Walmart U.S. chief merchant Latriece Watkins told attendees at the company’s Investment Community Meeting assortment expansion online is playing a greater part in how the company thinks about positioning products and product categories for consumers, which will have an ongoing impact on such major merchandise categories as home.
Watkins, as part of the virtual meeting, said the company is “aggressively” blowing out the assortment to give customers more from brands they favor, including national brands and private labels.
Walmart’s online and marketplace assortments figure into how the company is addressing consumers, particularly as the digital store remains with consumers at all times and in all places via digital devices, Watkins noted. In 2024, Walmart added more than 300 brands to its owned assortment and increased the number of marketplace sellers by 50%, with plans to outpace that growth in 2025, she said. Watkins added the extended assortment online is generating an “overwhelming” consumer response.
Watkins said the third-party platform resonates with shoppers, elevating Walmart’s profile as a digital shopping destination by adding in-demand brands such as La Roche Posay, Omaha Steaks and All Clad. Walmart Marketplace can help diversify the mix of customer baskets as more than two-thirds of the Walmart third-party assortment is general merchandise, she noted.
Marketplace also gives the company access to more inventory without the ownership and enables it to monetize that inventory through Walmart Connect retail media and Walmart Fulfillment Services, Watkins said. And it gives Walmart the chance to capture data on customer response to items that are also a good fit for the company’s private label assortment, she added.
Today, in its own-brand initiatives, Walmart stores carry 200 items from the Beautiful by Drew home collection, and the company offers 600 products sporting the label across brick- and-mortar and online operations combined. In an example illustrating the importance of digital commerce to Walmart’s operations, and the home business specifically, she said the company now completes 60% of furniture purchases online.
Watkins said Walmart’s goal with private brands is to provide shoppers the same or better quality at a lower price. Walmart has worked to modernize the private brands across its portfolio, she pointed out, and it recently added its first food private label — Bettergoods— in 20 years. At the same time, the company is refreshing existing own brands such as No Boundaries, which focuses on creating products for the Gen Z consumers, molding the product assortment into a cohesive collection of on-trend items.
