Based in Silicon Valley, Store No. 8’s charge is to keep Walmart competitive years into the future by trying to anticipate, if not create, retail’s future. It’s an R&D lab for a company that rose to dominance focusing on the nitty gritty details of logistics, store ops and bare-knuckle retail competition. In other words, it is a modest hedge against the possibility of retail’s future being taken over by a tech company (i.e. Amazon).
Under Flees, Store No. 8 launched the concierge service Jetblack, run by Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss, virtual reality startup Spatialand and artificial intelligence lab IRL. The incubator, launched in 2017, has made other moves since its inception, including developing cashierless store technology, acquiring a product review startup and launching a secret tech-focused “stealth company.”
