Thrive Market has added a COO role for the first time and tapped Amazon vet Scott Lescher to fill it, rounding out a C-suite full of execs hailing from the e-commerce giant as the online grocer gears up for continued growth.
Lescher is the second Amazon vet Thrive has added to its C-suite in the last year, following the hire of chief merchandising officer April Lane in 2024, who spent 12 years at Amazon and worked on its Amazon Fresh business. Thrive CFO Hetu Patel, who joined in 2023 and brought on Lane, also spent over a decade at Amazon. Lescher previously worked with Lane at Amazon.
Lescher spent 15 years across two stints in a number of operations roles at Amazon, most recently director of surface transportation support and fleet. He also served as Uniqlo USA’s director of logistics and supply chain for two years. In an interview with Retail Brew, Lescher described himself as a “builder at heart,” who started at Amazon in 2007 leading hourly associates in fulfillment centers, establishing standards for running those early fulfillment centers, through the launch of ultra-fast delivery and integration of those operations into Amazon Fresh, and finally overseeing middle-mile transportation.
Thrive Market has amassed more than $700 million in sales and ended 2024 with 1.6 million paid members, according to the company, with membership seeing a double-digit percentage increase year over year in the first quarter. Lescher said his joining Thrive will help ensure “the operations space is ready for sustained high growth moving forward.”
“I’ve always gravitated towards the early-to-mid-phase growth opportunities, really helping take operations from the one to 100 phase, helping scale,” Lescher said. “As I learned about Thrive Market, really got to know the team, see the culture in place, I saw an opportunity to really apply this operations toolkit that I've been fortunate to build in all my years with Amazon.”
Thrive it home: He’s about two months into the role, and has spent nearly half his time thus far alongside Thrive associates in its fulfillment centers and doing delivery ride-alongs to “see things at the ground level,” he said.
As COO, Lescher will oversee operations across Thrive’s three fulfillment centers in Nevada, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, the teams working at those centers, supply chain and demand planning, and transportation including last-mile delivery. His previous Amazon experience has helped prep him for these responsibilities.
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“By understanding what it takes to be successful at each of those levels, it really helps me be a strong strategic leader on a sort of end-to-end basis in the ops space,” he said.
He aims to “strengthen” the safety culture within its fulfillment centers, ensure consistent member experiences (which will reduce needs for refunds, damaged products, or late shipments), grow capacity, and find efficiencies. Creating efficiencies includes “evaluating and improving” its operation design and potentially turning to technology and “various automation options” to create savings that are ultimately passed on to customers, Lescher said.
Lescher’s work will help launch Thrive, which reached profitability in 2023, into its next growth stage, one that it’s been working to set with a number of recent operational changes. Over the past year, it’s moved its frozen fulfillment in house. Thrive has since shipped more than 1 million units in frozen products itself, boosting delivery speeds by 20% and cutting refunds while giving the company the capacity to carry more frozen SKUs.
The online grocer has also begun making its own deliveries to members in New York and Philadelphia to further improve delivery speed and the quality of customers’ experience. It has used third-party logistics providers for delivery in the past and will continue to do so in other delivery locations, according to Lescher. It’ll evaluate expanding the capability to additional locations and bringing other operations in house “where it makes sense,” he said.
Food chain: Thrive’s push into further growth comes as online grocery has notably rebounded after a post-Covid slump, with sales jumping 15.2% to $9.8 billion year over year in April, according to Brick Meets Click. While ship-to-home grocery delivery remains the smallest online grocery method, compared to delivery and pickup, the segment continues to grow. In April, sales rose 22.1% YoY to $1.9 billion.
Looking ahead, Lescher said his biggest challenge as COO will be accurately predicting what’ll happen next.
“It definitely is a challenging area, especially with a company that’s growing quickly, but we continue to improve the models that we use and make investments so that we make it easier to have high quality forecasts, which in turn improve the member experience.”