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PHILADELPHIA — As chief merchandising officer for Rite Aid, Pamela Kohn is responsible for front-end strategies in assortment, innovation, customer presentation and space optimization, pricing, promotions, and private label development.
Her mission, she says, is to “transform and modernize the merchandising organization in order to elevate the Rite Aid customer experience and engagement.”
Kohn’s team has completed a total restructuring of the merchandising organization, enabling better customer focus, higher effectiveness, more ownership, improved execution and new career development opportunities.
The team has implemented many new tools and process changes in space optimization, pricing, promotional effectiveness, category business planning, and data and analytics. It successfully created Rite Aid’s first “in-house” private label organization to allow direct contact with the supplier base and improved cross-functional strategies with merchant partners.
“We have changed old mindsets and taken down the silos between operations, merchandising, marketing and supply chain — allowing for common goals and cross-functional engagement on impactful initiatives,” Kohn says.
Pamela Kohn
The most gratifying parts of her work have included seeing the team “lifting” together and leveraging each other’s strengths and experience, as well as driving change and making a positive impact with customers. It has also been rewarding to have the ability to be creative and deliver innovation that can really help customers’ lives.
Kohn has had the good fortune to work across many different retail industries — including department store, grocery, mass, dollar channel, specialty and now drug store. “This allowed me to develop a holistic customer approach and constantly improve my capabilities,” she says.
Early in her career she was asked to take on a new position that was out of her “comfort zone.” That led to the discovery that she could have a passion for multiple functions — merchandising, operations, supply chain, sourcing and real estate — with work in each area teaching her how to be an even better leader. The varied experiences also taught her “to embrace the opportunity to learn, to enjoy the adventure, and have confidence that you can figure it out and thrive.”
She is proud to have earned a reputation as a “change agent” during her career. “Leading many transformational initiatives allowed me to put my fingerprints on the changes — changes for the company, changes for the customer and changes for the people,” she says.
Kohn was the first woman to be named senior vice president, chief merchandising and marketing officer at Food Lion.
At Walmart, she enabled the Neighborhood Market format to become a viable growth vehicle for the company. She also created the first-ever global food sourcing organization for Walmart, and led the Walmart Southeast Operations division’s disaster recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina.
