Mike Graen Verified listing

Mike Graen has spent more than four decades on a question that sounds simple and almost never is: where is the product, and what will it take to get it on the shelf. Answering it well, across the supply chain, inside the store, and between the companies that have to cooperate to make it happen, is the work of his career, and it's what he brings to Retail Ready.

His perspective was earned in the seats that actually run retail. He spent twenty-five years at Procter & Gamble leading the technology relationship with Walmart, including the early work that became Retail Link. He then moved inside Walmart, where he owned the business side of RFID and built much of the supplier collaboration infrastructure the industry still relies on. Along the way he has worked at the front edge of on-shelf availability, shelf-scanning robotics, and electronic shelf labels, the technologies that decide whether what a system says is on the shelf is actually there.

That history is unusual. Mike has worked the supplier side, the retailer side, and the solution-provider side of the same problem, which is why he understands that the technology is rarely the hard part. Getting retailers, their suppliers, and the providers who serve them aligned enough to deploy it, and to keep it working, is the hard part, and it's the thing he's spent a career getting right.

On Retail Ready and in his advisory work, that's exactly what he does. Mike partners with retailers, consumer products companies, and solution providers around the world, using his reach and his relationships to drive real product availability and the alignment that makes it possible. He's less interested in what a technology can do in a demo than in whether it holds up on a Saturday afternoon in a real store, and what it takes to get there. For the teams trying to turn retail technology into results on the floor, that's the whole point.