Kimberly-Clark

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F500-2021-158-Kimberly Clark

The multinational corporation is a leading producer of paper-based consumer products; its brand names include Kleenex, Huggies, and Cottonelle. The COVID pandemic led to a big sales bump in cleaning and disinfecting supplies.

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F500-2020-175-Kimberly-Clark

With a history that dates back to 1872, the manufacturer of paper-based products has many household brands in its portfolio, including Kleenex, Depend, Scott, and Huggies.

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Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Kimberly-Clark, founded in 1872, manufactures and sells a wide range of consumer products including disposable diapers, baby wipes, feminine care products, tissues, soaps, and sanitizers. Its household-name personal care brands—like Huggies, Kotex, Cottonelle, and Kleenex—are stocked at retailers in over 175 countries. In 2025 Kimberly-Clark announced a plan to devote $2 billion over five years to its U.S. manufacturing business, as it seeks to expand its domestic capabilities amid Trump’s manufacturing push.

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Kimberly-Clark (KMB): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Kimberly-Clark | Fortune

Kimberly-Clark (KMB): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

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Roz Brewer, Chief Executive Officer and Director, Walgreens Boots Alliance


Most Powerful Women 2022 - Breaking Barriers

Ladies, please welcome back fortunes Mahala, I'm back. Alright. This time it's gonna be very short. Can I have your attention? Hello ladies. Hi. Okay, so our conversation this evening is without question with one of the most influential women in corporate America no pressure Rosalind brewer rose through the ranks from her early days in management at Kimberly Clark to taking the reins as chief executive at Walgreens Boots Alliance in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic, a move. She herself described as pretty gutsy and I think that's probably true. She was recently quoted as saying she's in the most rewarding moment of her career right now, we want to hear from her on that and also about her leadership toolbox and so much more. We're also happy to note that she is # seven on this year's list of most powerful women. So please welcome Rod to the stage along with my dear colleague and fellow coach, er Beth Cohen ross welcome um It has been five years since you have been with us on the M. P. W. Stage and we've missed you. So thank you for thank you for being back. Um What's happened since then you at the time you were Ceo sam's club, then you went to Starbucks. Now you are Ceo, That's a very abbreviated a lot of other things. Right, But in that time I'm sure you've got a lot of calls about Ceo job. Why did you take this one? Well, you know, actually best um timing is everything and um I was loving Starbucks. Um you couldn't tell me anything. Um I thought that that was like the best job ever. I mean it was fun, right? It's coffee, it's flat, you know, um you know, it was just, it was everything and um, I enjoyed a lot about it, but as things were happening around me, um, there was, you know, that growing activist in me and it wasn't enough, it, you know, when things happened and this moment came and the opportunity met the moment and um I sort of snapped in a good way, you know, and this was something that just pulled me in um and made me change my mind about a lot of things, tell me more about that house. So, so, you know, um, I think everyone knows, you know, this pandemic was just horrific and um, I joined in March of 21, it was 30 days before vaccines were being administered. So the death toll was very high. Um, I had been seeing and experiencing through friends and family, the, you know, the health inequities that were happening and um, I knew I had been part of healthcare years ago, so ran tons of retail pharmacies through my time at walmart and at Sam's club and then I had a health care role at Kimberly clark. So healthcare has always been right for disruption. So I saw this as a um, problem, ready to burst, right? And so executing vaccines while people were dying at this high rate, um, and affecting everything around us on the backs of social unrest, Our communities were not ready for this. Um, and so I just felt like it was time for me to take everything I've learned and put it against one of the biggest problems I thought I was gonna ever face in my life. So as we all said, you know, it was a gutsy move as you've acknowledged, um, how has that shaped your ambition for Walgreens taking over in the middle of a pandemic? How's that shaped your thinking? So, you know, um, you learn a lot in a crisis and usually, you know, a lot of innovation happens. Um, that's in fact what happened to us if I just isolate just vaccine administration alone, um, just creating the technology around the scheduling tool, right? And so you come into an environment that is a pharmacy led environment. I learned quickly on day two that they had not done, You know, um, a lot of opportunity was there for digital and technology. And so we had 30 days to build a system. And um, all my friends from tech called me and said, Hey, you know, come over our right to program for you in two seconds, you know, and so I called on every friend we had and the team was actually raring to go, but you know, having done, um, a lot of digital work in my career. Um, this reminded me of, you know, the time in retail when we had to figure out how to become a digital entity and look at all the different channels of access for retail and that was the same thing. We needed access to vaccines and people needed a place and know how to get in and they