Meet Our Founders
Zach Simpson
Zach Simpson is a Co-Founder of Waypoint Retail. He has extensive experience serving in retailer merchandising roles, scaling start-up CPG brands, implementing AI/ML technologies, as well as strategic consulting for some of North America’s biggest retailers and CPG organizations.
Prior to his full-time engagement at Waypoint Retail, Simpson served as the SVP of Commercial for confection brand Feastables where he was responsible for sales, revenue growth management, data infrastructure, category management, and route-to-market functions. Recognized as a “Top Insurgent Brand” by Bain & Co. as well as one of the “Fastest Growing CPG Brands” by Numerator.
Zach is best known for his 14-year merchandising career as an executive with Walmart where he served as VP/DMM for Non-Alcoholic Beverages. He led strategic initiatives in assortment management, private brands, promotional analytics, supply chain optimization, global sourcing strategy, and joint business planning. His greatest lasting impacts are in Walmart’s negotiation training and strategy, commodities sourcing, and planogram philosophy and process.
Zach is a graduate of Vanderbilt University where he obtained his B.S. in Human & Organizational Development. He holds an MBA in Corporate Finance from the University of Arkansas.
Chad Yoes
Chad Yoes is a Co-Founder of Waypoint Retail and is a Board Member of 1440 Foods. Prior to these roles, Yoes has served as a senior advisor to Eversight by Instacart, a Partner at The Partnering Group, and spent three years as the CEO of The Runway Group, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate founded by members of the Walton Family located in Northwest Arkansas, including private equity, real estate development, aviation service, aviation manufacturing, and regional economic development.
Prior to The Runway Group, Chad was an executive at Walmart Stores, Inc. for 19 years where he led centralized merchandising operations, driving a transformation of the retailer’s strategies in Pricing, Data Science, Product Layout, Merchandising Technology Development, Replenishment, and Merchandise Feature Selection. Additionally, he has served in roles in supplier negotiations, M&A, strategy, operations, and finance.
Some of Chad’s key retail accomplishments at Walmart were orchestrating a $6.5-billion-dollar, multi-year price investment in the U.S. Retail Market, gaining more than $40-billion in market share over a three-year period. Chad has redesigned and managed through over a dozen large-scale organizational and departmental transformations, aligning organizations towards value added, high impact business growth work, and eliminated rote, transactional, non-value creating tasks. Chad is a graduate of Louisiana State University where he obtained his B.S. in Finance.