In 2011, Walmart made the bold statement that it would use its cash to promote gender equality. Internationally, the retail giant committed to doubling its sourcing from female suppliers, and in the U.S., it said it would buy $20 billion in products from female-owned U.S. businesses by 2016.
At the time, I was suspicious of the company’s committment–the announcement came quickly after a class action sex discrimination suit against Walmart (though it was thrown out by the Supreme Court). But, at least so far, the reality on the ground is promising.
To help fulfill these goals, Walmart launched in March an online marketplace specifically for women-owned businesses. The platform, Empowering Women Together, features a growing array of products, ranging from dresses to chocolate to paper mache vases.
Walmart has some strict criteria for the businesses: They have to be 51% owned and operated on a day to day basis by at least one woman, and they have to make less than $10 million in annual revenue. That’s a fairly large number, but Walmart is ultimately hoping to lift up smaller suppliers.
“When we launched, it was a bit more strategic in that we didn’t necessarily have a portal of women saying ‘I want to sell to you.’ We had to go see who was out there,” says MiKaela Wardlaw Lemmon, Senior Director of Women’s Economic Empowerment at Walmart. That meant dealing with some unexpected challenges.
In more remote parts of the world, the infrastructure (like roads) isn’t advanced enough to handle third-party logistics carriers like UPS that would normally deliver products. So Walmart teamed up with aggregator partners on the ground that take care of thorny logistics issues, ensuring that local products are combined into single shipments, taken to a port, and sent overseas. “The whole challenge of supply chain was not quite as obvious when we first started the process. We didn’t initially say ‘We need aggregator partners.’ That was one of the early learnings–that we couldn’t do it all ourselves,” explains Lemmon.
Walmart has signed on businesses all over the world. In Rwanda, a group of women are selling dresses via Full Circle Exchange on Walmart’s platform. In Nepal, a small company called Friends Handicrafts is producing handmade iPad cases for the site.