By Mitchell Parton. This story was first reported on and published by Glossy sibling site Modern Retail.
While Sam’s Club does not have a single store in New York City, the wholesale retailer found the city to be the ideal place to promote its health and wellness offerings.
On Thursday, Sam’s Club hosted its first-ever “Sam’s Wellness Club,” an exclusive event bringing together creators, media and merchants at a loft event space overlooking Midtown Manhattan. The space showed off products from areas of the Sam’s Club assortment such as food, health and beauty, flower bouquets, and apparel — some of which attendees could take home with them — as well as interactive components such as massage chairs, ear cleaning and a group sculpt workout class.
“Wellness has been a part of our strategy for a long time at Sam’s; it’s one of the top three things on our members’ minds,” Kaity Whitmire, who oversees the baby, health/beauty and over-the-counter medicine categories at Sam’s Club, told Modern Retail at the event. “What this experience is really for is to demonstrate how it comes together as an ecosystem.”
The event is an example of how Sam’s Club is working to tell a story around all the different health and wellness offerings in its stores — that members may buy both fiber powder alongside grocery items, or fresh fruits and produce alongside blenders.
“The cool part about this experience and this immersion is this is really what the member would find in the club,” Whitmire said. “It’s all about really great items, really incredible values brought to you by industry experts from our merchandising team in a really curated and thoughtful way that supports the members’ everyday wellness journey.”
Sam’s Club also just partnered with Weight Watchers on new membership benefits, including a program that provides medical support to GLP-1 users. Last year, Sam’s Club said 96% of its Member’s Mark private-label food and beverage products were now free of over 40 ingredients such as artificial colors and high-fructose corn syrup.
“We know that our members are focused on healthier living, and this partnership helps us bring that to them in a more accessible and affordable way,” Myron Frazier, chief merchandising officer of Sam’s Club, told Modern Retail in an exclusive interview earlier this month. “Consumer expectations around health and wellness are changing rapidly, and increasingly people want trusted and affordable solutions.”
Whitmire said that, while Sam’s Club has been in the wellness space for a long time, it has become more intentional about highlighting wellness. “That doesn’t just include health foods or medicines; it could also mean high-protein products, beauty items or fitness apparel,” Whitmire said. The event showed off a wide range of products from an electronic face mask to smoothies and workout clothes. “What we’re doing is bringing thoughtful solutions across the entire box together in one place to give that visual and that inspiration to the member.”
With the emergence of the creator economy and social media, Whitmire said Sam’s Club has been spending time analyzing trends such as “fibermaxxing” and high-protein. Specifically, she said the team has looked into not just what is trending, but also why something is trending — like if people generally are looking for sleep support or help getting enough fiber. “What the team does is they go back and look and [ask], ‘Do we have things across the assortment today that meet that objective?’”
Walmart, which owns Sam’s Club, has previously held pop-up events in New York City as marketing activations, including a fashion pop-up this spring with items from Free Assembly and Scoop, as well as stops by its themed “Walmart Delivers” trucks in Brooklyn and Central Park last year.
Sam’s Club decided to host the event in New York City because of its close proximity to health and fitness influencers. “It’s the mecca of wellness,” Whitmire said. Attendees included Matt James of “The Bachelor,” who is now a food and fitness influencer, as well as Austin-based fitness content creator and events host Jenna Palek. Palek also led the workout class at the Sam’s Club event. Whitmire said the creator community is important in helping members and consumers in general understand product trends and use cases.
“People are experiencing products differently now than they ever have before, and a large part of that is due to the creator community,” Whitmire said. “It’s no longer OK just to read a [product detail page] and understand a product; you really want to hear firsthand from someone how it works, you want to see how it works, you want to engage in a different way.”
