Behind the Rebranding Campaign of Wal-Mart’s Scarlet Woman

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At one point, Roehm-the sole breadwinner for her husband, Mike, and sons Luke and Nick-was nearly $1 million in debt. | Photograph by Danielle Levitt

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Roehm at home: She's been trying to leave Bentonville since the she lost her job. | Photograph by Danielle Levitt

Julie Roehm is cornered. The lanky blonde, who's partial to skinny white jeans and ivory Ray-Bans, is stuck inside a brick McCastle in one of Bentonville's gated communities, wedged into the northwest corner of Arkansas between a cattle ranch and a snaking country road. Roehm bought her manse three-and-a-half years ago, 2 miles away from her new boss at the time, Wal-Mart's then-CEO Lee Scott. Hired as the retail monster's senior vice president of marketing communications, arguably the top job in her field, she was charged with fighting off Target's aggressive rise by transforming Wal-Mart's image from low-end merch peddler to temple of discount chic. But a career that took 15 years to build unraveled in a flash. After scarcely 10 months on the job, Roehm (pronounced raim) was loudly, publicly fired. The following day, she put her house up for sale. "I was thinking maybe it would take six months to sell," recalls Roehm, 38. "We'd go somewhere else, start again, pick a new job. Yeah. That was the thinking."

It's been two-and-a-half years, and no matter how many plastic fuchsia flowers Roehm and her husband, Mike, jam into the grass by the pool, they still can't offload their $850,000 ball and chain. In 2006, after Wal-Mart fired Roehm at least in part for accepting a Nobu 57 sushi dinner from Draftfcb, the ad agency she'd recently awarded the retailer's $580 million account, she filed a $1.5 million breach of contract lawsuit against the House of Sam, prompting a litigious spiral of soap-operatic proportions: Wal-Mart countersued Roehm for having an affair with a subordinate. Roehm countersued CEO Scott for buying discounted yachts and a diamond ring from a Wal-Mart partner. And the partner sued Roehm for defamation. An image of Roehm's face slapped on a Wal-Mart ad went viral online ("If you come to Wal-Mart," the spoof read, "please don't fuck your coworkers... . Because our legal team will fuck you back for every penny you've got... . Guaranteed") and bloggers ordained her a "ho" and "slut." All of the parties involved eventually dropped their suits, but Roehm, once the face of innovative advertising for Ford and Chrysler, emerged as the Hester Prynne of Bentonville.

On a Windex-blue day in April, Roehm, shuffling around her office off the master-bedroom suite, reveals her latest attempt to exorcise her minimansion of its scandalous juju. "I wouldn't want to scare away any potential buyers," she says, at once blasé and sarcastic -- a woman inured to humiliation. She's referring to the dozen-plus framed accolades ("Automotive Marketer of the Year" from Brandweek; "Interactive Marketer of the Year" from Ad Age; "The Advertising Hall of Achievement") that once hung on the walls. Some 14,000 people work at Wal-Mart headquarters -- Bentonville itself has 32,000 residents -- so she's well aware that splashing her name around the house could keep her shackled here for another three years. The awards now sit buried under newspaper in the hallway closet.

But Roehm -- who has another closet filled with 4-inch Donald J. Pliner pumps -- isn't exactly the type to go into hiding. "A weaker person would have said, 'I'm going to buy a franchise or go be a college professor,'" says Andrew Judelson, chief marketing officer of Sports Illustrated, who worked with Roehm during her Chrysler days. Instead, Roehm has chosen a more treacherous path, taking on the most challenging rebranding campaign of her career: herself. "If I'm going to be stuck with this scarlet letter," she says, "I'm going to dress it up and make it the prettiest damn scarlet letter I can possibly make it."

Julie Roehm's minivan is stuffed like a clown car. Well, technically, she clarifies, it's Mike's car -- Julie drives a Hummer-size red convertible Wrangler Sahara -- and stacked inside are her husband, her two sons, a neighbor's kid, and her giant black schnauzer, Isabella. She's on her way home from her 10-year-old Nick's school recital in nearby Fayetteville, where one of his classmates once told him, "Your mom stole $50,000 from Wal-Mart!" (Roehm: "Sure, why not, just add that to the list.") At the school, it was clear that Mike, a stay-at-home dad, was the regular, while most teachers were meeting Julie for the first time. After piling the kids back in the van and rationing out cookies, Roehm lays her head on the steering wheel looking like Carrie Bradshaw in a suburban straightjacket. "This is why I could never do this," she yawns. "I'd go nuts."

Roehm has always been a centaur of sorts -- half swan, half pit bull. Or, as she puts it, "the princess and the tomboy." "I'm an extremely competitive person, so I liked playing on the all-boys teams," she says, "because I was better than a lot of them." By the time Roehm was in an all-girls Catholic high school in Cincinnati, her salesman father had moved the family around to eight cities, and she had become as fluent at fitting in as she was at partying. "I really pushed the limits and never got caught," she says. "I always believed knowledge is power, and I can work hard and play hard." Watching her parents argue about finances, she decided early on that she never wanted to rely on anyone else's salary. "I remember thinking, I want to be able to do what I want to do when I want to do it."