Sam’s Club China, the membership-based discount omnichannel retailer and Golden ABC, the Philippines-founded multibrand fashion company, could hardly be more different in terms of retail proposition. 

But they both share stunning growth pathways to become dominant players in their respective categories and markets. Leaders of the two companies featured on Day Three of the NRF’25 Asia Pacific edition in Singapore on Thursday. 

Thirteen years ago, when Andrew Miles took the helm of Walmart’s Sam’s Club China business after 20 years with AS Watson, including five as CEO, the US chain had just six Sam’s Club stores. Now it has 56 and is considered China’s largest omnichannel retailer. 

While Miles joined the business, he was presented with a chart showing a “a big green wave; a tsunami” of consumers graduating into the middle and upper middle classes. “I asked the question, Who’s going to serve these people, and how? These people have got money to spend, they’re educated, and they’ve traveled. They want a better quality of life.” That presented an opportunity.

At a time when the Chinese retail market was starting to trend in the opposite direction, with “everything getting smaller” and hypermarkets downsizing, Sam’s Club began to build 200,000sqft big boxes and charging customers a membership fee for the right to shop there. Responding to the price-focused trend of online retailers, he adopted the everyday low price approach for Sam’s Club as part of a commitment to delivering members consistent value. The ultimate goal was that after a year of membership, they would see the value and willingly renew. 

That was initially a hard sell: “No one wanted membership. No one could understand why you would like to pay to go shopping. There was a genuine fear of ‘anti-membership’ in the market. So we had to get past that, which was one of our biggest challenges.”

Clearly, Sam’s Club succeeded in delivering that value proposition. Today, the business has more than 8.6 million members in China, and last year’s sales surpassed 100 billion yuan (US$13.88 billion at today’s exchange rate). According to Momentum Works, the annual membership fee alone accounts for 2.2 billion yuan ($300 million) of revenue, and the first stores in Shenzhen and Shanghai are the highest-grossing and most profitable Walmart stores in the world. This year, Miles predicts several stores will broach $500 million in sales.

At the same time, Miles and his team also progressively narrowed the range of products sold by Sam’s Club on or offline from around 10,000 SKUs in a store to 3500. 

That took lots of trial and error, he recalls. “There was a lot of top-down encouragement and decision-making to help the team go on the journey.” One category at a time, and one SKU at a time, buyers were encouraged to consider every item ordered, focusing on which was the best in its category. 

In early 2017, Sam’s Club expanded its concept online by developing what it dubs its ‘Cloud’ business, which offered just 1000 of its most popular SKUs to members, delivered within an hour. 

“We can see from day one, in order to serve this tsunami of members that was going to be growing, we had to go beyond physical stores. However, the starting point was to establish our core business, to strengthen our top business, our offline business, and to embed key disciplines within the organization. Once you do that, and you get the foundation strong, then you can start to build on top of that innovation.”

The clouds were transformational, and those community stores turned out to be “a real tipping point for our business” by making it easy for members to access frequently-purchased items. Today, the company has more than 500 virtual Cloud stores anchored by its Sam’s Clubs. 

“Access creates the frequency of shopping. Frequency of shopping creates extra spend, and extra spend means that when I get to the end of the year and ask, Do I renew my membership? The answer is, yeah, I see the value. So Cloud has played a massive role.”

There is no single silver bullet that drove the success of Sam’s Club in China, Miles explains. 

“You don’t build the biggest omnichannel retail business in a market like China by just doing one thing. It’s a series of retail disciplines focused on who you’re trying to serve, being really clear on your communication between everybody with you on that journey, coaching them, showing them by example, keeping that confidence and that clarity of where you’re going, and using great examples of the teams as they go on that journey to their bring that to life, to show how that really is happening, and how our teams, every day are making it happen. 

“For me, that’s the foundation of building a business like Sam’s Club, and I guess that’s what we did.”

For Penshoppe’s parent, providence is as important as profit

Golden ABC, the parent of Penshoppe, has grown since 1986 from a small garment factory with 40 staff into a multibrand, multichannel retail group with 1000 stores across the Philippines alone, and an expanding online and global footprint. Its brands – the other five are Oxgn, Forme, Memo, Regatta, and Bocu – cater to different demographics across women’s and men’s wear. 

Alice Liu, CEO and president of Golden ABC, shared that a key to the business’s success was a commitment to doing good for the community – a focus on both providence and profit. The company invests considerable effort in community building. 

“We want to impact our employees, our community, and our partners in the industry as a whole.”

Within the retail industry, Liu sits on the boards of the Philippine Retailers Association and the Philippine Franchise Association, and more recently, has been asked to join the advisory board by the National Retail Federation for Asia Pacific for this conference. 

“I care deeply about helping uplift the broader retail industry, because I believe that while we compete with each other together, we can really help the whole sector become more robust.”

Golden ABC began with a promise rather than a business plan. In the mid-70s, founders Leo and Norma guaranteed a loan for a family friend who started a clothing factory in Manila. The business did not do well, so the couple guaranteed the bank loan, stepping in to help their friends and the company’s employees. 

“In hindsight, that became the foundation that set the stage for really finding our purpose through the work that we do and giving back to those who need help,” said Liu. “And this has largely shaped who we are as a business today.”

“The decision to do the right thing is always what’s at the back of our mind in everything that we do. You see that in our corporate values also, as well as with stewardship, service and integrity, that’s what it’s rooted in.”

Innovation and reinvention have been a constant part of the company’s history. “A few years after we took over the garment manufacturing business, our executive chairman, Bernie, proposed the idea of venturing into branded retail apparel, instead of just manufacturing.” 

The company no longer manufactures its products, instead partnering with trusted suppliers and manufacturers. “This has allowed us to really focus and build up our capability of becoming brand builders … and we’d like to think that brand building is a core competency.

“We build brands from the ground up, because we believe in speed and agility and building a strong structure that allows us to be flexible and agile and to likewise work with like-minded partners so that together we can create strong synergy and consequently a strong enterprise,” said Liu. 

In conclusion, Liu said the company wants to be seen as “high energy but low ego”. 

“We believe in creating work that means something that is real and tangible, and that has impact, not only for our people, our customers, but also our partners and the rest of the world that we live in.”

• Inside Retail’s coverage of NRF’25 Asia Pacific edition is brought to you by Centric Software.