ion for exceptional product curation. From Watsons to Sam’s Club Miles didn’t set out to become a retailer. He once aspired to be a police officer in the UK.  “But due to eyesight issues, they wouldn’t accept me,” he recalled.  Instead, he joined Sainsbury’s on a management trainee scheme, an entry point into retail he hadn’t originally considered. That detour became a 35-year global retail career, spanning senior roles in the UK, Asia, and the Middle East. Miles first landed in Asia in 1988, when he moved to Hong Kong to join Watsons. “During the interview process, they told me Watsons was ‘the Harrods of the East.’ I’m not sure that’s quite the right description of Watsons, but it sold me and got me on a plane,” he said.  At the time, Watsons had just 59 stores. By the time he left, the business had ballooned to 12,000 locations globally, with 1500 in Asia. He spent the last five years of his 20-year stint as CEO for the region. After several years working in the Middle East for a family-owned conglomerate, Miles was approached to take on a new challenge: lead a small, relatively sleepy business unit in China called Sam’s Club. “It was trading reasonably well and making money, but no one was driving it. It was kind of like being on autopilot,” Miles, who is now an advisor and business consultant at Global Essence Consulting, said at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show Asia Pacific in Singapore. Miles joined Sam’s Club China in 2012. According to him, the company had been in China since 1996, but its growth had stalled. When Miles was first offered the job, even Walmart’s own leadership acknowledged the risk.  “Doug McMillon, then Walmart’s international CEO, told me, ‘You’re not a club guy. You don’t understand the model,’” Miles said. “When I arrived, I took his words seriously and spent time trying to understand what those disciplines were. I spent time in the US, travelling around the world, learning about the club model.” He went back to basics, spending time in the US studying club operations at Sam’s Club and Costco. The learning curve was steep, but he emerged convinced that the club model, if adapted well, could thrive in China. A member of Miles’ strategy team presented a chart projecting explosive growth in China’s urban middle and upper-middle classes, families with disposable income, aspirations for quality and rising expectations around service. “These people have money to spend, they’re educated, they travel. They want a better quality of life, and that presented the opportunity that helped us shape who we serve based upon those disciplines of the club model,” he said.  A retail strategy built on less  In an era dominated by platforms like Alibaba and JD.com, where choice was infinite and promotions relentless, Sam’s Club went the other way. The team slashed SKUs from more than 10,000 to just 3500 per club. “Customers were getting more choice than ever before. Meanwhile, we decided to give them less choice,” he said.  “We needed to cut the SKUs to bring this back to a true club model. When the whole marketplace was going in completely the opposite direction – everything was getting smaller and big-box retailers were starting to lose their attraction as the market became more community focused – we said, ’We’re going to have big clubs, 200,000-square-foot boxes of retail.’” And while Chinese consumers were increasingly addicted to discounts and promotions, Sam’s Club went the other way, offering “everyday low prices” without the gimmicks. Building an obsession-worthy product culture What Sam’s Club did differently in China wasn’t just about limiting products. It redefined how products were chosen. Rather than blindly following market data or customer surveys, the merchandising team was trained to think like the company’s core members. From 10,000 SKUs down to 3500, every item had to earn its shelf space. “It was a category-by-SKU approach, because we had to show the teams that they needed to think about every item we ordered in a way that said: ‘This item needs to be the best within the category,’ because you can only have one or two of them with limited SKUs. So limited SKUs with wide categories meant that we had to spend time at work with them,” he said.  The cloud revolution But perhaps the most radical part of the transformation happened outside the store, through the creation of “clouds.” Starting in 2016, the company began opening small delivery hubs, between 3000 and 4000 square feet, in residential neighbourhoods, stocking just 1000 of the most essential SKUs. Orders placed via the Sam’s Club app could be delivered to members’ doors in under an hour. “We [could] see from day one, in order to serve this tsunami of members that was going to be growing, we had to go beyond physical stores. However, the starting point was to establish our core business, to strengthen our top business, our offline business, and to embed key disciplines within the organisation. Once you do that, and you get the foundation strong, then you can start to build on top of that innovation,” Miles said.  This network of micro-fulfilment centres now numbers more than 500 across China. Every cloud store is tied to a parent club, which functions 24 hours a day: daytime for in-store shopping, nighttime for packing and dispatching fresh goods to the clouds. Importantly, Sam’s Club didn’t bolt on a digital offering after the fact. From day one, membership required downloading the app. That app became the company’s primary interface for shopping, data collection and personalised communication. And while many digital teams pushed for more SKUs to compete online, Miles held the line.  “The more you try to give them, the more complicated it makes your business. So you have to make some really hard decisions based upon your financial model of keeping that member happy to ensure that you don’t overextend yourself,” he said.  Discipline in a distracted market According to Miles, China is a unique market in terms of the pace of change. “I learned that while it’s easy to be dragged along with trends, you have to be really disciplined about what you stand for: your culture, your way of working, your business model and the customer you’re trying to serve. There are so many distractions that come along every day that could take you in a different direction,” he said.  “You don’t build the biggest omnichannel retail business in a market like China by just doing one thing. It’s a series of retail disciplines focused on who you’re trying to serve, being really clear on your communication, bringing everybody with you on that journey, coaching them, showing them by example, keeping that confidence and that clarity of where you’re going.  “For me, that’s the foundation of building a business like Sam’s Club, and I guess that’s what we did.” Further reading: How Golden ABC is building a modern retail empire from the Philippines.