It’s been a tumultuous year for the legacy retailer, shaped by new tariffs, shifting consumer habits, and the constant flip between “wartime” and “peacetime” leadership. Tony Spring, Macy’s Inc. chairman and CEO, shares why his team is now on “version 27” of the company’s forecast and plan, and what it really means to court the next generation of shoppers.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
The Thanksgiving Day Parade, the sprint to Christmas, it’s like your Super Bowl. What’s distinctive about 2025? I mean, the economic and shopping environment has been pretty chaotic.
I think the news certainly makes things more complicated. I think people are confused. We had a terrific second quarter. We talked about the back-to-school business being pretty healthy, and yet we all see potential storm clouds on the horizon. So we’re trying to be cautiously optimistic. . . . You could stay up all night worrying. . . . But in reality, our job is to make sure we create a better shopping experience for the customer. There’s plenty of things that are out of our control that we could obsess about, but it really doesn’t satisfy anything or make you feel any better.
And for the parade, how do you keep it fresh?
Making sure every year the parade has newness: We have partnerships with Disney, Pokémon, Pop Mart, Labubus . . . We want to make sure that whatever is popular and whatever’s interesting weaves its way not only into our merchandise strategy but also into an iconic event like the Thanksgiving Day Parade; 32 million people approximately are going to watch it on TV, and we have several million more that come live in person in New York City on that day.
Macy’s has an iconic place in American culture, although obviously it hasn’t been immune to the challenges in retail. You launched what you call a “bold new chapter” after becoming CEO in 2024. It’s showing traction in your financial results, but you’re still sort of in the midst of it. What’s working, what’s not?
Well, let me break it into the three parts: The first was strengthening and reimagining Macy’s, and that included closing underproductive stores and betting on our future-state stores. So putting more colleagues into the stores, putting new merchandise into the stores. . . . We also improved our digital platform and doubled down on our luxury businesses, which include Bloomingdale’s and Blue Mercury.
And then the final part of the strategy is end-to-end operations, and that’s making sure we’re utilizing automation and robotics and AI, and making sure the complexity that might exist in our business doesn’t affect the consumer.
Your stores face pressure from everywhere, fast fashion and e-commerce and social shopping and live shopping. How do you think about in-person, human interaction, versus digital commerce?
I talk to our team all the time about the word balance, and I don’t think the word gets enough volume or credit. . . . There are some reports out now that the next generation is longing for socialization, and in-person shopping is a big part of what they’re doing together. There is a place, I think, for all these types of businesses, as long as we pay attention to what the consumer wants.
Almost 70% of our business still remains in physical retail, which is very consistent with the industry averages. That doesn’t mean we don’t love our digital business. If we were selling paper towels, who wants to go shopping for paper towels? I’d like to have those delivered to my house right before I run out of them. But I think there are other things that are fun to do in person.
And by the way, when we have a DJ on a Saturday, when we do bottle engraving, when [we have people showing] how to do flower arranging, you can get people to turn out to the stores because it becomes an extension of what they want to do for the weekend. I think a big part of our bold new chapter is stepping up to the fact that a good retail experience, people are looking for. A bad or mediocre retail experience—people can do digital. They don’t need to exhaust themselves with that experience.
I want to ask you about planning and decision-making in 2025. One CEO I talked to recently told me that things change so fast that he’s been forced to update his plans as often as weekly. You get new data constantly. I’m curious what you look at and how fluid you have to be with your plans?
You have to be very fluid. I mean, to be candid, in the age of tariffs and in the uncertainty of supply chains, plans are the guardrails, and the longer the plan, the less accurate it is. So you do deal with a rolling operating forecast, which is something that we update on a weekly and monthly basis, and that kind of gives us a greater visibility into how to allocate inventory, how to plan our staffing, how to change our marketing, so that we’re doing it in real time, not based on some plan that we developed three or six months ago, which may at this point be somewhat outdated. I think we’re on version number 27 of our forecast and plan, because of the interesting environment that we’re operating in 2025.
There’s an analogy that people sometimes use, that sometimes you need a wartime leader and sometimes you need a peacetime leader, and there’s a different strategy for each one of them. And I’m curious whether you feel like for Macy’s, is today wartime or peacetime? And how would you cast yourself in that?
I’d like to say it depends on the day of the week you ask me, and I think the challenge for our business is, on Tuesdays, I might have to be a peacetime leader, and on the first day of November, you may need to be a wartime leader. And in the environment we’re operating with, with unexpected tariffs by the middle of the year that didn’t exist at the beginning of the year, there is a lot of wartime philosophy.
And in the same time, we are in a business for the long term. We are not trying to just have a great third quarter. We’re trying to have a great business that lasts decades, if not more. What matters tomorrow is going to be different than what mattered yesterday. I use a phrase, “graciousness and kindness—the last time I checked—don’t cost money.” So, how do we make sure that we imbue and express those things on a regular basis?
What’s your role when it comes to the Thanksgiving Day Parade itself?
Stay out of the way.