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Hello and welcome to Women in Retail Talks, the podcast where C-suite executive women in the retail space share their stories of professional growth leadership development, personal journeys and more.
I'm Marie Albages, Managing Editor of Women in Retail, a membership-based community of executive women at leading retailers and brands.
Today, I'm joined by Kate Gulliver, the Chief Financial Officer of Wayfair.
So Kate and I talk about her roots as an analyst, what she really sees as the biggest shift in what's expected of retail CFOs and how Wayfair is navigating all of these consumer spending changes and a lot more.
So Kate, I'm going to bring you in.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Happy to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I'm so excited.
We've had a great relationship with Wayfair.
We've spoken with your chief technology officer over several years.
So I'm really glad to have you on here.
Yeah.
So let's first talk a little bit about your background, your career journey.
I know you started as an analyst for McKinsey & Co.
And then you went to Bain Capital for a few years before you settled at Wayfair as the head of investor relations.
So You've come a long way since then.
So maybe just walk us through your career journey and how it led you to become the CFO of such a major retailer.
Yeah, so thank you for the question, and thank you again for having me.
I'm very happy to be chatting with you.
You know, I think it's really easy when you're finally sitting in that you know maybe position that you dreamed about or that senior role, to look back and create a very tidy narrative, regardless of what your experiences were, and to say
Of course, this led to this and this led to this, but that wasn't actually the case.
I didn't start out at McKinsey thinking that 20 something years later I'd end up as the CFO of a retailer.
I think it's important to emphasize that because I think if I had tried to do that, it maybe wouldn't have even worked out as well as it did now.
And I think it gives some false sense of your ability to sort of precisely script your career versus the reality, which is it's some combination of performance, luck being connected to great folks, and those things sort of come together to help shape your career over time.
So as you pointed out, I spent several years at McKinsey.
I loved working there.
I actually mostly focused on healthcare when I was at McKinsey.
So I wasn't even in retail.
Then I went to business school and then I went to Bain Capital.
And when I was at Bain Capital I actually started doing a lot more work in, And so it was really exciting to be able to work with something that I sort of more intuitively understood.
And one of the big trends you know during that time period when I was investing at Bain Capital, which was sort of 2009 to 2014, was just how much e-commerce was eclipsing all of the brick and mortar retail that we were working on at the time.
I learned from some incredible professionals there sort of how to think about the retail space, how to be an investor in it, how to evaluate the space.
But I always felt sort of between McKinsey and Bain Capital that something was missing.
I was sort of jealous of a management team, if you will.
I wanted to go in and actually do the work that we advised or we recommended.
And that's how I ended up leaving and joining Wayfair.
I've now been a Wayfair for over 11 years.
I've had a wide range of roles here.
I joke that Wayfair has been several different companies since I've been here, which is part of why I've stayed.
I joined pre-IPO to run our IPO process.
So that was sort of the super high growth, turbocharged stage.
Then we had this, you know, very odd in retrospect COVID period.
And then post-COVID, it's been, you know, the shift from growth to profitability particularly, you know, given how challenging the sort of macro furniture environment has been.
Our focus has really been on getting the business to a point of profitability and ramping that up.
And so each phase has had very different challenges.
And I feel fortunate to have been able to spend, you know now nearly half my career, you know at Wayfair.
Yeah, it's interesting.
So many of the speakers that we have on this podcast and so many listeners have that like nonlinear path.
And you said something that really stood out to me, which is you know, you didn't dream 20 years ago that you would be the CFO of this major retailer.
So tell me if this resonates with you.
It's a balance between aiming for whatever goals you have in your career, but also kind of letting your career take you in whatever direction you think it's going to go, without kind of putting all of your eggs in that one basket.
Is that something that resonates with you?
That definitely resonates.
Let me be clear.
I'm not trying to say that I wasn't ever ambitious, if not overly ambitious at times.
I think anyone would tell you I, you know particularly my siblings and parents, would say that I come with a healthy dose of ambition.
But I don't think that you can script these things perfectly.
And so I think it's really important to stay open to the possibility.
And as an example of that.
I had been at Wayfair about three years, running investor relations and a small business line.
That was a pretty normal, you know, I was an investor and then I came in to run investor relations.
That's not a crazy path, right?
But about three years in the CFO at the time and the CEO, who's our co-founder and still the CEO today asked me if I would take on our people function.
So That was a crazy departure, right?
It was not anything that I'd ever, not even a thought that had crossed my mind.
