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Over the past 44 years, few industries have changed more than retail. Since the Leavey School of Business’ Retail Management Institute (RMI) at Santa Clara University was founded in 1980, a bricks-and-mortar scene has expanded to include ecommerce in all its forms — from early digital shopping in the 1990s and to a landscape forever altered during the pandemic of the early 2020s.

“Retail is a complicated business with a lot of moving parts,” says Kirthi Kalyanam, Leavey School of Business marketing professor and executive director of RMI. “It takes a lot to unravel it. You need to understand the bricks of it. You need to understand the clicks of it. You need to understand the information technology part of it. You need to understand the supply chain part of it.”

Leavey’s location in Silicon Valley provides RMI with a birds-eye view of emerging trends and transformations. Home to tech giants as well as ecommerce pioneers, the region fosters cutting-edge advancements in AI, machine learning, and augmented reality that are transforming the retail experience. Plus, the Bay Area's affluent, tech-savvy population serves as an ideal testbed for innovations such as delivery services, subscription models, and sustainable practices. 

Logistics and supply chain startups in the region are revolutionizing inventory and fulfillment processes, ensuring efficiency in modern retail operations. And a strong focus on sustainability aligns retail practices with ethical consumer demands, while the area's global connectivity helps scale innovations internationally. 

With deep connections across Silicon Valley and beyond, Leavey’s Retail Management Institute is ideally situated to help prepare future leaders to understand and embrace this rapid change. The institute offers a minor for marketing students, plus certification programs that are open to both students and alumni. It offers industry connections with retail leaders. And it includes a robust research program that seeks to identify and understand the changing behavior of consumers.

Retail Ambassadors

“One of our goals is to be an ambassador for the retail industry for the campus community,” Kalyanam says. That ambassadorship includes providing students with direct access to high-level retail executives from the likes of Apple, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, Wayfair, Sam’s Club and more via on-campus events, speakers and seminars — and also through a highly involved advisory board and industry fellow program.

A look through the list of RMI’s advisors, all picked and assembled carefully by Kalyanam, reveals not only a group of high-achieving executives with major decision-making power, but also people in segments of the industry that have undergone or are undergoing transformation.

“Without question, the most significant change has been the acceleration of digital technology, both from a digital commerce and fulfillment perspective, but also from a media, marketing, data, analytics and insights standpoint,” said Jeff Hom, the latest high-profile addition to the advisory board, in a recent Q&A with Kalyanam. 

Hom is EVP and general merchandise manager for Kohl’s and spent 20 years at Target in multiple roles in merchandising, merchandise planning and supply chain. At Target, he led an integrated inventory solution for the brand’s online and in-store properties. At Kohl’s, he’s helping a team transform merchandising and assortment strategies in a multiyear project. 

“I was excited to join the Santa Clara Retail Studies board for three main reasons,” Hom told Kalyanam. “One, I enjoy supporting the development of future retail talent, but also advancing future strategies to support the industry. Two, the opportunity to learn from the board and continue my personal development journey. Three, the opportunity to share some of my experiences with the board and students at Santa Clara.”

Kalyanam expects Hom and fellow board members to use their deep understanding to help shape curriculum, research and programming for RMI. For instance, board discussions led to RMI’s Digital Merchandising Certification program, which is open to students and others beyond the retail minor and now serves around 70 people annually. The program operates in partnership with Bloomreach, an online ecommerce platform that offers a “sandbox” version for students to use in class, Kalyanam notes.

Likewise, discussion with board chair Michael Schriver, group president of LVMH, helped lead to RMI’s “consumer in” research perspective. 

“We need to be much more deeper in our understanding of consumer behavior than there was previously,” Kalyanam says. “Why? Because in the past consumers operated in a few channels: they bought in the store, and they watched TV. If you figured out those two things, you had a good retail model. Now they buy in so many different channels. You know they could be buying on Tiktok. They could be buying in the store. They could be on your website. They could be buying Instagram. We need to know where they're buying and which media influences them.”

Board discussions around such topics inform curriculum and research, but Kalyanam says that the board members support each other in surprising ways, too.

“You just joined a group of other senior people in the industry, who are your peers,” he says. “They are thinking about the same problems you’re thinking about. And you have this forum where it's not in your corporate environment, where you can freely discuss ideas, what's working, what's not working, what's hard, what's not hard.” 

The Retail Experience

RMI’s evolved curriculum, research and industry discussion perhaps benefit one group the most: students in its minor program. 

Ann Waldo is one of roughly 40 such students. The senior from Chicago first learned about RMI during a classroom presentation as a freshman. She decided to pursue the institute’s retail studies minor, on top of her marketing major and Spanish studies minor.

Now, at the end of her college years, she leads RMI’s student organization as president and helps recruit other students with similar interests. To Waldo, the institute’s benefits are clear. She cites the importance of learning hard-earned skills such as merchant allocation negotiating with vendors. She points to experiences such as RMI’s yearly sponsored trip to New York as highlights and differentiators.

“Offering coursework in retailing is great, but the experiences really set us apart,” Waldo says. “To really live it out and go see Apple Fifth Avenue, one of the highest selling stores in the world, and also speak with Apple board members on campus — you just can’t pass up some of these experiences.”

Waldo has valued hearing from board members and other industry executives as they’ve participated in classroom sessions, seminars, speakers series’ and other events on and off campus. The theme of “transformation” was not lost on her.

“I think it's very reassuring to hear from them that everything works out and your career might pivot in a number of ways, and you just have to embrace that,” Waldo says.

As retail pivots, so too will RMI — and it will do so with direct feedback from the people making major decisions in the industry. 

“Retail has expanded fairly dramatically in its scope, and what all it does,” says Kalyanam, who also points out that retail now includes everything from clothing to food delivery to scheduling a ride online. “We cover all of that. And we will continue to stay on top of that evolution.”