January 26, 2023
Heather Hughes, Group Vice President, GMM of Beauty, Personal Care, and Seasonal, Walgreens
Rebooting Health, Beauty & Wellness at Scale – Heather Hughes, Walgreens
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Almost 80% of Americans live within 5 miles of a Walgreens.
Founder Charles R. Walgreen Sr. established the brand in 1901 as a single location pharmacy in Chicago, which grew into an integrated healthcare, pharmacy and retailer—which filled approximately 820 million prescriptions and immunizations in the US last year alone.
Now part of Walgreens Boots Alliance, the largest retail, health, pharmacy and daily living destination across the U.S. and Europe, the brands serve millions of walk-in customers, patients and omnichannel shoppers’ every day. The combined entity was founded 170 years ago, is an index component of the Dow Jones sustainability indices (DJSI), with 13,000 locations and 325,000 people that delivered $130 billion in revenue last year.
Heading the multibillion-dollar Beauty, Personal care & Seasonal category at Walgreens is Group Vice President and General Merchandise leader Heather Hughes, a trained pharmacist—a rare profile for a retail executive. Her unique background is just what the doctor ordered, as Walgreens looks to reboot the category and take health, beauty, and wellness to the next level of growth and innovation. Heather joined me for an episode of The Reboot Chronicles, to give us a behind the scenes view of what’s new and what’s next.
Rebooting Self-Care Journeys
For over two decades, Heather has focused on making impactful changes, and with beauty and personal care, she’s identifying new opportunities, from the pharmacist angle and looking at things clinically, to identifying gaps that may arise when it comes to communicating with customers. From the steep climb in self-care journeys to the immediate and long-term effects of COVID, customers are prioritizing their overall wellbeing.
“Beauty is no longer about this, just looking beautiful. It’s how you take care of yourself and how you feel about yourself. It’s an emotional well-being and you can start to connect so much of that back and forth into the health and wellness space, which is uniquely what I’m focused on, especially being the pharmacist background that I have, bringing that clinical perspective into the view.”
Evolution Of Healthier Societies
When customers demonstrate more intentional alignment to their beauty, personal care and wellness regimen, brands have to focus on the right set of suppliers and invest more in research to tailor customized solutions.
“COVID was a huge igniter. There’s no doubt about it. The trend existed before COVID where you were starting to see this shift in thinking from acute care shift into proactive care. A lot in health and wellness space where our society really has been built on -I get sick, I go treat it and it’s this acute care thinking, right? Before COVID, there was a bit of some folks saying, I actually know that my parents had this illness. Therefore I want to try to prevent it for myself. You were starting to see those dynamics shift, but it wasn’t everyone. When COVID happened, it really made a lot of people rethink how they were taking care of themselves, and it made them think beyond just that. I’m sick and I need to care for myself, but how do I feel about myself? How do I feel about everything in general? And it really ignited this idea of taking care of yourself in a very holistic way. And so I think had that not happened, we would have just been on this very slow journey with it.”
Personalizing Customer-Journeys
Training in-store beauty technicians to be focused around the health space and especially skin care was a way “of bridging the gap” for WBA in its reboot of this category.
“Your skin is an organ that you need to take care of. It’s also what prevents you from many things and plays such a key role in keeping your body healthy. So, we use our beauty consultants to train them around skin health, various types of psoriasis or eczema. In addition to that, sun care. How do you take care of your skin to make sure that you can improve skin cancer? So making sure they’re trained on that. Right in the pharmacy, we are dispensing medications that actually cause photosensitivity. Making sure that we build programs to connect that so our pharmacists can then transfer over to the beauty consultants to find the right SPF for those patients that came into the pharmacy- those are the types of holistic ways that we’re approaching it, and using those beauty consultants to focus on that.”
Helping customers with a crossover approach, in addition to keeping up with newer innovations, trendier color and shade options is a fascinating mix of health and wellness, plus cosmetics.
“Another program that I think is amazing is feel more like you. We focus with our clinical teams internally here to build out the right regimen of products that we knew would be appropriate for patients dealing with cancer and having our beauty consultants make sure that they can help them on the specific products that might be right for them, that we knew were clinically valid and appropriate for the various ailments, and in particular that their skin was going through.”
Heather hints that the audience should expect more personalized “customer-journeys” from Walgreens, with improvements in technology and more connected tissue between social/online and in-store experiences. The trained pharmacist in her echoes “I get nervous that sometimes on social media people might be making recommendations that aren’t right for the consumer who’s taking in the information. So the journey is, how do we help cut through to make sure customers are getting credible sources through these avenues that they want to have that information, but make sure they’re credible to help them migrate down to the right products and that will work for them individually in the right way.”
In addition to targeted products and partnerships with the world’s leading and emerging brands, WBA’s portfolio also includes No. 7, Soap & Glory, Liz Earle, Botanics, Sleek MakeUp, and YourGoodSkin.
Beyond targeted products, Walgreens has unique leverage points with their neighborhood health destination concept, with clinics and partnerships, like VillageMD. With more customers coming in (remember the 5 mile proximity), the opportunity to provide a holistic wellness space—from acute care and pharmacy needs to beauty and personal care—seems to be a smart leadership and reboot strategy. “Customers have learned that it’s not just about what they put in their body, but also what they put on their body. At Walgreens, we have the clinical teams, we have ways that we can make strides and help the customer.”