And I think if I had had some, you know, long planned well, I'm supposed to do this step, and then this step, and then this step I might have said oh, that's not even something I'm open to discussing.
Instead, and I framed it before as, you know, sort of taking the next right move.
I, you know, I thought about, okay, why are they asking me to do this?
And I went and had conversations with them to really understand what is it that you think I could bring to the people function?
And why do you, Neeraj or CEO care about the people function?
And at the time he told me that it was.
You know, the most important thing that he thinks about every day is does he have the right people in the right roles?
Because the limiter at that time on our growth was, you know, do we have the right engineers?
Do we have the right merchants?
Do we have the right, you know, salespeople in all of these different roles, marketers?
And that that's what was consuming his time.
And so I thought, oh well, why wouldn't I, you know, want to work on what the CEO is focused on every day?
I love the company.
I believe in the business.
Seems like I could get a really interesting vantage point by focusing on what he cares about.
It was not obvious what the move after that would be.
I think a lot of people thought I was a little crazy for taking the job, but it was clearly for me the next right move at that time because it brought me closer to what the CEO cared about and what he was focused on.
And in retrospect, I loved the job and it was an incredible career move for me.
But I frame it all up as you know, it was not anything I could have anticipated.
And to your point, it's so important to be open to the possibility because you just don't know what might come along.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because you've said before that you've always focused on kind of that next right move rather than chasing that specific title.
Any advice for, you know, those people who may be in that kind of career transition or looking for their next right move.
How do you know what's quote unquote right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, certainly a fair degree of subjectivity involved in that.
I think for me how I've thought about it are you know generally what are the things that are important to me day to day in a job?
Usually that's who my manager is.
That tends to be the most important thing for me.
Who am I working for?
Who am I learning from?
Who are my peers, right?
What's the team that I'm on?
And then what am I trying to learn?
What skill set am I trying to develop?
Is this going to push me?
Am I a little bit scared to do it?
I mean, that's a thing people say all the time.
It can feel trite, but I think it's true.
You want to be constantly pushing yourself.
And so, when I think about it, for me it's been does this move have that right combination of incredible people that I'm going to learn from and work with day to day?
And am I going to be pushed?
Am I building some new skill set somehow?
Am I going to feel a little scared coming in that first day on the job and probably for some time thereafter?
Am I going to feel like maybe I stepped into something that's a little bigger than I anticipated?
I think those things are actually good in terms of driving you forward in a career and, you know, can actually help us get to that next stage.
And so I guess I'd encourage people to think about what is it that they really enjoy day to day, about their job, worry less about the specific function and the specific industry.
And then what is it that you want to be pushed on?
And does the, you know, the next right move, we'll have those two pieces sort of combined.
Yeah.
I love that.
And you said something else that stood out to me, which is you know it's it's easy at this point in your career to summarize your journey so far into these tight little like chapters.
And before we you know, I wanna ask you a little bit more about that career journey, which is any other kind of major lessons throughout each of those chapters that really apply or have helped you lead today?
It's such a great question.
And, you know, I think I mean, absolutely.
There's.
So I'm trying to think about what's, what are the most salient lessons, because I feel so fortunate to I've been very privileged to work at some incredible firms and companies.
I have learned so much from the institutions themselves, but also from the people at those institutions.
And so I could list several things out of each one.
Maybe to start with, my first boss at McKinsey was actually the older sister of a friend of mine.
And she and I ended up.
I ended up, sort of you know, guiding my career at McKinsey to be able to continue to work for this woman, Olivia.
She was just phenomenal.
And what I loved about Olivia was that she unapologetically showed up in every room that she was in.
She had a big presence and she knew that and she utilized that to her benefit.
And one thing that she shared with me fairly early on at McKinsey when she was giving me some feedback was that at the firm generally, people want you know you'll get you know what are you good at.
What do you need to work on every time you have something to work on?
And she said mostly people end up then over-rotating on what it is that they need to work on.
But I think what really distinguishes you in a career over time are your spikes.
And so identifying and knowing what your spikes are and picking a job that allows you to play to those spikes, really allows you to one be, you know, sort of be excited, right.
Because then you're doing the thing that makes you feel good, because you're actually really good at it.
And two, you know, allows you to be incredibly successful.
So round out those areas that need rounding out, but make sure you know where your spikes are and focus on that.
And I think that was an incredible lesson and one that I've always sort of adhered to.
Broadly McKinsey as an institution.
It teaches you how to ask questions, how to think, how to frame things, how to create and construct an argument.
