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I’ve bought more clothes from Walmart lately than I ever expected to, and apparently I’m not alone.
Walmart fashion is suddenly everywhere.
I’m usually shopping at Veronica Beard, Nordstrom and Anthropologie, so Walmart wasn’t exactly where I expected to start finding clothes I genuinely love. But the quality of some of these pieces is incredible, especially for the price.
Instagram, TikTok, fashion influencers, “you won’t believe where I got this” videos. After seeing one too many outfits that made me stop scrolling, I finally had to ask: Who the heck did Walmart hire?
Turns out, some very smart people. And what looks like an overnight fashion moment has actually been almost a decade in the making.
Walmart started getting serious about fashion around 2017, acquiring ModCloth, Bonobos for $310 million and later plus-size fashion brand ELOQUII. Not every acquisition worked out. Walmart eventually sold several of them, which is an important part of the story. Turnarounds are rarely as tidy as the case studies make them sound.
But Walmart clearly learned a lot about how fashion customers shop, and then it made what may have been its most consequential move: hiring Denise Incandela. Her résumé included 15 years at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she served as CMO and president of Saks Direct, followed by running digital and customer experience at Ralph Lauren.
She walked into a Walmart apparel department that had traditionally followed more of a “stack it high and sell a lot of it” philosophy and started editing. Fewer racks. Less merchandise crammed together. Better displays. More mannequins and complete outfits. Incandela has said that when Walmart put merchandise on mannequins, it sold. Fashion retail, it turns out, works better when shoppers can imagine actually wearing the clothes.
The bigger insight was what Walmart wasn’t selling. It already owned a healthy chunk of the boring-but-necessary closet: socks, underwear, T-shirts and basics. Incandela estimated Walmart wasn't really competing for about 80% of the customer's wardrobe. When you already have millions of people walking through your stores every week, that is one enormous opportunity sitting a few aisles away from the groceries.
So Walmart started building fashion brands. It relaunched Scoop, created Free Assembly and expanded its online assortment with more national brands. Then it made a hire that still makes me smile: BRANDON MAXWELL, the luxury designer who has dressed Lady Gaga and Michelle Obama, became creative director for Scoop and Free Assembly.
Yes, Walmart hired a red-carpet designer.
Man, to be a fly on the wall at that first breakfast. Turns out Denise Incandela didn’t have to twist Brandon Maxwell’s arm at all. Walmart was No. 1 on his career bucket list, which might be the biggest plot twist in this entire story.
But they didn't hire Maxwell to turn Walmart into Saks. They hired him to bring a designer's eye to Walmart economics. That's a much smarter proposition. The goal isn't convincing someone to spend $300 on a blouse at Walmart. It's getting her to pick up a $28 blouse and wonder how on earth it only costs $28.
What Walmart got right was realizing this wasn’t just a marketing problem. It was an entire experience problem. They brought in Denise Incandela and gave her room to rethink the assortment, merchandising, brands and how fashion showed up in stores and online. Then they gave Brandon Maxwell real creative reins, not a celebrity collaboration with his name slapped on a capsule collection. The right talent changed the product and the experience first. That gave marketing something real to work with.
That solved the product problem. Walmart still had a perception problem.
For decades, consumers had been trained to think of Walmart as the place for groceries, laundry detergent and inexpensive basics. You can't undo that with a few glossy ads announcing, “We're fashionable now.” Nobody believes a brand simply because the brand says so.
So Walmart went somewhere nobody expected Walmart to go: New York Fashion Week.
The irony is fantastic because Walmart doesn't even operate a traditional store in New York City. Instead, it opened a temporary fashion store in SoHo and put its clothes in front of fashion editors, influencers and creators before opening the doors to consumers.
People lined up around the block. Popular sizes sold out, and Walmart reportedly had to replenish inventory twice during the four-day pop-up. Walmart fashion causing inventory problems in SoHo during Fashion Week would have sounded like Mad Libs ten years ago.
But the pop-up wasn't just about selling clothes. It created exactly the kind of cultural credibility Walmart needed. Put a brand somewhere people don't expect to find it, make the experience good enough that they want to talk about it, and suddenly you've given social media a story.
That's where Walmart's influencer strategy becomes particularly smart.
Instead of Walmart trying to convince a 35- or 45-year-old woman that its clothes have changed, someone she already follows shows up wearing a great outfit. She asks where it's from and discovers it's Walmart. The old perception actually makes the content stronger because the surprise becomes the hook.
“You won't believe where I found this” is far more persuasive than “Walmart Fashion: Shop Our New Collection.”
Walmart has leaned into that behavior with Walmart Creator, its affiliate platform that allows creators to recommend products and earn commissions on sales. Now the company isn't simply buying influencer posts. It's building an enormous network of people who have a financial incentive to hunt through Walmart, find the gems and show their audiences what they discovered.
The flywheel is pretty great: make better clothes, put them on creators, let the price surprise people, turn that surprise into content and make everything easy to buy. Then repeat it at Walmart scale.
And Walmart has scale in abundance. Its U.S. fashion business had grown to roughly $30 billion by 2025, according to Fortune. This isn't a cute little brand experiment anymore.
What I like most about the turnaround is that Walmart didn't start with marketing. It started by fixing what people would actually experience. The company changed the talent, merchandise, private brands, presentation and product before asking marketing to change the perception.
Then it used Fashion Week, pop-ups and creators to make that transformation visible in places where Walmart historically had very little fashion credibility.
That's a much harder way to reposition a brand than buying a new campaign. It's also a much more effective one.
Because Walmart never really needed to tell us it had become fashionable. It just needed enough of us to look at an outfit and say, “Wait, that's Walmart?”
Judging by my shopping cart lately, mission accomplished.