needed knowledge and they need education. And so, um, you know, it's such a flashback to the retail transformation and so we just we put all that to bear, but it's it's what it has done for me is to say you likely do your best work when your challenge and the timeline is shortened and the resources look limited. And that's when you see that young engineer just step up and blow it out, right? And you know, they never would have gotten that opportunity. And so I've learned that, you know, I have talent in the bowels of the company. Um, I also learned that, you know, having, um, a one single objective, you know, our objective was shots in arms and that we, you know, we had t shirts that said that just very simply right? And so we ended up putting 70 million shots in arms. So, um, you know, so I quickly got a chance to see the company from the inside out, um, through the crisis. And um, I'll tell you, I've actually fallen in love with the company. I mean it has so much opportunity for growth and in an industry that's just right for change. So I want to talk about your own ambition for a second. Okay. At what point in your career did you know you were going to be a ceo Oh shoot, I never really knew that, you know, it just kind of came, I think that's really, you know um I think all of us can say this, we've seen we've had good leaders and we've had bad leaders and I've always tried to wedge myself in between those and so I never will do that. Um Or I like that, right? And so um you know I've had those opportunities but then it really came to me that um in many cases um you know I had more skills than I knew or believed, right? And and that's the closest the closer I got to C. E. O. S, you know being chief operating officer at Starbucks um really taught me, you know the importance of execution and planning and um then setting vision and bold ideas and so I quickly, you know, learned that it was probably time, right? I was bumping up a little bit more than I probably should have been or you know, maybe you know the ceo maybe thought but you know it's um you know and I don't mean in a bad way I'm just saying you know we were we were good partners. Um but I saw my potential at that point, I like that, I like that. So how have you thought about your career, have you said yes to everything? How is that? Thinking evolved over time? No, no, I got really clear, you know, I had, I had, there was a point in my career where I had so many, um, what I would call grunt jobs that it was making me sick to my stomach, I was like, okay, one more time, okay, I'll go do the worst job ever and make the best of it, right? And so after a while it was like over that, right? And so I, um after a while I started being very critical about, I don't want to, you know, like, I didn't say I want to be a ceo of a healthcare entity. I said I don't want to do that, that doesn't interest me, but I got very, very clear and said, no, titles never impressed me. Money never impressed me. I really wanted to be in the place where it was happening, right? You know, I know that there's this little tiny thing in me that feels like change is always got to happen and if it's not happening, I want to push it and make it happen and you can't do that sometimes from the back row, you've got to be, you know, up there, but then you can't do it without the skills. And so I quickly knew I've got to build in order to get where I can do my best work and when I feel my best self and that's when I'm right on the edge of where it's happening. So that's um you did not start out on a traditional ceo path though. I mean you started as a bench chemist. I did, I did. So how did you make that transition in turn? Yeah, so, you know, I was probably one of those, you know, loud nagging bench chemist that was like, you know, dang it, I gotta, you know, do you know, stuck in the lab on Saturdays, you know, you start because I was actually, I'm an organic chemist. And so I started off really just doing wet chemistry and it's kind of isolating right? There's like nobody in the lab but you and a couple other scientists and then, you know, you're on the end of research and development that gets, you know, gets cut, you know, that's where cost cutting happens. And so you get so excited about developing and creating something and, you know, the budget shifts. And so I got a little frustrated with that. So I eventually moved over to um, you know, actually I went into m and a at that point with Kimberly clark and I was on the side with the um, you know, valuing uh patent estates and things like that. So part of the business team, but on the periphery of it, but then I just came inside through that way and did you ask for that? No, actually I didn't know what was going on, I didn't understand them and a I was like, what's going on? They're like, well, you know, we're like a paper company and we want to be in, you know, consumer products, you know, we want to be like PNG. I was like, okay, whatever, I don't really understand what I was doing, they were like just go out with the lawyers and the finance team, we're gonna think about this company, you know, kind of, you know, value their patent status, you know, So I was like, okay, the next thing and I was like, oh, this is M and A okay, you know? Really? I mean, I just wasn't, I mean, I was five or six years into my career, I did not know what I was doing, I don't have an M. B. A. I didn't have a financial background, but I was there to bring the expertise on the technology side. So you are the youngest of five, I am first generation in your family to go to college and you were the yeah. And and you were the first correctness around the first of the five kids to leave the state to go to. That's right, that's right. How has that shaped you? I mean, clearly you were already cutting your own path that at that point, yeah, yeah. You