Andrea Nicole Albright
Andrea Albright grew up in a Walmart family with her father working for the retailer. Now she leads large teams of people in finding private brands for the company. And it’s a huge responsibility she doesn’t take lightly.
Andrea Albright was a brandnew third-grade student at Thomas Jefferson Elementary when she joined Girl Scouts for the first time. Her family had moved around a lot, but with her dad’s then-new appointment at Walmart, they knew the family would be anchored for a longer time. She joined Girl Scouts for a couple of years to gain community. The club allowed her to be more social.
Now her daughter, Mackenzie, is in a local troop herself, earning badges and writing her first business plan much as Albright did when she was younger.
Albright’s own business plans are much grander and complex these days. As a rising woman in business, she is one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Next Gen and is No. 4 in Procurement Magazine’s Top 100 Women in Procurement. As executive vice president of sourcing for Walmart, she leads large teams in finding all private brand products for the company.
That encompasses a little of everything — from car tires to bananas, she says — for Walmart U.S. and Canada. This includes many brands you might recognize on shelves, such as Great Value and Equate.
Making that happen means Albright leads groups that sometimes total up to 1,200 workers. It also means keeping odd hours, her work day sometimes beginning at 5:30 a.m. or ending at 7 p.m. to ensure she can keep communicating with various Walmart offices all over the world, like in Bangalore. Each day is a little bit different.
“It’s a huge responsibility that I don’t take lightly,” Albright says. “It’s probably one of the most rewarding experiences. What I enjoy most about my job is leading people and having a positive impact on how they view their experience at Walmart, how they view their capacity and what they’re capable of.
“There’s nothing better than having an associate who is right on the cusp of something great and giving them that feedback or that development and them doing more than they thought they could.”
That mentoring part of Albright’s career is what gives her the most energy and what stands out to others.
“Andrea is bright, curious, engaged and engaging,” says Judith McKenna, chief executive officer of Walmart International. “In a short time, she has learned the business, built global relationships and created a high degree of trust and transparency. What I really love, though, is her focus on people. She’s motivated by developing and [helping other people grow] and that shines through, not just for her part of the organization but much more broadly.”
McKenna says it’s Albright’s authenticity, clear strategic direction and her habit of being a champion for her team that keep her consistently inspiring the large teams she heads.
“She’s an exceptional mentor for so many across Walmart — women and men,” McKenna says. “You see it
everyday in the steady stream of people who ‘pop over’ to see her in the International building.”
Throughout her professional life, Albright has also prioritized coaching girls and women outside of Walmart by remaining connected with the Girl Scouts. She has served on its board of directors since 2013 and recently left that post with the regional organization that spans Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma to join the national board.
“My passion is women and children. … It’s very well aligned with where I’m focused.”
Albright has always loved the troop events, the community aspect and the cookie sales, but her favorite contribution from the last 10 years of volunteerism was bringing the region back to the core mission and values. She takes pride in re-centering the organization’s strategy, vision and impact to put them in a better position for longer term sustainability.
With daughter Mackenzie’s involvement, Albright says she could “see her confidence come to life in her pride and work with contributions to the troop.” The Girl Scouts of Arkansas do well to stay connected with girls and service units, but Albright hopes they will make strides in telling their own story and staying more visible.
MISS INDEPENDENT
Before settling in Northwest Arkansas, Albright, her two brothers and parents moved frequently, primarily in western Kansas, due to her father’s work. He began as a cart pusher for Walmart, but worked his way up into operations.
In that phase, Sears and J.C. Penney were out of reach for back-to-school shopping on their family budget, so their clothes, backpacks and school supplies always came from Walmart.
They wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise, Albright says, so in that way Walmart made a meaningful difference in their daily lives.
From the very beginning, Andrea Albright was her own person.
“Andrea was always pretty determined and strongwilled,” says her father, Drew Albright. He describes her as a very honest person who likes to win and always challenges herself to do more. “She never met anything she didn’t feel like she could accomplish. She’s thought for herself, [she has] her integrity. She’s had a strong understanding of right and wrong from an early age.”
Drew learned quickly that you wouldn’t ever want to tell Albright that she couldn’t do something. That just made it a fun challenge she was sure to take on. That’s also how he discovered that she wasn’t afraid of anything.
“She was very independent,” her father says. “With two brothers, she was outnumbered, but she was never on the losing side of that. She was an equal.”
In the early elementary years, Albright didn’t feel like an exceptional student, but she loved history and reading. She credits her third-grade teacher, Mrs. Massey, for pointing out her strengths and building her confidence to realize she was smarter than she was giving herself credit for.
Albright leaned on those conversations with Massey and learned to stop beating
herself up and believe in her abilities. That thinking continued to support her later in life as she earned an MBA from the University of Arkansas.
As young Albright began to consider the life she would have, she applied to a few colleges, including Florida State, Michigan and Kansas State University.
“When I was 17, all I could think was that I wanted to create my own life,” she says. “Bentonville was amazing, but I wanted a different experience than what I’d had.”
She chose Kansas State, where she applied to be a psychology major. Its campus was just far enough to get away but just close enough if she needed to get home. Once there, the reputable apparel and textile program caught her eye and she pivoted to that.
After the first semester, Albright was tempted to go back home. She felt like she didn’t really know anybody by that point. Albright turned to her dad for advice.
“He had strong convictions around personal accountability and doing more than you thought possible,” she says. “He was my guiding force through high school and college. … [telling her] ‘If you’re not trying your hardest, why do it?’ He’s got a strong work ethic, conviction and values.”
Looking back, Drew Albright thinks his daughter had a lot more to face than a little homesickness. She was 17 and at the university only three weeks when 9/11 happened, he says. It must have been unnerving to have military marching across your campus, a reminder of their close proximity to Fort Riley.