And then being capital sort of took that to the next level, laying over sort of the overall financial structure on it and helping me think about what is different about when you're an owner and when you actually go into the business.
One of the things that you learn there is just how incredibly important the management teams are and how important it is to identify and pick the right management teams.
But to take more of sort of a specific lesson.
I also had the opportunity to work for an incredible woman at Bain Capital, a woman named Trish.
And she became a mentor to me during my time there.
And I think what was so wonderful about Trish, many things, she's an incredible investor.
She's still an investor today, but she really took care to get to know her teams.
She knew sort of what motivated all the people on her teams.
And she was able to guide and develop and shape them because she cared about them as human beings.
And I think that that helped me understand that you could be a successful female executive and still bring your whole self to work.
Still, you know care about the people that you work with.
Still show vulnerability if you want to show passion, show excitement.
And you know again, bringing your whole self to work is so much of what makes you sort of satisfied and happy at work.
And she was a great example of doing that day to day.
I love that.
Okay.
So I'm hearing play to your strengths, recognizing the importance of managing teams, bringing your whole self to work.
And I think summarizing all of that is having a great leader can really make or break an experience.
Oh, I mean, I think.
Well, actually we know empirically from data that the number one thing that makes or breaks someone's time at a company is their manager.
All the data over many years suggests that.
We've done our own analysis on it here at Wayfair, but Google did that analysis originally sort of 15, 20 years ago, right.
So that is is unquestionably true in the data sense and on a personal level, I would tell you.
For me personally, it's certainly borne out to be true.
My first boss at Wayfair is still my mentor to this day.
He's somebody I can talk to anything about.
His name is Michael and you know I came to work for Wayfair ultimately, at the end of the day, because I met him through the process and I thought that's the kind of person I want to work for.
I really don't care what job he has for me.
I didn't even know at the beginning what job I was talking to him about, but I thought this is a great person to work for.
I could tell he cared about his teams.
I could tell he cared about sort of the whole person.
And so it made to me part of why I took different jobs within Wayfair was to be able to continue to work for him.
Yeah, I love that.
It's so important.
Okay.
So Kate, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about the business side of things.
As a CFO, your job is incredible and you're being pulled in so many different directions.
And so I want to know what your take is on what is expected of the modern CFO that touches all of these other departments.
What do you kind of see as the biggest shift there?
Yeah.
I guess it's hard for me to say, you know, I don't know what sort of the role of the CFO was perhaps 10 15, 20 years ago.
Describe it in terms of what I think is important.
You know in the job today.
I think you have to have a deep understanding of the business and the commercial side of the business.
So you know, sometimes I think CFOs can come up sort of through multiple paths.
Some CFOs are sort of more general purpose business executives who have a financial literacy and fluidity.
That's probably more my profile.
And then some CFOs are very technical and come up more through sort of an accounting background and then build that business knowledge, whereas I had to build the accounting knowledge.
But I think at the, you know, at the exec team level, what you're looking for is someone who can engage in the broader commercial discussions and be able to weigh the trade-offs of those discussions, not just be able to say hey, here's where the financials are coming out.
Yes, no, do you agree on that?
I think that's probably been the case for some time now for CFOs, but increasingly, or sort of consistently.
That's certainly what you see in the space.
I think, in terms of what's new, you really have to have a fluidity with technology to do the job well.
I believe.
Part of what I'm focused on myself and with my team is how we're leveraging AI
And that that sort of comes from two angles.
One is how is Wayfair as a whole leveraging AI and how do we want to be thoughtful and considerate about AI from the customer experience perspective to how our operations are run?
And then within finance.
You know, are we using AI thoughtfully and are we staying ahead and adapting new tools and ways of working as they evolve?
We're internally on the finance team.
We were just talking about in a meeting earlier this morning, some of the ways that we can pressure test some of our modeling with AI.
And I think that that's just one example, but I think it's really important as a leader to be talking about it regularly and pushing my team to be sort of day-to-day adopting it.
And then they push their team to day-to-day adopt it because the adoption curve is going to start with folks sort of testing out and experimenting it.
And if we don't do it, somebody else will come along and do it faster and better than we are.
So we have to make sure that we stay ahead.
And when you're in a pretty large organization, I think you can get complacent on that kind of thing.
And we need to make sure that we're staying ahead of it.
It's interesting that you say that, because at first I wasn't even going to ask you about AI because I was like I'm not going to bother the-.
You talk to Fiona about that when she comes on.
Right.
I'm not going to bother the chief financial officer about AI.
She's busy doing her finance things.
But clearly that's not the case.
