one great example: we partner with Zebra Technologies. All of our associates carry mobile devices with them at all times. As part of our operational efficiency, we leverage those devices to do everything: inventory management, controls, making sure the right products are on the right shelf, making sure our pricing is updated, but importantly, making sure that customer needs are taken care of as the first priority. So as soon as an in-store pickup order comes in at any given store, alarms are going off, it's ready to go, and it's often taken care of within minutes.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to underestimate the challenges that are out there. Retail is transforming, it's changing all the time. Customer expectations are changing. You really have to stay focused on that experience. And what I'm really proud of is our incredible NPS scores in our stores. Our associates genuinely focus on making sure that our customers walk out of the store happy. I think that is a big differentiator for us.

There's really two big things that I'd say we're focused on. One is leveraging AI for very clear use cases. One way that we've leveraged AI is to digitize all of our user manuals, our SOPs, all our associate-facing documentation, and put it into a model where AI will help them just get to the solution that they need right away. Remember, with any complex retail organization, you're going to have thousands of things that are possible. For any customer walking in, one particular thing may only happen in your store once a year. So being able to quickly figure out how to accomplish that task is really important. That's one interesting use of generative AI or LLMs: basically put everything into the machine, and then the machine parses back to individual associates the answers to their question. So as a new associate, I could be like, 'What are the closing procedures for my store?' or a small use case in our print center that may be relatively uncommon. That's a great example. And then the other one is really around personalization. Obviously we've been talking about personalization for a very long time, but we are actively working with our marketing platform partner right now on revamping all of our promotional emails and really looking to increase the amount of targeted content that we have out there. We have a really diverse customer base, and we know a teacher is going to have different needs from a small business owner. So being able to leverage that information is really important to us.

Oh my God, yes. This has been great.