Below is a summary of our interview with Lee Mackedanz. You can listen to the full interview using the embedded media player below or on your favorite podcast platform (e.g., Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music).
In this episode of Pricing Heroes, we sit down with Lee Mackedanz, Founder and Managing Partner of Value Capture Consulting, and a veteran pricing executive with leadership roles at Kohl’s, JCPenney, Fossil Group, Office Depot, SuperValu, and Advance Auto Parts. With more than 20 years of experience shaping pricing strategy across industries, Lee has delivered more than $700 million in incremental sales and margin improvements through disciplined leadership, credible influence, and scalable transformation.
Our conversation explores how pricing leaders can earn trust from merchants, compete with disruptors like Amazon, build organizational buy-in for a formal pricing function, and prepare teams for the adoption of technology and AI.
From Merchandising to Pricing Leadership
Like many in the profession, Lee never planned on a career in pricing. He began as a merchant at Best Buy and later at Advance Auto Parts, where he learned to navigate every facet of the business: supply chain, marketing, assortment, and customer demand. That broad exposure gave him a strong commercial grounding. When a pricing leadership role unexpectedly opened, colleagues encouraged him to apply. He took the leap, thinking it would be a short detour before returning to merchandising. Instead, it became a defining career shift.
That background proved to be a major advantage. “The merchants were essentially my customers,” Lee recalls. “Having been in their shoes gave me credibility. I could anticipate their pain points and frame arguments in a way that resonated.” He emphasizes that pricing leaders don’t need to have lived the full grind of merchandising, but they must understand it deeply to succeed. Without that empathy, influence becomes far harder to establish.
This lesson shaped Lee’s leadership approach across future roles. Whether working in automotive, grocery, office supplies, or apparel, he used his merchant’s eye to balance category realities with pricing strategy. His journey highlights the importance of commercial fluency: pricing leaders who can connect technical insights to day-to-day retail realities are far more likely to gain trust, earn buy-in, and deliver measurable results.
Competing with Amazon: Pricing to Value, Not Just Price
One of Lee’s most formative challenges came at Office Depot during the years when Amazon was rapidly expanding its dominance in office supplies. Competing on price alone was impossible. Amazon’s structure allowed it to scrape prices, change them instantly, and operate with a cost base most traditional retailers couldn’t match. For Office Depot, survival meant differentiation.
Lee and his team leaned into areas where Office Depot could deliver unique value. They built out buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) capabilities, which allowed customers to get essentials like printer ink immediately — something Amazon couldn’t offer at the time. They emphasized the in-store experience for higher-ticket items such as office furniture, where customers wanted to see, test, and feel the product before committing. They also invested in private-label assortments, offering quality alternatives priced competitively against national brands.
“Amazon is built to play the transactional game,” Lee explains. “If you get lost in just price, you’ll lose. You have to know your value proposition and price to that value.” This lesson still resonates today: retailers competing with digital-first disruptors must go beyond price wars, instead building differentiation into the customer experience and ensuring pricing reflects that value.
Building Pricing Maturity at Kohl’s
When Lee joined Kohl’s as its first-ever VP of Pricing, he faced a new challenge: creating a pricing discipline inside an organization that had never treated it as such. Kohl’s culture was highly stable, with long-tenured employees and a strong bias toward promoting from within. For Lee, arriving as an outsider to lead a function that hadn’t previously existed meant he had to start from scratch — both in building credibility and in shaping the role of pricing within the business.
He began by reframing promotions and discounts as strategic resources, not blunt instruments. Rather than spreading discounts evenly across assortments, he encouraged teams to treat markdown dollars as finite assets to be allocated where they could deliver the most impact. This required testing, iteration, and evidence. Early experiments in juniors’ apparel provided proof: discounting weak performers did little to move units, so the best choice was to hold prices steady and reserve markdowns for clearance. Documented wins like these created momentum.
Lee stresses that success came not from forcing change, but from patient influence. “It was better to go slow and win than to go fast and lose,” he says. Over time, his team’s successes snowballed. Merchants who initially resisted began to advocate for the pricing team, and pricing became a trusted partner in planning events, promotions, and competitive adjustments. For Kohl’s, this marked the shift from reactive pricing activity to deliberate pricing discipline — a transformation that required both strategy and credibility.
Preparing for AI: Why Foundations Matter
As new technologies and AI-based pricing solutions emerged, Lee recognized a common pitfall: companies eager to implement advanced tools without the right groundwork in place. He argues that technology cannot compensate for poor strategy, incomplete data, or lack of governance. “If you don’t have a set strategy and you have bad prices, bring in a tool and you’ll just have bad prices faster — and more expensively,” he warns.
Foundational readiness starts with data. Companies must be able to measure outcomes clearly — understanding whether a price change drove units, margin, or customer satisfaction. Beyond that, organizations must define objectives: is the goal to drive margin dollars, maximize unit growth, or improve top-line sales? Tools need direction, and without clear guardrails, they generate outcomes that may not align with brand or business goals.
Governance and process are equally critical. Who owns pricing decisions? How often can prices change? How should competitive rules and thresholds be enforced? Without clarity, tools can overwhelm merchants and erode confidence. For Lee, AI readiness is less about the technology itself and more about organizational maturity: transparent goals, structured processes, and a culture of measurement. Only then can technology deliver transformative results.
Leadership as Influence, Persuasion, and Courage
Throughout his career, Lee has emphasized that pricing leadership is as much about people as it is about numbers. Influence, not authority, is the core of the role. “I focus on openness,” he explains. “I think I’m right, but I don’t know I’m right. Let’s test it and see.” This humility, paired with a commitment to testing and data, allowed him to win over skeptics.
At Kohl’s, for instance, he persuaded a resistant VP of men’s suiting to scale back discounts from 30% to 20%. The result: units sold held steady, proving that deep discounts weren’t necessary. That single win turned a skeptic into one of the pricing team’s biggest advocates, creating a story that resonated across the organization.
Leadership also requires courage. Not every pricing decision will succeed, and not every test will deliver the expected results. Lee stresses that leaders must be willing to take risks, fail fast, and learn. “If you don’t have the courage to make bold decisions, you’ll sink back and won’t be the change agent the organization needs,” he says. For him, courage, collaboration, and transparency are the hallmarks of effective pricing leadership.
Pricing in the Spotlight: Responsibility and Transparency
Pricing has increasingly become a flashpoint in public and political debates, from accusations of “price gouging” during inflationary periods to legislation requiring disclosure of AI-driven pricing. Lee believes that organizations must embrace transparency and align pricing decisions with their brand values. “Anytime you make a pricing decision you intentionally try to hide, that should raise red flags,” he notes.
He emphasizes that customers ultimately serve as the final judge. Retailers must ensure their pricing strategies reflect not only profitability goals but also fairness and long-term trust. Whether competing in-store versus online or navigating tariffs and cost increases, Lee’s advice is to align every decision with the company’s North Star: its mission, values, and customer promise.
Recommended Resources
Lee encourages pricing professionals to expand their knowledge and stay connected through diverse resources:
- The Pricing Roadmap by Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt
- ChiefPricingOfficer.com newsletters and community discussions
- LinkedIn pricing groups, where case studies and debates provide real-world learning opportunities
