Macy’s Exclusive Workshop Schools Entrepreneurs How to Make ‘Magic’

Finally, all candidates have to make a final presentation to a group of judges before being considered for graduation.

Helping Minority and Women Owned Businesses Prosper

The goal behind the program is to target minority and women-owned businesses and provide them the opportunities to succeed. To teach them to allocate resources in a better way to best drive their business.

Outler explains, “When I first took on the role about five years ago, we set out to grow minority and women-owned businesses, we had a few that were on board, but we realized that they weren’t growing. And so, I interviewed those companies as well as the buyers who were doing business with them, just to assess the opportunities or gaps. We soon realized that most of the companies were unaware of, or educated about what it took to be successful and how to measure their business the way we do. They also had a presence online but didn’t know how to translate that into a retail environment with either an online partner or a brick and mortar.”

She says, “The realization of what their business could be or their full potential was never fully fleshed out between the two parties.”

More importantly, the aim of the program is to teach how to fill some of those gaps and how to fill specific needs.

She says, “Most new business owners shoot from the hip. Our vendors were not educated about going into meetings with major retailers to articulate what they’re looking for, beyond getting the deal. Helping them step back and look at their business from a holistic point of view and be strategic about the direction in honing that,” that’s one of the missions of the workshop.