Current speakers

Kurt Staelens is a Senior Managing Director leading our retail and consumer products practice. He focuses on growth strategy, marketing & sales effectiveness, digital & omnichannel commerce transformation, COGS/SG&A transformation and CEO a.i. roles.

Combining his consulting past with chief merchandising, COO and CEO/president roles at major publicly traded retailers, Mr. Staelens has more than 30 years of experience in the retail & consumer space.

Prior to joining FTI Consulting, Mr. Staelens was the lead partner of PwC/Strategy&’s Retail and Digital Commerce consulting practice where he grew the Retail P&L from $95M to $132M and was honored with the 'partner of the year' award for realizing a $1B cost transformation at AT&T.

Before this, Mr. Staelens was Group President for Apparel, Footwear, Home, Mattress & Jewelry at Sears Holdings Company (where he managed $3.4B in revenues). Prior to that, he held roles such as CEO of Macintosh Retail Group (a footwear & home retail holding); CEO Benelux at Neckermann.com (a digital commerce and mailorder company) and CEO of Proxis.com (the market leading ecommerce in the Benelux), among others.