I feel like I ask everyone about how they're utilizing AI, both in their business, internally and And then personally, and it sounds like you're kind of as deep within it as as the CTO or other.
Well, Fiona would I'm sure say that she is deeper into it than I am.
And certainly Fiona is our CTO who has been on the show before.
Certainly her knowledge is far superior to mine.
Let me be clear.
But I do use it every day.
And I need to be using it and my team needs to be using it.
And I think it's actually critical that everybody on the leadership team is using it day to day.
It's not enough just for the CTO to be driving it.
The way we'll get broad scale organizational change is, you know, for everybody to be using it.
And let's, you know, talk about the financial end of this.
There are certainly financial considerations to this.
These, you know, certainly the tooling costs dollars.
And you have to think about, you know, how are you going to get the ROI on that?
And how do you think about the payback?
And so it's not just a pure tech decision, right?
This is a overall broader company decision.
And it's the kind of conversation that needs to be happening regularly at the executive team level.
Yeah, that's a great point.
Okay so, speaking of finances, I want to get into a little bit of today's consumer and what's going on with consumer spending, especially given everything that we're seeing right now.
We are recording on May 27th.
The tariff situation is, of course, still up in the air.
So maybe at just a high level.
Kate, how is Wafer navigating all of Both these shifts in consumer spending?
And maybe a little bit on the tariff situation, if you can.
I'm glad you started with giving the date because, you know, things are changing day by day.
So let me start with the consumer spending piece, and I'll take it to our category.
Our category boomed, so Wayfair obviously sells primarily humped and corn furniture.
Our category boomed during COVID, having sort of significant pull forward of sales, and then has been under pressure since the COVID period due to a combination of having to manage through that pull forward and the housing market being under significant pressure, largely due to rates and affordability.
So I think some categories are starting to experience sort of consumer malaise now.
For us, we've been copying negative as a category for several years in a row now.
And we actually believe that in the core sort of furniture and decor part of the business, that the category itself across the US is actually on a dollars basis at 2019 levels or below.
So it's been a pretty significant pullback in our category.
Now to get that moving again for our category we need some momentum in things like housing and ideally, consumer sentiment.
That said, you know our focus.
When we went out on our sort of Q4 earnings call, which happens at the beginning of 25, we said we were not planning on any sort of category.
This was obviously before tariffs were announced, but we said we were not planning on any sort of category recovery, but we were focused on trying to drive to growth even within the construct of the category still being challenged.
And we've launched a number of things and I'm really proud of us to be launching so many things even in this challenging time over the past few years to sort of try to meet the consumer where she's at and build the business more, you know, sort of more strongly over a long period of time.
So most obvious one is we launched our first physical retail store.
It just hits one year in our first large format physical retail store, the Wayfair store in Chicago.
Just at its one year anniversary, we announced two more stores coming, you know, sometime between 26 and 27.
We launched Wayfair Rewards, which is a loyalty program last year.
We launched Wayfair Verified, which allows the consumer to sort of understand more the quality of the product that she is purchasing and how she thinks about the relative of that in a category that has a lot of substitutions.
Those are just a few of the pieces that we've been able to launch.
And we've done that while we've grown EBITDA substantially.
So we were actually running negative EBITDA pre-COVID.
We boomed positive, you know, sort of 2021 and then fell back to negative again.
We turned that positive in 23.
And so we've been able to take substantial cost out of the business and launch all of these initiatives.
And so our focus has been even though the category is under pressure, we want to meet the consumer where she's at and deliver for her.
So, from a consumer focus, we're really trying to drive share gain and And we've seen that come through in the form of share gain.
So you know tariffs overall.
Obviously you know very dynamic and fluid situation from a tariff perspective.
One of the things I think can be lost sort of externally, as people look at Wayfair, is that, although on the front end we're a first party retailer to you,
So if you were to buy on the site, you know, your experience would be transacting with Wayfair.
On the back end, we operate like a marketplace.
So we source products from all over the world and we have a wide range of suppliers that we work with over 20000 suppliers.
Those suppliers source from a wide range of geographies.
Certainly, a lot of the product manufactured for this business comes out of parts of Asia, but we source from everywhere, not just Asia.
We also source from Turkey, India, Brazil, everywhere. the U.S.
And so part of the benefit of our model is because a lot of these products are very similar.
You may have one product from one geography, another product from another geography that are quite similar.
And so we encourage competition in our marketplace.
To end up on, you know, if you're selling bar stools and you have a bunch of very similar bar stools, the lowest price, bar stools being sort of forced up in the short rank.
