Two Women Running Major Outdoor Brands Have a Lot to Say About Getting There
Mary Beth Laughton, chief executive of REI, and Janice Tennant, chief marketing officer of Merrell, sat down to talk about what it actually takes to lead in footwear and outdoor retail right now – and neither of them offered a tidy roadmap.
The Career Path That Wasn’t a Path at All
Laughton and Tennant share something more significant than their industry overlap: neither arrived at their current roles by following a straight line. Both executives described careers that bent, doubled back, and moved sideways before climbing – a pattern that, in their telling, turned out to be the thing that made them effective. Laughton, who leads REI, one of the country’s largest outdoor co-ops, and Tennant, who oversees marketing at Merrell, one of the most recognized hiking and trail footwear brands in the U.S., credited their nonlinear trajectories for giving them a broader read on how organizations actually function.
That kind of range matters more than it used to. Footwear retail is facing pressure from multiple directions at once – shifting consumer priorities, supply chain volatility, the ongoing tension between physical stores and digital channels, and a wholesale landscape that keeps renegotiating its own terms. In that environment, executives who’ve only ever moved vertically through one function often find themselves without the peripheral vision the moment demands.
Tennant’s work at Merrell sits at the intersection of product storytelling and consumer behavior, a position that requires her to stay close to both the brand’s heritage – trail running and hiking footwear built for serious outdoor use – and the expanding audience Merrell has been courting in recent years. That audience now includes younger consumers who may be drawn to the brand’s aesthetics or outdoor-lifestyle aspirations before they’ve ever set foot on a technical trail.
Laughton’s challenge at REI is structurally different but equally layered. REI operates as a consumer cooperative, which means its relationship with its members is baked into the business model in a way that typical retail chains don’t have to manage. Decisions that might be purely commercial at another company carry an additional weight at REI, where member loyalty and brand values are not incidental – they’re the architecture of the whole enterprise.
Leading When the Retail Environment Doesn’t Cooperate
Both executives were candid about the difficulty of leading through disruption without losing clarity about what the organization is actually trying to do. That clarity, they argued, doesn’t come from having all the answers in advance. It comes from knowing which questions to keep asking and being willing to hold the tension between short-term pressure and longer-term direction without collapsing one into the other.
For Laughton, that tension plays out in REI’s ongoing effort to be a credible outdoor authority while also functioning as a modern retailer that competes for consumer attention and wallet share against a much wider set of competitors than it faced a decade ago. The co-op has made significant investments in its digital infrastructure and private-label product lines, moves that put it in a different kind of conversation with the brands it carries – including Merrell – than a straightforward wholesale relationship would suggest.
Tennant’s position at Merrell, which is owned by Wolverine World Wide, requires managing brand equity that has decades of outdoor credibility behind it while pushing into new categories and consumer segments that don’t automatically associate themselves with the brand. Merrell has been actively expanding its reach beyond its core hiking customer, introducing product lines and marketing campaigns aimed at bringing a younger, more style-conscious consumer into the fold. That’s a balancing act with real stakes: move too fast or too far, and you risk alienating the customers who built the brand; move too slowly, and the next generation of outdoor consumers picks someone else.
Innovation, both women suggested, doesn’t announce itself cleanly. It tends to emerge from the friction between what a brand has always done and what the market is asking it to do next. Laughton pointed to REI’s ongoing work to define what a physical store does for a consumer who can theoretically buy anything online. The answer the co-op keeps working toward has to do with experience, expertise, and community – none of which are easy to manufacture or measure, but all of which are genuinely difficult for a pure-play e-commerce competitor to replicate.
Tennant framed Merrell’s innovation challenge in product terms. A trail shoe that performs in technical conditions is an engineering problem before it’s a marketing one, and Merrell’s reputation rests on getting that engineering right. But once the product exists, the question of how to communicate its value to someone who might wear it on a weekend hike and then to a coffee shop requires a completely different kind of thinking – one that’s less about specs and more about identity and aspiration.
What connects both approaches is a refusal to treat change as a disruption to be managed and then moved past. The executives both described operating inside what amounts to a permanent state of adjustment, where the goal is not to return to some previous equilibrium but to build organizations flexible enough to function without one. That’s a harder thing to operationalize than it sounds, and neither Laughton nor Tennant suggested it had been figured out.
What Nonlinear Actually Means in Practice
The specific value of a zigzag career, as both executives described it, is not simply that it produces well-rounded leaders – it’s that it produces leaders who are harder to rattle when the org chart stops making sense or when the strategy that worked eighteen months ago is suddenly the wrong one. Laughton and Tennant both occupy roles where the external environment changes faster than any plan can fully anticipate, and their ability to operate in that condition tracks directly, in their telling, to the range of experiences they accumulated before reaching the top.
The harder question, and one neither executive resolved cleanly, is how organizations build that kind of adaptability into their pipelines beyond the individual level. REI and Merrell are not small operations – they require depth across functions, geographies, and product categories, and the talent decisions made now will shape how both companies navigate whatever comes at outdoor retail next. Laughton runs a co-op whose member base expects something from its leadership that goes beyond quarterly results. Tennant operates inside Wolverine World Wide, a portfolio company managing multiple brands with different identities and different customer relationships – which means Merrell’s internal decisions never happen in complete isolation from what the parent company needs the brand to contribute.
