How Foot Locker’s supply chain is lacing up for the future

ORLANDO, Fla. — Foot Locker’s investments in inventory accuracy, vendor relationships and cross-functional partnerships across its supply chain are key drivers of its multi-year transformation plan, executives said at the Retail Industry Leaders Association’s LINK 2025 conference last month. 

The sneaker retailer advanced its “Lace Up” plan last year by opening six Foot Locker reimagined store concepts, among other initiatives, EVP and COO Elliott Rodgers said. The reimagined stores aim to create an immersive brand experience while enhancing digital capabilities, including the company’s new mobile app.  

Although the Lace Up strategy is a company-wide effort, changes within Foot Locker’s supply chain played a major role in progressing the initiative in 2024, according to Chief Supply Chain Officer Kristin Bauer. 

Keeping an eye on inventory

Inventory is the lifeblood of omnichannel retail, Rodgers said. Therefore, improving inventory accuracy is essential to support Foot Locker’s goal of becoming a best-in-class omnichannel retailer, one of the four pillars of the Lace Up strategy.

“Because there’s so many different elements of the organization that touch inventory, you have to have some type of unifying vision for what you’re trying to accomplish,” Rodgers said. “If the unifying vision is a near real-time view of inventory that’s available for sale at the item and location level, then it becomes clear what the organization is trying to solve for.”

Given its exposure to fluctuating sneaker trends, Foot Locker deals with trapped and aging inventory at a higher rate than some other retailers, forcing it to rethink how it approaches this critical part of the business.

By focusing on inventory accuracy and leveraging the stores for omnichannel capabilities, Foot Locker reduced cancelled and rejected order numbers in 2024, she added.

“We actually fulfill a large number of our digital orders from the back of the store,” Bauer said. “It’s a huge part of our strategy. It’s not necessarily a capacity play all the time for us; it very much is an inventory play.”

Valuing vendors

Strengthening vendor relationships is critical for Foot Locker as the company relies on “handfuls” of partners, rather than thousands like some other retailers, Bauer said.

“We’ve always had those from a merchandising perspective, but we very thoughtfully leaned in in 2024 to build better strategic relationships with our vendor community upstream, and it drove incredibly meaningful results,” Bauer said.

For instance, providing improved forecast information to vendors and suppliers enabled better data cross-sharing and better upstream visibility. This, in turn, helps Foot Locker be more accurate with its buying practices.

“It’s a balance. A lot of our inventory is allocated inventory, and there’s not an endless supply of it,” Bauer said.

Cross-functional champions

Foot Locker has also shifted how its different teams engage with each other, opting for more cross-functional relationships, Rodgers said. Now, success is based on customer experience rather than individual department performance.

“Looking at it holistically — and not making it about functions, but making it about the customer, and making it more about a North Star vision that everyone in the organization kind of could rally around and move to — is incredibly important, especially in an omni retail environment,” Rodgers said.

Rolling out integrated business planning at Foot Locker has allowed for supply chain collaboration that ensures the customer experience remains the center of decision making, according to Bauer.  

“It really drove different conversations within the supply chain team than I think what we had historically had,” Bauer said.

Running with tech

Foot Locker is also more regularly assessing its technology stack through a dedicated, internal “tech council” that meets quarterly, rather than waiting for the company’s annual planning cycle.

As it evaluates new technology and processes to better optimize its supply chain and operations overall, Foot Locker initiated a product operating model that leans on smaller teams to deliver new features and functionalities, Rodgers said. This strategy allows the company to move more quickly to keep up with a rapidly evolving consumer landscape.

In the supply chain, Bauer and her team have found success by identifying less capital-intensive solutions that drive results. For example, the retailer will be rolling out RFID technology in its distribution centers this year.

“A lot of our product already is tagged from a vendor perspective, and so it’s a huge capability, not incredibly capital intensive for…