know, my family thought I was like totally like crazy, like why would you leave michigan, there's like you have them there, Michigan state, wayne state, you know, wonderful community colleges, all that I loved, right? And but I, you know, I didn't like the cold weather and then I saw this, I saw this brochure on the south and Spelman College, I was like oh I like that, right? So I was looking for um fun and frolic, you know, like Like anybody else, I was 18 years old and it happened to be outside of Michigan. So right, but I mean you you talked about this before, it was hard for your family know it was hard, you know, because while I was in school my dad was my sophomore year, my dad was diagnosed with colon cancer and he was 49 and then by six weeks before I graduated from college he passed away. And so for him he was the one was just like education, I mean he was just like plowing it into me, you know, I could get a C and he'd be like, you know, that's great. And so for him not to be, there was really hard, so you know, I broke away but you know, it was I grew up really fast because by the time I finished school um you know, and then there was a point in there where there were four of us in college and my dad worked three jobs and my mom worked, you know, I was a latchkey child at three years old because I was the youngest of five and everybody was off doing their thing. My oldest sister is nine years older than me. And so they would prop me in the window. Um, at about 2 30 my mom would go work the afternoon shift And I'd be sitting in the window like this and all the neighbors would be walking down the street because you know, that's when, you know, your neighbors raised you in addition to your parents, that's when we lived in villages, right? And everybody took care of each other. And um, I'd be sitting in the window until the older siblings got home from school and I did that until I was five years old from 3-5. I have to ask you more about spelman because I know this is so important to you. Um, you said that There you really learned the importance of seeing yourself and other people tell me more about that. Yeah. So, you know, Spelman is a unique place and it is very special to me. I've been working with the college ever since I graduated and chairing the board for the last 10 years, but you know, going to school with, um, you know, all black women, you know, I came from a pretty diverse school, but predominantly white high school. And so to be shoulder to shoulder with women who had experiences similar to mine and some not because, you know, there's a broad socioeconomic um, student based at Spelman, you know, the positions and lawyers, kids and you know, and then my parents being auto workers, right? And so I saw really the diversity within the diversity and I never thought there was diversity within diversity. I never thought that until I got to that school. And so it's taught me a lot about, you know, race relations in a way that it is very specific and particular about that person's lived experiences is not about their exterior at all. Um, and so, but it took that experience for me to learn that. And I, you know, I feel better, um, stronger because of it. So you had a very different experience than when you entered corporate America. Um, Oh yeah. So you and I talked about this before, but you know how your accomplishments are often positioned as the first or the only. Yeah. Tell me, tell us honestly how that makes you feel. You know, it's I, you know, I really mean this seriously, it's never a good feeling because first of all, I'm still like walking in being the only one in the room, right? And then, um, I looked down and, you know, young women and I, and I know what I've been through and I said, you know, I just want to like quit my job and like help, right? Because, you know, I've seen it, right? And I see what's on their faces. And so it doesn't feel good to be the only because, you know, this should be moving, it should be much stronger than what it is right now. We should be moving in tandem with, you know, multitudes of people. Um So it doesn't feel good when when, when I hear that, you know, um because it just shouldn't be and, you know, I hope that I can do as much as I can to change that, but it's gonna take more than me to do that. I realized that yeah. Um I want to end by, you know, we have a group uh from the military community here. And you met some of them earlier. Yeah. And you'll hear a little bit more about them right after this. But what advice would you get them as they think about their own careers? You know, First of all, I mean, I've hired so many people from the military, you know, I'd like to, there's some walmart folks here, I would say I'm just gonna hold walmart out, they do a fantastic job of hiring uh post military. I'm just going to give them their kudos and I learned that when I was there um with them. And um I, you know, to see what um someone with a military background and their level of execution and expertise and focus. Um I mean, I'd hire them, you know, every day of the week because I see a skill set to drive a hunger, the independence. You know, if you've been in the military, that's a very deliberate decision. You wanted to be there, you wanted to make change happen and you were doing something for the greater good, not just for yourself. So wonderful humans dedicated, hard working. So I just say to all of the women in the room that our post military, thank you first for serving our country and um, so proud of you and um, second of all, you know, they've got, they've got the stuff, you know, I'm proud of them every time I've hired when I've been more and more impressed every time. So good advice for everyone here, hire them, hire them rod. Thank you so much for being here. We're so glad you're back. Um, really enjoyed, glad to be here. Thank you.

