Ep 311 – Kate Railton (Chief People Officer, Mejuri)

1. When the business model changes, the people model has to change too

Mejuri started as a highly successful e-commerce business. But as retail became a bigger part of the customer experience — and eventually the majority of the business — the people team had to rethink almost everything.

That meant learning how to support employees who weren’t sitting in the same office, working the same hours, or communicating through the same tools. A retail workforce operates inside stores, across time zones, in front of customers, and often in part-time roles. You can’t manage that through corporate osmosis.

“You can’t just do it through osmosis through a meeting. You’ve gotta really be clear on change management.”

The takeaway: don’t assume the systems that worked for one stage of the business will work for the next. When your revenue model shifts, your communication model, training model, engagement model, and leadership model probably need to shift too.

2. Build scaffolding around your blind spots

Kate was very direct about what she didn’t know when Mejuri began scaling retail: she hadn’t come from a retail background. So instead of pretending that gap didn’t exist, she built support around it.

She sought mentors, learned from retail leaders inside the business, and hired people onto her team who had experience in that environment. That humility became a practical operating principle: know where you’re underqualified, then intentionally surround the problem with expertise.

“I tried to build scaffolding around my blind spots so that we can do the best we can.”

This is especially important for People leaders entering a new business model, geography, or workforce type. You don’t need to personally have every answer, but you do need to know where your assumptions might be wrong. The faster you name those gaps, the faster you can build a team and support system that helps the business scale responsibly.

3. Corporate employees need to experience the frontline

One of the clearest changes Mejuri made: getting corporate employees into stores to work shifts. Kate said this is fairly standard in retail, but it became especially important as Mejuri continued scaling its store footprint.

Why? Because the corporate team can’t solve what it doesn’t understand. Product decisions, POS experience, back-of-house realities, customer objections, stylist workflows — all of it becomes more visible when corporate employees actually spend time in the environment they’re supporting.

“If you don’t understand our customer’s experience inside of the store… you can’t solve for it.”

This is a strong reminder for any People team supporting distributed or frontline employees. Don’t design programs from HQ and assume they’ll land. Get close to the work. See the employee experience in context. Then build systems that reflect the actual operating reality, not the corporate version of it.

4. Flattening the org was about decision velocity

Mejuri didn’t flatten the organization because it was chasing a trend. They did it because they were seeing signals that the org was slowing down.

Decisions were getting stuck. Work was getting muddy in the middle. Managers were leading very small teams. Leaders were being pulled into decisions just to move things forward. Employees were also signaling that they weren’t always clear on objectives, KPIs, or where they were supposed to be going.

“We were starting to just get specific signals… decision velocity, or things feeling stuck in this purgatory and unable to really move forward.”

So Mejuri started focusing more intentionally on span of control, clearer ownership, and flatter reporting lines where it made sense. The goal wasn’t simply fewer layers. The goal was clearer accountability, faster decisions, and stronger cross-functional work.

“The team members themselves have been saying that they’re a lot clearer.”

The lesson: org design should be tied to business symptoms. If decisions are slow, ownership is unclear, and leaders are constantly being pulled in to break ties, the structure may be creating drag.

5. Memo writing helped move the company from tasks to strategy

As Mejuri scaled, Kate said the business noticed people were shipping a lot of work — but not always anchoring that work in the larger strategic outcome.

So they moved away from flashy decks and toward written memos. The memo forced leaders to clarify the executive summary, problem statement, hypothesis, timeline, owners, and supporting context. Meetings now often begin with a ten-minute read, followed by comments and discussion.

“The concept of I have a strategy, it’s written down. We can read it, reference it, and everybody can grab alignment from it as a source of truth.”

That shift matters because decks can hide fuzzy thinking. Writing makes the logic visible. It forces the team to answer: What problem are we solving? Why now? What do we believe will happen? Who needs to be involved? How will we know if it worked?

If your company is stuck in performative updates, try replacing the deck with a memo. It may slow the meeting down by ten minutes, but it can speed up alignment by weeks.

6. People metrics need to ladder into business outcomes

Kate shared a practical way Mejuri thinks about people metrics: tier them.

Tier two metrics are the familiar HR health indicators — attrition, exit interview themes, offer acceptance rate, time to ramp, and other signals People teams should always monitor. But tier one metrics are directly connected to the company’s strategy.

For example, if Mejuri trains retail teams on clienteling, the real question isn’t whether employees completed the training. The question is whether conversion improved in the stores or cohorts where that training was expected to make a difference.

“Not that you took the training and passed the test. It should be moving a metric in the business.”

That’s the shift from reporting HR activity to proving business impact. Leaders don’t just need to know what People launched. They need to know whether it changed something that matters.

“What we’re putting in is actually helping us drive business results.”

The punchline: stop showing metrics that leave the business asking, “So what?” Start with the business strategy, identify the people levers that support it, and measure whether those levers are actually moving the outcome.

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