‘I’m a stores guy by trade’: Designer Brands’ Roger Rawlins on the shoe retailer’s digital future

Designer Brands Inc., parent company of DSW, has been trying to prove itself to be a bonafide digital retailer.

This past quarter cemented that the current strategy may be working. After a year of losses due to the pandemic, Designer Brands swung to a profit in the first quarter of this year hitting $703.2 million in revenue. “We were really just trying to manage what was there until we could get our arms around how long this thing was going to last,” CEO Roger Rawlins said on the Modern Retail Podcast, describing the initial days of the pandemic. “That was by far the biggest and most disruptive thing that we had to deal with.”

But now, according to Rawlins, things are looking up. After furloughing 85% of the workforce, “we were able to bring folks back,” he said, “and [we were] really proud of how we made it through.”

Rawlins joined the podcast this week and spoke about how he’s been leading the company. He has been at Designer Brands for 15 years -- and helped bring the company online. This was a behemoth task; “I’m a stores guy by trade, even though I ran dot com,” he said.

But that work over the last decade-plus, according to Rawlins, has helped make a robust online strategy. Designer Brands, for example, doesn’t rely predominately on warehouses and uses most of its stores for fulfillment. Last quarter, nearly 70% of its inventory was fulfilled from a store.

What’s more, Rawlins worked to make it so that store associates weren’t focused only on in-store sales. “We gave stores credit for all of the dot com demand they fulfilled,” he said. The idea, he explained, was so that “they could see the benefit of engaging in an omnichannel way.” That program helped the company throughout the pandemic. “[We saw] store associates posting on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook,” he said. That drove significant volume “by just fulfilling that digital demand,” he went on.

It was those kinds of programs over the last year, Rawlins said, that “really did save our fannies as an organization.”