“The real world sunk in a little,” he says. It was all new and came with a bit of uneasiness, but “she was one of her own worst critics, harder on herself than anybody else.”
Albright stuck it out and soon found a support system and community.
She built exponentially on that momentum, taking home and apparel internships during many Christmas holidays and summer breaks. One was with Debenham’s international division in the U.K. that supported other countries like Saudi Arabia and Sweden in their franchise businesses. Albright also found work with a sourcing company in Taipei.
“Those were what set me on the path of retail,” she says. “It showed me that the way Americans do it isn’t the way everybody does it … and gave me different perspectives on people, solving problems and empathy.”
GREATER IMPACT
Albright might have stayed on that international track, were it not for a different kind of offer made to her after her graduation from college in 2005. She got engaged and since her fiance made it clear he would not be interested in moving to another country, Albright searched for positions stateside.
She applied to Target and Walmart. In July 2005, Albright got offers from both companies within an hour of each other.
It was a tough call. Target’s low cost, high quality brands were gaining popularity. But at the time, Walmart’s clothing brands, while also low cost didn’t yet have the same reputation for quality.
“They were seen as low quality … with brands and styling that we weren’t proud of,” Albright says. While turning it over, she realized her choice maybe wasn’t necessarily an obvious one. “I could have a bigger impact at Walmart. I had never wanted to work for Walmart, but it’s where I could go and have an impact and help the most.”
As a new associate, Albright worked in ladies apparel only a couple of months before being asked to move to boys apparel. A year into that, she landed as a buyer and worked with seasonal, licensed school uniforms, coats and licensed T-shirts.
Not long after becoming a buyer, she became pregnant with her daughter, Mackenzie, an experience that she describes as exciting and terrifying.
Terrifying, in part, because her marriage had started to fall apart. The couple had met in college and halfway into the pregnancy it was clear that the marriage was over. Due to state law that dictates that a divorce cannot be finalized if one is pregnant, Albright had to wait. They filed for divorce when their daughter was a week old.
As her maternity leave came to an end, Albright got a call to join Walmart’s apparel team in the Big Apple. Mackenzie was only 3 months old, so Albright gave some serious thought about what it would be like to be a single mom in New York. She took the job despite knowing it would be challenging not to have family nearby.
“You don’t realize how strong you are until you have to be,” Albright says. “It set a path forward on resiliency, that if I was going to have a great career, it wasn’t just about me, it was about my daughter as well.”
Arriving in New York, Albright
and her daughter spent the first few months in a walkup. Then, through friends, she found a reliable nanny who could stay with Mackenzie overnight whenever work travel called.
Albright had recently met Ann Theile at Walmart, another career-driven woman who got called to the New York office, and the two became fast friends.
“I admired how seamlessly she handled being a new mother while making a big move,” Theile says, recalling how much fun it was being small-town girls exploring the city together. “When Andrea sets her mind to something, it happens. We like to get things done … so having a friend that shares that drive and motivation is comforting.”
About a year into living in New York, Albright was out with friends for Halloween. She was dressed as a sheriff when she struck up a conversation with a guy dressed as one of the men who do the running of the bulls.
Albright was drawn to how smart and kind he was. The two had a great conversation, keeping up with each other intellectually.
For their first date, they went to dinner at Cafe Loup in lower Manhattan and sat talking for more than two hours, focusing in on each other even though actors Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Junior were seated at the table behind them.
“She was so much fun to talk to,” says Patrick Bannon, Albright’s husband. “She had a witty sense of humor and a great personality. In a city of millions of people, it’s crazy to think I was able to meet my future wife in a bar crawl, dressed in costume on Halloween night in New York City of all places.”
It was at the same restaurant, Cafe Loup, that Bannon proposed a couple of years later, just as the New York office was closing. Knowing that Arkansas law at the time prevented non-married couples from cohabitating with children in the household, they chose to get married at the courthouse only a couple of weeks later.
By early 2012, Albright and her new family were back in Arkansas, where she took on baby apparel and roles with private brands at Walmart. She learned women’s apparel
in all its complexity with high fashion, quick-turn trends and core basics for every age demographic, color and fabric.
Albright began leading people, first with teams of five, then 26 and more, learning the business of getting all those different personalities to work together.
She started working in intimates apparel and soon gave birth to her son, Liam. Walmart was undergoing a big transformation at the time and the chief merchant asked Albright to run human resources.
For two weeks, Albright staved him off, saying that it wasn’t her background or skill set. She felt like it was a huge risk to take it on. At the same time, Albright knew it would also be a huge opportunity to see merchandising in a way she hadn’t seen before.
Albright finally accepted, taking them up on that new level of trust the company showed in her and spent two years on that learning experience before facing another crossroads. She could go back to New York, or head up food merchandising. Albright chose the latter.
It was fun learning the piece of Walmart that makes up so much of their business, she says, and at the same time she helped with the transition of beginning alcohol sales. The displays of wine and beer in stores now is something her team was responsible for creating.
Once she was named a vice president, Albright got to experiment more, working on food product flavors for snacks and bourbon. She liked harnessing nostalgia for the ’90s and random ideas from social media into something she could put on the shelf.
Now her work stems on establishing trust, value and resiliency with customers through quality products that are sourced the right way, Albright says. She spends much of her time making sure the equation of value — price point divided by quality — is always right.
“I have an extreme amount of pride, having been in the inside of Walmart, to see what she’s doing now,” says father Drew Albright. “The amount of time in those responsibilities to train and teach and keep involved in the community, and how she manages her time between life, family and work, she does much better than I did.”
“What I enjoy most about my job is leading people and having a positive impact on how they view their experience at Walmart, how they view their capacity and what they’re capable of.”