Molly Hartney

Ask most executives to name the moment their career turned, and you will get a fog of humility and buzzwords. Molly Hartney gives you a sentence you could stitch on a pillow: the day she realized she was "a leader first and my job was second." It sounds modest. It is not. It is the difference between a marketer who guards a budget and one who ends up running the digital future of a 3,700-person shoe company.

Hartney is Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer of Rack Room Shoes, the family-owned footwear retailer that has been putting affordable sneakers on American feet from its base in Charlotte, North Carolina. She joined in 2021 with a single chief title. She now holds two, which is either a sign of unusual talent or an unusually clever way to avoid printing new business cards. In her case, the record suggests the former.

The numbers do the arguing. Since she arrived, Rack Room Shoes credits her with a 40 percent increase in customer retention and a 36 percent improvement in productivity - the sort of figures that make a boardroom lean forward. In July 2025 the company responded in the only language executives truly respect: a promotion, and a brand new one at that. It created the role of Chief Digital Officer specifically to fuse the marketing she already ran with the company's digital sales and omnichannel strategy. CEO Mark Lardie called her "a creative marketing and digital innovator." The org chart called it a merger.

From home improvement to collectibles to shoes

Hartney did not arrive in footwear by the scenic route so much as by the entire tour of American consumer life. She earned a degree in communication studies and marketing from Clemson University, then went to work at Lowe's, the home-improvement giant, where she learned retail at industrial scale. From there she joined The Mine, a Lowe's-affiliated online home furnishings brand, rising to vice president of marketing and merchandising and steering its digital transformation before "digital transformation" became the phrase every company printed on a slide.

Then came the fun detour. In 2018 she was named Chief Marketing Officer and senior vice president of digital at Funko, the Seattle company that turns every fictional character you have ever loved into a big-headed vinyl figure. It was there that Hartney discovered a truth that would follow her: people do not buy products, they buy belonging. "I love the fans," she said plainly, and proceeded to grow Funko's YouTube brand awareness by 170 percent. Selling shoes, it turns out, is not so different from selling a shelf of Pop! figures. Both are really about knowing what people quietly care about.

The listening executive

What makes Hartney interesting is not the resume - plenty of people collect logos. It is what she claims to actually do all day. By her own account she spends far more of her time now listening, asking questions, and connecting teams across disciplines than issuing decrees from a corner office. "Taking a moment to understand the who, what, where, why and how allows teams to work through problems," she has said. And, more bluntly: "Lack of communication will be the downfall of any leader."

This is not the standard-issue humility of a press release. It is a working method. A Chief Digital Officer who came up through marketing rather than engineering has exactly one way to succeed: get the smart people in the same room and translate between them. Hartney has built a career on being the person who can talk to the merchandiser, the technologist, and the customer in the same afternoon and leave all three feeling understood.

On artificial intelligence, an honest admission

Here is the part that ought to disarm the skeptics. Asked once to name her one career regret, Hartney did not offer some rehearsed non-answer about "not taking enough risks." She said: "Learn to code!" Two words. An executive now charged with leading her company's AI strategy, cheerfully admitting she never learned the language underneath it all.

It would be easy to read that as a weakness. It is closer to a strength. Hartney has become a vocal advocate for building AI literacy - the emphasis on literacy, not wizardry - and for applying the technology responsibly to marketing, online inventory optimization, personalization, and internal productivity. She is not promising to hand-write the algorithms. She is promising to make sure the humans around them ask the right questions. Given how much retail AI amounts to expensive tools pointed in the wrong direction, that may be the more valuable skill.

Why a shoe company invented a job for her

It is worth pausing on how unusual the 2025 promotion actually was. Companies do not typically manufacture C-suite roles on a whim; a new chief title is a public statement about where a business believes its future lives. Rack Room Shoes looked at its marketing chief - a role many retailers still treat as the department that makes the logos bigger - and decided it was the natural home for the entire digital and omnichannel operation. The message was unmistakable. In modern retail, the person who understands the customer's story is the person who should own the technology that serves it.

The realignment paired her elevation with the promotion of Brian Burnett to senior vice president and chief merchandise officer, a deliberate move to align merchandising and digital under a single coherent strategy rather than the traditional retail turf war between the people who buy the shoes and the people who sell them online. Hartney's remit sits at that seam. Her job is to make the website, the mobile app, the loyalty program, and the physical shelf behave like one organism rather than four departments that occasionally email each other. It is unglamorous plumbing work dressed up in an impressive title, and it is exactly the kind of problem she has spent fifteen years learning to solve.

What success looks like now

Early in a career, success is a title and a number. Hartney has both, so she has moved the goalposts. Her stated definition of winning now sounds almost stubbornly long-term: building capabilities that scale, developing leaders who grow into bigger roles, creating resilient and ethical systems, and making sure the work genuinely improves both customer experience and employee engagement. At Funko she once mentored a colleague out of digital products and into marketing leadership, which is the kind of quiet act that never makes a quarterly report but shows up in someone else's promotion years later.

She credits a former Lowe's manager, Michelle Brown, for planting the customer-first philosophy that runs through everything she does. And in her Funko days she gave her imaginary autobiography a title that reads like a mission statement: Take Epic Chances. For a leader who has bounced from lumber to lightning-headed collectibles to sneakers, it is hard to argue she hasn't lived up to the byline.

The footwear future, in flats and heels

Today Hartney's mandate at Rack Room Shoes is straightforward to describe and hard to do: take a legacy, family-owned retailer with 1.3 billion dollars in revenue and make its digital experience feel as effortless as walking into a store and having someone actually know your size. That means loyalty programs that reward the right people, personalization that does not feel like surveillance, and an omnichannel strategy where the app, the website, and the shelf all agree on who you are.

The strategy she describes is not fashionable jargon so much as patient common sense. Loyalty, to Hartney, is not a points scheme bolted onto a checkout page; it is the accumulated result of a company remembering you correctly. Personalization is not about knowing everything a shopper does, but about knowing the few things that matter and quietly acting on them. And an app is only worth building if it agrees with the store down the road about who you are and what you last bought. These sound like small ambitions. In an industry where digital and physical retail still frequently contradict each other, they are quietly radical.

She is doing it, notably, from Charlotte rather than a coastal tech hub, at a company that predates the internet, in an industry not famous for reinvention. That may be the most Molly Hartney detail of all. She keeps choosing the unglamorous middle of American retail and quietly making it grow. The industry noticed: in 2026 Footwear News named her one of its "Women Who Rock" for exactly this kind of innovation. Two chief titles, a wall of growth metrics, and a regret about coding she has turned into a philosophy. Not bad for a communications major who decided, somewhere along the way, that the job was always going to be second.