Today’s rapidly evolving marketplace expects retailers across all segmentations to continually innovate just as most of them would have the ai in retail. Environmental sustainability and social responsibility, speed of delivery and technology are just a few of the issues that are top of mind for consumers and Neiman Marcus Group (NMG) leaders. NMG is a relationship business that leads with love in everything they do for their customers, associates, brand partners, and communities. Their legacy of innovation and culture of Belonging guide their roadmap for Revolutionizing Luxury Experiences. Guided by this roadmap, as an integrated luxury retailer working in partnership with over 5,000 individual brands, NMG is positioned to improve the industry’s environmental, social, governance (ESG) performance well beyond its stores and corporate offices. In its first Environmental, Social Governance (ESG) Report, “Our Journey to Revolutionize Impact,” NMG committed to making ESG a cornerstone of its growth and transformation strategies and engaging its associates, customers, brands, and nonprofit partners along the way.
As part of NMG’s journey to revolutionize impact, the company is committed to fostering a culture of Belonging and leading with love. In 2019, NMG conducted an associate survey, discovering four key areas of opportunity to be top priority for their associates – Total Rewards, Career Development, Flexibility, and ESG. In 2020, NMG began strategically investing in those priorities, building out their Belonging organization to drive Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging progress in three critical pillars of the business – workforce, workplace, and marketplace.
Jonathan Hall, Director of Belonging, Neiman Marcus Group, leads the company’s culture of Belonging, ensuring diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging are embedded into all functional areas of the organization and partners with internal and external stakeholders to deliver progress around four major goals within the Belonging pillars to:
- Increase racial diversity in leadership roles at the Vice President level and above to 21% by 2025 and 28% by 2030.
- Advance workplace equity in line with prominent external standards like Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index and Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index.
- Provide Belonging training to 100% of NMG associates
- Spend $150 million with diverse owned brands and businesses by 2025.
Jonathan does not come from a traditional DE&I background. He began his career in business operations, merchandising and planning. His data-based approach to driving performance has helped inject evidence-based bias interrupters into business and people processes. Jonathan underwent a comprehensive review of the entire hiring journey to ensure there is equity and inclusion at all touch points and putting best practices in place to interrupt bias. NMG recently deployed its new inclusive hiring training which creates an environment where everyone can understand the importance of diversity as a key driver of business innovation and performance. This training covers many topics ranging from how to write a gender inclusive job description, an in-depth overview of cognitive bias and its influence on decision making during the interviewing process. NMG’s inclusive hiring training helps drive progress in advancing workplace equity, increasing leadership diversity, and training associates on topics that drive cultural awareness.
In Jonathan’s merchant role, he has partnered with several diverse-owned brands, building exclusive collaborations and events that brought focus to diverse representation within the luxury space. In FY21, NMG completed a customer insights survey with Boston Consulting Group that showed NMG’s customers are more racially diverse than the average luxury customer. As a result, NMG prioritized supplier diversity across its retail and non-retail spend categories. NMG has created two customer facing online edits called “Fashioned for Change” at Neiman Marcus and “Conscious Curation” at Bergdorf Goodman. The edits provide a shopping destination for customers who are interested in products that are diverse owned, responsibly manufactured, sustainable, transparent or gives back. In addition, NMG began tracking its non-retail spend with diverse owned businesses by leveraging the Supplier.io platform and is developing a robust supplier diversity program that helps to drive progress around its newly set goal to spend $150M with diverse owned brands and businesses by 2025.
Belonging is an essential component of NMG’s culture, which they describe as their NMG|Way. It’s a belief in and a practice of leading with love as they create an environment where everyone Belongs, diversity of thought is valued, and showing up as your full and authentic self is encouraged and celebrated. Today, and every day, NMG let’s love lead the way.
