“Our stores fit into their neighborhoods architecturally, but also about 30% of the products we stock are local to the Pacific Northwest,” Escobedo explains. In her career, she quickly found: “You get really good at reading the organization, the culture, seeing opportunities and being able to stand back and say: ‘Where do I fit in this picture? Where I can use what I do best to help the company?’ One thing that I lean on a lot is my adaptability coming into new organizations.”Īdapting to different environments is a skill that Bartell’s has integrated into its business model for a long time each of the brand’s 68 locations is uniquely tailored to its neighborhood and customer base. “I got very good at finding my way and finding things about myself that integrate well into new situations,” she explains. My siblings and I got dropped into a whole new school on a regular basis.” Escobedo credits her frequent relocations into new cities, cultures and social dynamics at an early age for a trait she has found invaluable throughout her career: adaptability. “Every two to three years, we would pick up and move to another state. I’ve lived all over the country and parts of the world – that's what you do as a military child,” recalls Escobedo. “I grew up in the Marine Corps, moving around every couple of years.

From years of growing up in a military household to experiences at Starbucks, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Kaiser Permanente of WA, she shares how the transformation values of continually driving innovation, promoting community and diversity, and championing adaptability are informing Bartell’s digital transformation. Prior to joining the company in July 2018, Escobedo spent over a decade working for some of the Pacific Northwest’s largest, most game-changing companies. With Kari leading our digital transformation, we are offering our customers more choice than ever.” T his approach will carry the company into the fourth industrial revolution and, hopefully, into the 22nd century. “It’s important that we adapt while maintaining the level of service that our customers have come to expect from Bartell’s. “Technology is an ever-changing landscape,” says Lentzch. Escobedo, along with new CEO Kathi Lentzsch and other Sr Executives are working to build teams to shape Bartell’s digital transformation strategy. “We want to bring Bartell’s into the modern digital world and ensure that its brand and products will still be here serving our communities a hundred years from now,” says Kari Escobedo, Senior Vice President (SVP) of IT at Bartell’s. Walking the line between the traditional and the futuristic, while always delivering the highest quality of service to its customers, Bartell’s is making strides towards a bold digital future. Achieving constancy and longevity through a great depression, a great recession, two world wars and myriad upheavals that mark almost 130 years of history, the brand is an American success story. From a single location purchased by 21-year-old pharmacist George H Bartell Sr in 1890, Bartell Drugs has become the United States’ oldest family-owned drugstore chain – an iconic brand in the Pacific Northwest. Digital transformation is change, and in the world of the enterprise, change is unrelenting.

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