The most revealing detail in Christie Raymond's résumé is printed near the bottom: industrial engineering, Stanford. Long before she became the chief marketing officer responsible for the sprawling conversation between Kohl's and its customers, she learned to look at systems. Inputs, constraints, handoffs, friction. Retail would give those abstractions fluorescent lighting, a rewards account, a fitting room, and a family wondering whether one pair of trousers could survive both school and Sunday dinner.
Raymond's career has been an argument that the human story and the operating system belong in the same meeting. At Kohl's, her remit eventually included marketing strategy, brand and creative, media and personalization, credit and loyalty, customer insight and analytics, corporate communications, philanthropy, and customer service. It is a list long enough to lose a semicolon in. The logic beneath it is cleaner: nearly everything the customer sees, hears, earns, clicks, or asks should tell a coherent story.
That work is entering a coda. On August 25, 2026, Kohl's announced a new chief customer officer position uniting marketing with digital commerce. Raymond's CMO position was eliminated, and her employment is scheduled to end September 9. An org chart has changed. The more interesting question is what her nine years at Kohl's leave behind: a practical method for listening at retail scale.
The engineer enters the magic kingdom
Before Menomonee Falls, there was Disney. Raymond spent the majority of her pre-Kohl's career at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, moving through business strategy and development, marketing, consumer insights, analytics, and personalization. She also held leadership roles at Aspen Club Technologies. The Disney years matter because a theme park is a master class in the customer journey. Anticipation, arrival, waiting, surprise, memory: the product happens across time, and every awkward handoff shows.
Retail has different scenery, but similar choreography. A shopper encounters an ad, checks a phone, visits a store, tries a product, earns a reward, and perhaps returns the purchase. No single department owns that whole trip. Raymond's subsequent roles read like an attempt to follow it anyway.
She joined Kohl's in October 2017 as senior vice president of media and personalization. In June 2020 she became executive vice president of customer engagement, analytics and insights. She stepped in as interim CMO in May 2022 and received the permanent title that August. The promotions did not pull her away from data. They widened the canvas on which the data had to make sense.
“We know simplification is important.”Christie Raymond on the customer value proposition
Loyalty is a verb
In retail, loyalty can sound like a noun owned by a database. Raymond talked about it as a set of choices. By 2023, Kohl's said its rewards program had well over 30 million members. Cardholders could earn enhanced rewards, receive personalized deals, and collect a birthday gift. The partnership with Sephora connected two established loyalty systems. Yet Raymond kept returning to trust and ease. A customer enrolled in many programs needs a reason to choose one retailer over every other tab, app, and parking lot.
Simplicity sounds almost insultingly obvious until a company tries it. Discounts carry conditions. Rewards expire. A beauty partner has its own points. A customer moves between channels while the organization moves between teams. Raymond's discipline was to ask what the shopper experienced, not which internal group completed its assignment.
She also noticed the private arithmetic happening before checkout. During inflation, she said, customers were calculating cost per wear. Could a garment last? Could a child wear it more than one way? The price tag offered one number, while the shopper supplied a denominator made of school days, laundry cycles, and household budgets. Value was not a slogan. It was a little equation conducted in an aisle.
Reality, with the coupons left in
Raymond's most visible work tried to make a giant department store feel less generic. In 2024, Kohl's introduced “Where Families Come First,” a platform built around candid domestic life rather than immaculate highlight reels. Its scenes included sibling ping-pong rivalry, a newborn's midnight wake-up, first apartments, crowded dinner tables, and grandparents making waffles. These are not epic events. That was their charm. Raymond argued that families were already surrounded by polished perfection and that the brand could earn attention by showing life with the creases left in.
Two years later, the By Kohl's campaign confronted a different identity problem. The retailer's proprietary labels had fans, but not every shopper understood that FLX, Jumping Beans, Sonoma Goods for Life, Tek Gear, and others belonged to a distinct Kohl's portfolio. Raymond and chief merchandising officer Nick Jones gave the collection a shared signature without sanding down the individual brands.
The examples were delightfully concrete: reinforced knees on children's pants; an activewear line that could travel from work to golf; signage that helped a shopper recognize and navigate the labels in a store. Broadcast, social, digital, and physical retail carried one connected platform. Raymond said she wanted customers to rediscover Kohl's and find a new favorite they might return to season after season. In other words, brand architecture had to earn its square footage.
Influence gets an operating plan
By spring 2026, Raymond was applying the same system thinking to creators. Kohl's worked with roughly 1,500 nano-creators and about 200 larger creators, while introducing affiliate commissions and a four-person Trend Expert Council. Instead of treating creators as decorative media buys, the team integrated their work across the marketing ecosystem: events, social programs, product storytelling, and sales moments.
The selection logic began with an objective. Some creators could extend reach. Others could serve a family, travel, apparel, or beauty audience. Affiliate partners could help convert a Black Friday moment. Values and brand fit remained filters. The useful idea is not that every company needs 1,700 people with ring lights. It is that every partnership needs a defined role before the casting begins.
Raymond's public comments sound more like an operator than a celebrity CMO. She speaks of granular objectives, customer context, key performance indicators, experiments, and touchpoints. Yet the arithmetic repeatedly bends toward empathy. A 2023 podcast conversation about machine learning and loyalty also made room for developing leaders and empathetic management. The engineer never leaves the room; she simply learns that people are part of the system and cannot be reduced to error terms.
“We spend a lot of time understanding the consumer, what's important to them.”Christie Raymond on staying relevant
The apprentice table
One small scene reveals the leadership style better than a title can. In the summer of 2024, Kohl's welcomed 15 marketing interns. Raymond sat down with the group to discuss current trends, career growth, and how the retailer could remain authentic. In her public note afterward, she emphasized that she enjoyed hearing and learning from the next generation of retail leaders.
The phrasing matters. Senior executives are routinely invited to tell interns what the world is like. Raymond described the exchange as a chance to learn. It is consistent with her broader method: useful signals can arrive from anywhere, so the leader's job is not to look omniscient. It is to keep the listening machinery switched on.
That instinct extends beyond retail. In April 2024, Raymond joined the boards of Interstate Power and Light Company and Wisconsin Power and Light Company, Alliant Energy's public utility subsidiaries. She serves on audit and compensation committees. Customer analytics, risk oversight, technology systems, and financial literacy now meet in a business where reliability is not a brand flourish but a daily obligation.
Kohl's is consolidating marketing, loyalty, personalization, media, and digital commerce under a new chief customer officer. Raymond's CMO employment is scheduled to end September 9, while her Alliant Energy board term runs through 2028.
What survives the org chart
Raymond's departure arrives as Kohl's continues a difficult retail reset. The company wants clearer value, stronger style credentials, a more balanced assortment, and a frictionless omnichannel experience. Organizational changes are blunt instruments for delicate problems. They move reporting lines overnight; customers revise their habits on no such schedule.
Still, the creation of a role that joins marketing and digital commerce validates an idea threaded through Raymond's career: the customer does not care which executive owns the screen, the sign, the reward, or the return. The journey is one journey. A brand becomes credible when its internal pieces cooperate well enough to disappear.
Her next operating role has not been announced. Her public aspiration at Alliant is broader than a job description: use experience with consumer brands to meet changing customer needs and strengthen communities. It is a plausible continuation for someone who has moved from engineered systems to magical ones, from theme parks to department stores, and from loyalty points to utility governance.
The lesson worth stealing is compact. Listen for context, not merely clicks. Simplify until the promise is easy to recognize. Measure the job each idea was hired to do. And when a shopper is standing in an aisle calculating cost per wear, remember that the most important spreadsheet may be the one in her head.