The most revealing line in Tanbir Grover’s résumé may be the least technical. He entered e-commerce when Amazon was still, as he puts it, “just a bookstore.” The remark places him in a particular generation of retail operator: early enough to remember when a website was a side project, experienced enough to watch it become the shop window, the stockroom map, the loyalty card and the checkout.
Grover’s path through Canadian retail follows that change almost store by store. Sears gave him the catalogue. Hudson’s Bay gave him a launch. Lowe’s Canada gave him a portfolio of banners. Pet Valu gave him a harder organizational puzzle: how to build a centralized digital business inside a network of locally owned franchises without teaching those owners to fear every online order.
His answer was less about a shiny homepage than about who received credit for the sale. That detail tells you how Grover thinks. Digital transformation is easy to announce from head office. It becomes useful when the incentives survive contact with the store.
The catalogue in the machine
Before retail, Grover worked on special projects at Coca-Cola and managed projects at Bombardier Aerospace. In 2007, Sears hired him to help build its catalogue business. The timing mattered. The iPhone had only just arrived, online merchandising was still a specialty and Sears already possessed decades of experience persuading people to buy something they could not touch yet.
Grover saw continuity where others saw disruption. “The online business was a modernization of the catalogue business,” he later said. Both systems had to organize an assortment, turn descriptions and pictures into confidence, take a remote order and fulfill a promise. The browser changed the speed and the feedback loop. The commercial job remained recognizable.
By 2010, he took that education to Hudson’s Bay Company and helped launch its e-commerce business. Two years later, Lowe’s Canada recruited him. He rose from director to senior director and then vice-president of e-commerce and omnichannel, responsible for lowes.ca, rona.ca and renodepot.com. It was a job about scale, but also about consistency across devices and banners.
“Be inquisitive. Continue to always be willing to learn.”Tanbir Grover
In 2018, RONA’s responsive website redesign received the Retail Council of Canada’s Mobile Experience award. Grover described the aim in plain retail language: customers should be able to browse, compare, select and buy regardless of device. The award belonged to a team, and his public response emphasized that collective effort. The idea underneath it would keep returning: a channel should reduce friction, not ask the shopper to understand the company’s internal boundaries.
Teaching the reason, not just the decision
There is an earlier clue to Grover’s way of working. During his 2003 to 2005 MBA at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, he served as president of the Graduate Business Council and co-captained the dragon boat team. He was a Rotman Scholar and received the Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Award. Those details belong to a campus résumé, but they rhyme with what colleagues would later say about his executive style: he brought people into the reasoning behind a decision.
That distinction matters in digital work. A directive can get a feature shipped. An explanation helps a store operator, marketer or merchant make the next hundred choices without waiting for the executive who issued it. Public recommendations from former colleagues repeatedly describe Grover framing trade-offs, protecting attention for a few large priorities and asking what the customer would think. They also describe an openness to ideas from different levels of the organization.
His own public advice is similarly unadorned: remain inquisitive and keep learning. Marketing shifts too quickly for a finished worldview. Grover had watched the catalogue become a website, the desktop surrender traffic to the phone and online ordering become an ordinary part of a store visit. Curiosity, in that context, is not a personality flourish. It is operating maintenance.
The combination of explanation and curiosity became especially useful when the stakeholder was not an employee. A franchise owner has invested money, reputation and working hours in a local business. Head office cannot rely on hierarchy alone. It must make a case that works in the language of local customers, traffic and sales. Grover’s later Pet Valu work turned that leadership habit into platform design.
The second customer
After a brief 2020 role as vice-president of digital at The Co-operators, Grover joined Pet Valu in November as chief marketing and digital officer. The company’s online proposition was still loose. Inventory was not guaranteed, while payment and pickup happened in the store. The pandemic had compressed years of digital adoption into months, and the retailer was preparing for a public listing.
Grover knew the build would require long hours. He discussed it with his family before saying yes. That domestic conversation is a small but telling scene: the transformation plan arrived home before it reached the customer.
The central complication was the franchise model. Pet Valu needed one online operation, but many stores were owned by local operators. A conventional direct-to-consumer system could make those operators feel that the digital channel had been designed to route around them. Grover treated the franchisee as a second customer of the platform.
The resulting economics made the philosophy concrete. Stores could receive a portion of online sales associated with their loyalty members or shoppers in their postal-code trade area. Pet Valu did not publicly disclose the percentage, but the mechanism mattered. An online order could participate in the local store’s business instead of merely competing with it.
AutoShip showed the same logic in miniature. In one promotion, home delivery earned a five percent discount while in-store pickup earned ten percent. A subscription, often imagined as a way to avoid the shop, became a reason to return to it. The customer received convenience; the store received a visit and the possibility of another conversation.
Third-party delivery required similar persuasion. Pet Valu tested Instacart in corporate stores in British Columbia, then expanded to Ottawa with franchisees able to opt in. The useful data point was incrementality: were these orders reaching people the stores did not already serve? Grover’s public shorthand was, “We want to grab that incrementality.” The sentence is pure operator. It turns a strategic debate into a measurable question.
When a new channel changes who gets credit, design the credit system before selling the vision.
Trying to digitize a bark
Pet retail added an emotional layer to this work. Grover had owned fish, hamsters and turtles. Two years after joining Pet Valu, he got a dog named Levi, to the delight of his children. The executive responsible for understanding devoted pet owners was becoming one himself.
The category also made the limits of software unusually visible. In one store, an associate recognized a returning customer’s dog by its bark. Grover used the moment to pose a digital-product question: how could a website carry that kind of knowledge? He imagined a greeting that knew Levi’s dad had arrived.
That is a more demanding standard than dropping a customer’s first name into a banner. The store associate remembers a relationship. The site usually remembers a transaction. Closing the gap requires useful content, reliable customer data and a tone that respects why people are shopping. Pet Valu brought its Animal Care Experts into online education, turning store knowledge into articles and guidance that could travel farther than one aisle.
Grover’s interest was not digital for its own sake. He described enjoying the cross-functional work required to make online and store operations come alive as one business. His public advice to marketers follows the same practical curiosity: keep learning, stay adaptable, connect the dots only after collecting enough of them.
A chapter closes, the questions remain
Grover’s employment at Pet Valu ended on January 5, 2026. In the months that followed, he appeared publicly as the company’s former chief marketing and digital officer, joining a DeGroote School of Business panel on AI in marketing and a Canadian Retail Collective discussion on the future of merchandising and retail marketing.
Those appearances fit the arc. His career has repeatedly placed him where a new interface meets an old institution: web and catalogue, mobile and big-box, central platform and local franchise, artificial intelligence and the accumulated judgment of a store employee. The useful question is rarely whether technology will arrive. It is how the organization should behave once it does.
Grover’s record offers a grounded answer. Start with the customer’s full journey. Find the people whom a new system might bypass. Put their participation into the operating model. Then explain the why until the transformation belongs to more than the team that built it.
The digital aisle keeps expanding. Grover’s contribution to Canadian retail is a reminder that its strongest connection may still run through a local store, a familiar employee and, sometimes, a dog whose bark somebody knows.