Ezgi Barcenas, Global Head of Sustainability, Anheuser-Busch InBev
Rebecca Dunphey, President, Personal Care, Kimberly-Clark North America
Alyssa Raine, Group Vice President, Customer Marketing Platforms, Walgreens

Moderator: Maria Aspan, Senior Writer, FORTUNE

MPW Next Gen 2020: Retail and Supply Chain in a Pandemic

Uncategorized

While the pandemic has uncovered vulnerabilities in the supply chain, it has also highlighted some strengths. How can retail, manufacturing, and the food industry forge ahead and build on previous innovation?

How the coronavirus pandemic exposed U.S. supply chain flaws.

The Case of the Missing Toilet Paper

Magazine

How the 2020 pandemic exposed U.S. supply chain flaws.

So at the beginning of the pandemic, toilet paper is suddenly starting to be sold out everywhere. People are buying as much as they can get their hands on because they're worried they're going to be stuck inside for a long time and not be able to go outside because it's not safe. So they need toilet paper and they're not going to work. They're working from home. So all the toilet paper that they might otherwise using at their offices, at restaurants, wherever they go there now using it at home. But everyone says no, there is no real shortage. America is not running out of toilet paper. Um, it will be back in stock in a few weeks. People just need to stop buying quite so much and stop supporting it. But so here we are, two months later into the pandemic, and toilet paper is still really, really hard to find. This is a problem. How are they going to fix it? And so I did a deep dive into the toilet paper industry. Okay, so let's go back to March 12. If you think about it. The day before March 11th is when the WHO declares the coronavirus pandemic, and that is the day that everything changes for everyone. Almost everyone is preparing to work from home, and that's when you start to see people descend on the stores. And that day, toilet paper actually becomes the number one best selling item at grocery stores. Pictures are showing up on social media of fair shelf empty of paper products. That's a scary thing for a lot of people to see, because usually when you go to the grocery store, you can expect to find something as simple as toilet paper. It's not something that's really ever sold out, and all of a sudden it's this hot commodity item that you can't find anywhere. You can find it online. Think Amazon was probably the first place it was sold out and then soon after Walmart Costco, its Kroger's Albertson's. In some parts of the country, they're calling 911 because they can't find toilet paper, and it just shows you that, you know, as people started to panic a little bit, this kind of fuels their panic even more, and so any time they even see a roll of toilet paper there grabbing it because they don't know when they're going to see another one. And so sales actually surged 734% on March 12 for toilet paper. And that's when it becomes the number one best selling item in grocery stores. And it sold out for most of the country. You know, as much as companies and experts try to deny it at first, when everyone starts to perceive there is a shortage, they by going for the stock up on it and therefore perception becomes reality. And that's what's happened here. So even if there wasn't a shortage at the beginning, the perception that there was a shortage has now become reality. So the reason that toilet paper is such a uniquely complex challenge is because of the nature of what it is. I mean, think about it. You know they're bulky white rolls. You can't store a lot of it without investing huge amounts of money, so it's very expensive to make very expensive to store. And so it's become, you know, the kind of poster child of the trend in manufacturing over the past decade called just in time manufacturing. And what it basically means is you're producing just enough to meet demand at the time that it's needed the right amount at the right time delivered to the stores the customer buys it. Nobody's ever storing huge amounts of toilet paper for too long. That makes it a very lean operation. You don't have more than a couple of weeks of toilet paper on hand. I mean, just think about it for Walmart to store that much toilet paper. You're talking extra warehouses. Amazon extremely efficient company does not want to be, you know, having a warehouse full of toilet paper when it could be storing, you know, maybe six times, 10 times as much as something else. Like so for shampoo. Toilet paper is uniquely costly and uniquely capital intensive, and therefore you can't keep a lot of it around at one time. And so here you have the pandemic when it sells out, all at the same time very quickly, and suddenly the supply chain has no chance of catching up. So think about the