Nata Dvir’s rise through the ranks of Macy’s to become the retailer’s chief merchandising officer has been meteoric, but she’s taken a measured approach to climbing the ranks.
“I’ve spent 16 years at Macy’s and have always been surrounded by great leaders and great mentors. Part of what I also experience is focusing on how to be great in a role that I’m in, not always focused on what’s next,” Dvir said. “It’s making sure that I can make an impact and being known for being somebody who can really deliver.”
Dvir’s roles have spanned the retailer’s offering: She started in intimate apparel, then worked on cross-category strategy, in addition to fine jewelry and women’s shoes. For the past five years, though, she’s helmed the retailer’s beauty business and then was given merchandising responsibility for everything. “Understanding so many different categories, and how our customers have been able to shop across those categories, made me successful in each role,” she said. “In my role today as chief merchant, versus running beauty, what I get to do is really spend time thinking about that customer across all the different categories, and how we bring it all together.
“It’s given me the opportunity to invest in categories we know are important for our customers, and new categories that we have heard from our customer that they’re looking for at Macy’s,” she continued.
That includes hair care, which the retailers added over the past few years into its brand matrix. “We have amazing assortments in fragrance, skin care and makeup. It’s important for us to make sure that we have categories that were new to us and trending in the market. That’s hair care, and we’ve seen a huge growth in home fragrance, too,” she said.
Beauty presented a much faster-paced assortment to cover, given the high rate of innovation. “The pulse is just so fast, we really need to keep current with the customer trends,” she said. “We’ve started to see makeup coming back, trends showing up on TikTok, products that are launching.”
How Macy’s reaches its customers, too, is being rethought. “We’ve also been able to refresh a lot of our beauty store formats, so that it really feels like an opportunity for our customers to shop across any brand in any category,” Dvir said. “We’ve taken so many learnings that we’ve been able to invest in-store and apply them online as well, and really making sure we have a differentiated experience online.” The retailer has also introduced Macy’s Live, a shoppable livestream platform on its website.
Dvir credits her rise to that ethos — as well as the proper guidance. “I’ve been fortunate to see that because of that focus around delivering, and because of that focus on making sure that I can contribute to the business, I’ve been able to naturally progress throughout my career, and great guidance from so many different mentors has helped me along the way,” she said. “We have over 70 percent of our workforce, and nearly 60 percent of our senior directors and above, being women. We’ve got a lot of women at the table.”
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