Shekar Natarajan
Chief Supply Chain Officer
American Eagle Outfitters
Shekar Natarajan is a highly regarded, transformative servant leader with a track-record of progressive, positive disruption and industry-standard-setting innovation. A Harvard Business School alum with an industrial engineering background, delivering operational impact through innovation and thoughtful change leadership at top Fortune 100 companies have proven to be the hallmark of Shekar’s ~20-year career.
With more than 100 patents and worldwide adoption of at least 10 industry-standard practices, Shekar’s pioneering vision has led to industry-agnostic recognition throughout his career – from winning the Institute of Industrial Engineering’s Medallion Award (2010) to Times Now’s Non-Resident Indian of the Year Award (2014) to Retail Innovation Group’s Innovator Award (2020).
Throughout his career, Shekar has created a now industry-standard last-mile beverage delivery system; he has re-engineered a grocery home delivery/ pick-up operating model, built and scaled grocery-shopping operations more than $9 billion in less than two years. Shekar's created and piloted a cutting-edge drone program within distribution centers to speed-up ecommerce fulfillment and has created an automated solution for an existing direct-store delivery system.
Well-respected not only within the industry, Shekar has authored three books translated in 11 languages and has been published or quoted in more than 75 thought-pieces across the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNN, CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg and prominent logistics and supply chain management magazines; he continues to remain associated with the hottest Silicon Valley startups disrupting supply chain and logistics.