investment that would be required for companies to produce more toilet paper and have more in hand. So you say you want to produce more tied to church If you want to fill up those bottles. You can open another assembly line for relatively cheap, probably under $10 million to do that with paper. These are huge machines. I mean, like two stories high in terms of machines, huge factories just because of the scale of the rolls of paper and what it takes to do that, you need to invest about 300 million. That's something that no company is going to do. Not to mention the time that it would take to do that. Maybe 18 months when we're not even in the pandemic anymore. Nobody wants to be stuck with mounds and mounds of toilet paper. You have three big players in the toilet paper industry. Um, the first one being Procter and Gamble. They move Charman, Um, and then you have Kimberly Clark, which makes Cotton l and Scott. And the third one is Georgia Pacific, which is not in the Fortune 500. But so, you know, I'm talking to PNG and Kimberly Clark, and what they're telling me is there, you know, doing everything they can to make toilet paper to meet demand. And so what they do is basically all of the down time all the time that it would take every time they want to make, you know, ultra strong versus ultra soft. They would have to stop machines, change at all the packaging, change out all the kinds of paper, and it's a significant amount of downtime. So they said, You know what? We're not gonna do that. We're gonna make fewer kinds of toilet paper, and we're going to keep the machines running. You know, we might take a break for an hour or two times a day. We're gonna have three shifts, maybe some even went from two shifts to three shifts. We're gonna run 24 hours a day, Um, and make as much toilet paper as we possibly can. PNG even says that some of their workers who would normally be in the office and could be working from home are now coming in and working on the floor of the plant just to make sure there's enough toilet paper for America there. Actually, as we speak, collecting all the lessons that they learned and having this huge internal meeting about how can we implement these lessons forward? How can we make sure that we know when there's a demand shock coming. That's something that all of a sudden is going to be selling out and increase production if they need to. But also importantly, at the same time, they don't want to be stuck making too much toilet paper when demand drops off. And as soon as people go back to work, you know demand could drop off a cliff. So importantly, they want to make sure that they can also take production down quickly when they start to get those signals That demand has fallen, and similarly with Kimberly Clark, which has said they've significantly reduced their toilet paper. You know, if you're seeing more kinds of cotton mills through often seeing them rather than the 12 packs, you're seeing them in more four paths and six packs, because that way they can spread the supply across more customers. So whereas one customer might be able to get a 12 pack now, you can have two customers buying six pack three, buying four packs. It's a little bit more fair. It keeps people happy. They're not freaking out. As much as they won't be able to find any toilet paper. They've also realized that Hey, you know, it's much more efficient and consumers don't mind. In fact, they actually like the choices that we're giving them. Maybe we don't quite need as many choices after the pandemic. And so when this all ends, you probably won't see as many different kinds of different toilet paper as you did before. The The industry has been so concerned over the last 10 years about just being so efficient. How do we cut every single cost? How do we beat? Make make sure we're lean, that it doesn't allow for really any of the protection that you could build in If you say, had, you know, a month's worth of toilet paper on hand just in case something happened, the supply chain was disrupted by a hurricane or a snowstorm. They do that to a certain extent when there's some weather, but only regionally. You could never really do that across the whole country. I don't think that I've ever thought before about weird is my toilet paper come from. It's something that we all really take for granted, and so it's really exposed how the modern supply chain that has brought us so much efficiency and made shareholders very happy in terms of cost cutting. Uh, and profits also doesn't really have a lot of buffer, A lot of protection, you know, where a lot of givin it in the case of a huge crisis like this one, where suddenly people need something very, very crucially and just want to buy it all at the same time.

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