And you seeing the best option for if you're looking for wooden bar stool.
We probably have many different options from a wide range of geographies with potentially a wide range of pricing.
And our focus is on delivering you sort of that best quality and best value.
So we've been working to partner with our suppliers to help them understand how this might all flow through in the marketplace and how to be thoughtful about both the pricing dynamic and availability dynamic over the next few quarters, as we're all sort of navigating somewhat of a sort of dynamic period on the tariff front.
So it's not like you can blanket statements, say we're going to be increasing the cost.
You're passing the cost of tariffs onto the consumer.
It's not like you can kind of sweep that statement across the entire company.
You know, in fact, the way our pricing model works is the supplier sets the wholesale and then we set a take rate on top of that, like a traditional marketplace.
And again, our focus with our suppliers is on keeping those wholesales competitive.
And making sure that we have enough you know product from competitive geographies to source up to you a product that you know has a very efficient price.
We really want to work with our suppliers on that.
And I think we've done a very good and healthy job of doing that.
And we have a number of tools to partner with our suppliers on that.
So we have a domestic fulfillment program where we can bring product in and run it in our 3PL network.
That can help forward, position the product, make it more efficient for the supplier.
They can use supplier ads to boost certain products.
They can invest in promotions if they want to.
So there's a whole bunch of different levers that we can partner with them to help them manage their price efficiency.
So, given everything you just described, Anything that we can anticipate that's going to be new for the rest of 2025, into 2026, from Wayfair.
Anything that you're kind of anticipating or excited about?
I mentioned three of the biggest things that we've launched over the last year, and they're the physical retail store, Wayfair Rewards and Wayfair Verified.
And what gets me excited about all of those is that they make the shopping experience easier for the consumer.
And so I think anything that helps the consumer discover a product easier get a better value on product.
Those are, you know, those are points that are particularly compelling.
So if you take the store, for example, more than 50 of the customers signing up in the you know buying in the store are new to our customer file.
We have, you know, a very large customer file at this point, right?
We've been operating, you know, as Wayfair since 2011.
We've been operating, you know, as the sort of company as a whole since 2002.
So it is a pretty large file.
And again, new customers is kind of small. you know, shocking in a way.
But I think it tells you how important it is to have these different experiences for the consumer.
And so we see something like that and we feel like gosh, we're meeting a need that we were not meeting before for the consumer.
Or Wayfair verified these are products that we, you know, sort of put our stamp on.
We've actually tried these products.
We brought them into our.
There's actually another office sort of down the street from here where we literally bring these products into the office.
Our merchants actually touch and test them.
They close the drawers to see how they close.
They sit on the couch.
And then we film a video so you can get a sense of where the sizing and all of that.
And we're really focused with those products on making sure that we're telling the consumer exactly what she needs to know.
And these are products that we know from a variety of data are probably going to be the best products in sort of their range.
And again, that's solving this need for the consumer.
We do see those products convert a lot better because the consumer is seeing oh okay, I can trust this.
You know, sometimes it's difficult about a marketplace, is waiting through the noise and this is helping me, you know, sort of understand what's there and therefore I can trust it.
Right.
And then you're also dropping those return rates, which is probably super beneficial.
Totally.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Well listen, I love talking to you, particularly about this, because you're incredibly knowledgeable and it's so refreshing to hear this from a woman.
And I want to point out the fact that I think it's less than 20 of public CFOs in the SP 500 are women.
So as a woman in the minority, have you felt that pressure?
Let me answer that a few ways.
Do I feel a very high pressure job and as near your ceo would joke.
I'd probably feel pressure, you know, even if everything was going as perfectly as it possibly could be.
I tend to be a somewhat high anxiety individual, but i also feel pressure that i am representing for women absolutely right um, and but also i i feel pride in that right.
It's really kind of how incredible to be able to Do a job that I genuinely enjoy with people that I respect and enjoy every day, and be able to feel supported enough by both my family and incredibly supportive husband kids parents, et cetera and my team here.
That I am able to come in and show up and do that job every day.
That is a real gift.
And I am very, very lucky.
And so you asked, you know, how do you progress it forward?
A lot of people don't have that kind of support.
And, you know, I recognize the privilege that I have.
And so I, maybe I you know.
I certainly feel like it's important to explain in particular that I am very well supported.
Um, and I've had you know, I mentioned my name a few of the bosses I've had in your age.
Our CEO is an incredible boss to me as well.
And incredibly supportive.
Sometimes he'll send.
