Walmart Built Its Fashion Business By Climbing Above Its Own Price Floor

Walmart gave its highest internal honor, the Sam M. Walton Entrepreneur of the Year Award, to Denise Incandela at its June 5 annual meeting, recognizing the executive who has spent nearly nine years rebuilding the company’s apparel business. The Walton family chooses the recipient, and board member Steuart Walton and Board Chair Greg Penner presented it before a crowd of 11,000 in Fayetteville. Walmart does not disclose apparel sales separately; Talk Business & Politics put the business at roughly $20 billion. By that measure it is one of the largest apparel operations in the country, and the award is the occasion to look at how it got there and what it asks of suppliers.

The rebuild rested on a pricing bet that ran against Walmart’s instincts. Incandela, executive vice president of fashion and private brands for Walmart U.S., has said that roughly 60% of Walmart’s customers had been shopping apparel at $15 or below, and that the assortment served what she called “just the bottom of the closet.” The team went after the space between $15 and $40, a tier Walmart had largely ceded, building toward quality and style rather than price alone. For a retailer whose identity is the lowest price, deliberately climbing above its own floor was the risk the award is meant to honor.

The vehicle for the climb has been private brands. Since 2020, Walmart has launched or relaunched around ten private apparel labels, including Free Assembly and Scoop, both directed by designer Brandon Maxwell since 2021, along with No Boundaries, a roughly $2 billion brand relaunched in 2024 for Gen Z shoppers. The pipeline is still running. Walmart added a tween line, Weekend Academy, in 2025, and in January 2026 debuted Mills, a brand from actress Millie Bobby Brown, across 750 stores and online. Walmart has paired the labels with a New York design office, pop-up stores, runway tie-ins such as a Maxwell line built around the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, and store remodels that group apparel displays and add QR codes linking to more colors and sizes online.

The numbers Walmart shares point in one direction. Greg Penner said apparel sales were up 10% in the first quarter, a category still growing in stores and online. David Guggina, now president and CEO of Walmart U.S., told a recent investor conference that sales from an April fashion event rose 70% over the prior one, and described customers increasingly treating Walmart as a destination for both value and style. That fits Walmart’s first-quarter results, when the company said it gained share across income tiers led by upper-income households, and trade reporting that the fashion push is resonating particularly with six-figure households.

Walmart Is Climbing Into The Mid-Market Amazon Just Took

The part the award ceremony skips is the competition. Even as Walmart’s apparel business grows, Amazon has moved ahead of it. By Coresight Research’s 2025 survey, Amazon is now the most-shopped apparel retailer in the country by number of shoppers, and it built that lead by penetrating the middle of the market, the same mid-tier Walmart is climbing into. The size gap is wide. The Wells Fargo estimate cited by WWD put apparel and footwear sold on Amazon’s platform above $67 billion, more than double the roughly $32 billion Walmart was estimated to have sold, a figure that includes footwear and so sits above the apparel-only estimate cited earlier. Coresight also found Walmart is the retailer Amazon Fashion shoppers most often shifted their apparel spending away from, with Target close behind. Walmart’s answer runs partly through its own marketplace, where third-party sellers expand the fashion assortment the way they do on Amazon, which makes apparel one of the clearer fronts in the contest between the two.

For National Brands, The Competition Is Now Walmart’s Own Labels

For 1P national-brand apparel suppliers, the strategy changes what wins a line review on two fronts. First, a buying organization that has spent years moving upmarket and recruiting design talent is judging assortment on style, quality, and fit, not landed cost alone. Second, and more pointedly, the engine of the elevation is private and exclusive brands that Walmart owns, directs, and can place exactly where it wants, which means national brands are competing for space against labels the retailer controls. The read for suppliers is that price competitiveness has become the cost of entry, and what earns placement is whatever a private label cannot easily copy, whether that is brand equity, genuine design distinction, or a customer the label reaches that Walmart cannot reach on its own. The pressure from Amazon on the same mid-market only raises the bar, because the assortment now has to win the higher-income shopper both retailers are chasing.

The Marketplace Is Walmart’s Second Front In Fashion

For 3P Marketplace sellers, apparel is among the better opportunities on the platform, and the same customer shift works in their favor. Walmart reported Marketplace sales up nearly 50% in its first quarter, its best showing in ten quarters, and apparel is a category where third-party assortment fills gaps the shelf cannot hold. The elevated positioning and the younger, higher-income shopper it draws widen the range of styles and price points that can sell, rewarding sellers with differentiated or on-trend product over the lowest-priced basics. Resale is an adjacent opening, after Walmart began carrying pre-owned luxury handbags, jewelry, and watches through a partnership with the platform Rebag. The fulfillment, content, and reliability standards that govern Marketplace apply here as much as in any category.

The award looks back at nearly nine years of work. The forward signal for suppliers is in the shopper Walmart is now competing for, and the company it is competing against to reach her. Walmart said its first-quarter share gains were led by upper-income households, and apparel is one of the levers reaching them, but Amazon is reaching for the same shopper from a larger apparel base. Planning the next Walmart apparel line for the old low-price customer means planning for an aisle the company is deliberately leaving behind, in a category where standing still means losing ground to the competitor that just passed it.

Winning With Walmart

Winning With Walmart is an independent platform for suppliers, sellers, solution providers, and industry experts.

Articles are developed by staff editors, contributing experts, and trusted partners.

Some are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools and are reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by Winning With Walmart editors before publication.

Editorial judgment, sourcing decisions, and final approval rest with the publication's human editors in every case.

We are committed to accuracy and fairness. If you believe this article contains an error, we welcome your feedback.