Most retailers chasing fashion credibility start by shrinking their audience. They curate harder, raise prices, and build mystique around scarcity. The playbook assumes that fashion authority flows from selectivity.
Walmart’s fashion strategy does the opposite. It starts with 145 million people already walking through its stores and visiting its website every week, roughly half the country, and asks a different question: what if the largest retail audience in America is also the largest underserved fashion audience?
That was the argument Denise Incandela, EVP of Fashion at Walmart, brought to the main stage at eTail Palm Springs 2026, in conversation with Anne Mezzenga, Co-CEO of Omni Talk. Incandela spent 20 years in luxury retail at Saks Fifth Avenue and Ralph Lauren before joining Walmart. She did not arrive to make Walmart more exclusive. She arrived because the data told her Walmart’s customer was already a fashion customer. She was just spending her fashion dollars somewhere else.
Twenty years of luxury was the preparation, not the contradiction
Incandela’s career path is itself the thesis. She started saks.com, served as Chief Digital and Chief Marketing Officer at Saks, then moved to Ralph Lauren. When a LinkedIn message about a Walmart role arrived, she did not take it seriously. Her mentor, Steve Sadove, the former CEO of Saks Fifth Avenue, changed her mind. His argument was simple: it will come down to two companies, and Walmart is one of them. You will either read about the transformation or be part of it.
The talent signal is real. Incandela noted that when Walmart first opened design roles in New York City three or four years ago, a job posting might attract 20 applicants. Today, the same roles attract hundreds. The mission, democratizing fashion at scale, is pulling serious talent.
The spending data told Walmart it had permission
The strategic foundation was not aspiration. It was arithmetic. Incandela shared a striking data point: when the Walmart customer shops at Walmart, 60% of her apparel spend is at opening price points below $15 average unit retail. But when she leaves Walmart, only 20% of her spend stays in that under-$15 range. The remaining 80% goes to higher price points elsewhere.
That gap was the permission slip. Walmart’s customer was already spending on fashion. She was just doing it somewhere else. The opportunity was not to trade the customer up in an abstract sense, but to serve the closet she was already building.
The three-part playbook is deceptively simple
Incandela’s strategy has three pillars: elevate the assortment, overhaul the shopping experience, and change perception. What makes it work is the specificity underneath each one.
On assortment, Walmart has brought in thousands of national brands over the past five years, from Millie Bobby Brown to $90,000 Rolexes. At the same time, the company has modernized its private brand portfolio, standing up elevated labels like Scoop, Free Assembly, and Avia to target the $15 to $40 white space. Six private brands are at a billion dollars or more. Four of those are at $2 billion or more. Scoop is now in half of Walmart’s doors; Free Assembly and Avia are in all of them. Incandela said they cannot keep them in stock.
On experience, 1,500 of 4,000 fashion doors have been remodeled with brand shops that put premium labels, both owned and national, up front. NPS scores on the remodels are, in Incandela’s words, through the roof. The website, originally built around food and grocery, is being rebuilt with a dedicated fashion landing page, fashion-specific shop, and virtual try-on.
AI is accelerating design, not replacing designers
The AI story here is notably practical. Walmart is using AI to scan runway shows, social media trends, and market data, then feeding that intelligence into the front end of the design process. What used to take weeks or months now takes hours. The designers still design. AI compresses the trend-to-shelf cycle.
This is a useful case study for any marketing or product leader evaluating where AI delivers real operational value. It is a speed-to-market story, and at Walmart’s scale, that speed compounds into a structural advantage.
Pop-ups are marketing. Supercenters are the business.
The New York Fashion Week pop-ups have been attention-getting. Four pop-up locations have each outperformed the average supercenter in daily sales, with only two brands on the floor versus 400. But Incandela was clear: these are perception-change vehicles, not a store format. They give influencers a space to experience and promote the assortment. The real scale is in the 4,000 doors.
Walmart is using experiential retail not as a growth channel but as a brand credibility tool, a way to earn the right to show up differently in the places that actually drive volume.
What this means for senior marketers
Incandela closed with a statement that landed like a thesis: “We are just at our beginning.” Brand relaunches, new brand launches, more pop-ups, limited-time offers, and a deepening influencer strategy are all in the pipeline for 2026. She said she feels grateful to be executing this transformation at a moment when value matters more to consumers than provenance.
For senior marketers watching Walmart’s fashion push, the lesson is not about mass retail specifically. It is about permission. Walmart had the traffic, the data, and the customer. What it needed was the credibility to serve a bigger share of her life. Everything Incandela described, the design team, the AI integration, the store remodels, the pop-ups, was in service of earning that permission.
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