He does crazy things like send my children bags of candy when we're traveling together to entertain them.
And I'm like that's actually not that helpful, because now you've got them popped up on sugar for my husband to deal with them, which he's not going to be pleased about, but he, you know, he wants to know what's going on with my kids.
He's focused on how is my day-to-day life.
And I just feel really lucky to be in that environment.
And so I guess in my own small way, how can I help?
I certainly want to make sure that I'm providing that support to other women and other men on my team.
And I think one of the things I've been lucky in is that I've had both female mentors and male mentors.
And the combination of the two is really powerful.
And so how can I, you know, make sure that I'm providing that to other folks as well.
So if there's a listener out there who wants to know, you know how can we get more female CFOs circulating through the retail industry?
What advice would you give them?
I think the sort of first step is hopefully you have people coming up in sort of a broad, you know whether it's consulting or banking or sort of a general management program somewhere.
But you need women in those programs early on and they need to have a mentor that is looking out for them, because that is how you advance right.
You get this sort of broader business knowledge.
I got exposed to a ton of different companies when I was in consulting and private equity.
And I was able to have mentors and bosses that were sort of helping me through, pulling me through.
I think it's really important for women to proactively identify those people as well.
In addition for companies to try to, you know, lean in and sort of pull women up and support them.
But I think you want to build that sort of broader knowledge, give women that opportunity and then make sure that you're helping to sort of guide them through the process.
Yeah, agreed.
That's great.
And retail can be a great area for women, right?
I mean, one of the reasons I love the company is I am, you know, I am a consumer of this product.
I'm incredibly passionate about it, sometimes to the annoyance of our merchant teams when I try to, you know, jump in and I'll walk a market with them.
I'll be like, oh, why don't we have that?
And they'll have to tell me like, you're not a merchant.
Back down.
You have no idea, you know, what we should have on the site or not have on the site.
But I do love the product.
And that has made it really, you know, enjoyable for me day to day in the job as well.
Yeah, it's so relatable.
Okay, so in the minute or so that we have left I want to shoot some rapid fire questions at you that I have started asking, kind of all of our guests.
The first one is what are your non-negotiables when it comes to work-life balance?
You know, it's embarrassing that I don't have an immediate, rapid-fire answer to that, because I actually think I'm relatively flexible.
And what I would say is it's actually hard for me to say I have non-negotiables, because it's just different things at different times.
Yeah.
And so there are weeks where I know I have to lean in with my kids because something's going on with one of them or they have something going on at school, or you know it's a particularly challenging moment.
My kids are 10, 8 and 5 right now.
And the problems are more complex at 10 than they are at 5.
And I, you know, I would tell you that on those, during those time periods, I need my team at work to pick up more.
Because I do need to step out and go to a doctor's appointment for a kid, or talk to a therapist for a kid, or talk to the school, whatever it is.
And I rely on my team to jump in and do that.
And then there are other weeks where you know maybe everything's going swimmingly and I'm preparing for earnings and I spend more time, you know, at work preparing for earnings.
And it's not easy.
I want to make sure that I can be there for my kids whenever they need me to be there.
And I think that requires a lot of flexibility from both me, my team, my husband and you know our child care providers.
And that is sort of an overall effort, versus saying you know, I will never do this or I will always do that.
And it goes back to what you were saying earlier about it's key to have that support team.
Maybe that's the non-negotiable.
You have to figure out where you know what support and it's different for every family, but what support your family needs.
And I will say we have prioritized as a family, we've prioritized that support over and above pretty much everything else.
That's great.
Okay.
And then the last question is we talked about AI a little bit kind of professionally.
So I'm curious, what's maybe one AI tool that you're using in your daily life to make things easier?
Oh, well, I can tell you.
Last night, we're planning a trip.
We're going to Denmark with our three children and my in-laws who are in their late 70s.
And so I was working with Perplexity yesterday to ask about family-friendly dining in Denmark, which is a little more challenging than it seems, because there's a lot of high-end restaurants in Denmark that do not want a 10 85-year-old in it.
And it was giving me great recommendations.
So very helpful.
I actually asked them to plan the itinerary for a group of seven and gave them the ages.
And some of it I took, some of it I didn't.
But it was actually a good starting point.
Yeah, that's great.
Well, I, uh, we're out of time.
I wish you the best of luck on the trip to Denmark with all the kids.
Um, but thank you so much, Kate.
This was a really great conversation.
I really enjoyed talking with you and I can't see, can't wait to see what you do next.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate you taking the time.
Thanks for listening.
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