Aleks Spaseska’s migrant story from Macedonia to boss of Wesfarmers-owned Kmart

She arrived in the Pilbara as a young child from Macedonia and spoke no English, but her father’s dream that Australia held better opportunities has been realised as Aleks Spaseska takes the reins at retail giant Kmart Group.

Kmart Group managing director Aleks Spaseska. Picture: LinkedIn

To compare Aleks Spaseska’s hometown of Ohrid, Macedonia, with the dusty and dry industrial port of Dampier in the Pilbara where she spent time as a girl is probably as big a life change as a child can imagine.

The storybook town of Ohrid sits on a stunning lake with views of national parks, it has cobblestone streets you’d expect from its UNESCO world heritage status and it proudly boasts 365 churches – one for every day of the year.

These were the two very different worlds a young Spaseska shuttled between as her father plucked her family from their birthplace to Dampier, and eventually Perth, believing there were better economic opportunities on the other side of the world.

He was right.

Since settling with her sister and parents in the 1980s as a girl who spoke no English, Spaseska rose through the ranks of one of Australia’s largest companies, Wesfarmers, to become the boss of its general merchandise business Kmart Group as of last month.

This week, she made her executive debut in front of Wesfarmers’ biggest investors with a bold promise: to hit $20bn in turnover.

“I moved to Perth when I was about seven or eight years old, so my family moved over and it was a really big change, to come from a very big, extended family in Macedonia, and we moved to WA. I couldn’t speak a word of English, went straight into year three at the time, and I think I figured it (English) out probably before I hit high school.

Kmart MD Aleks Spaseska as a girl and now

“I still have a very large family in Macedonia, and we go back quite regularly, actually.

“(Ohrid) is a stunning place, it is very unique … as a young child, probably the bigger part for me was leaving a very large extended family – my grandparents were at my doorstep every day.”

Kmart’s next big thing

Now comes the real hard work. The youngest boss of a Wesfarmers division at just 41, Spaseska has set huge ambitions for her and her team at Kmart, Target and its in-house clothing and homewares brand Anko.

To reach her $20bn target, she will have to double sales from where they are today.

Kmart Group is enjoying exceptional growth and its twin stores Kmart and Target have stripped market share from other discounters, especially Big W, owned by Woolworths, which thanks to Kmart Group’s ascendancy is now mired in millions of dollars of losses.

Kmart is also winning over the powerful cohort of younger shoppers, with Spaseska singling out in her presentation to investors this week at the Wesfarmers strategy day the growing importance of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the successors to Gen Z.

But nothing in retail comes easily, even to a behemoth like Kmart.

Big W might be on its knees but there are others in the category trying to steal Kmart and Target’s lunch, from Amazon and eBay to Chinese marketplaces Temu and Shein, as well as traditional players like The Reject Shop which will soon be taken over by cashed-up Canadian discount giant Dollarama.

Aleks Spaseska: ‘We make a lot of things accessible to families that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible.’ Picture: Marie Nirme

Kmart and Target are certainly winning from the hunt for value amid the cost-of-living crisis, which is proving a heady tailwind for its $15 rice cookers and $49 heated towel racks.

But Spaseska believes the chains can do well even when better economic times return and consumers feel compelled to spend more premium fashion, apparel, homewares and household goods.

“What we can see is that Kmart is really a brand for everyone, so we’ve got very good levels of engagement across all customer demographics and across all levels, and they’re spending with us, and we’re seeing growth across all of those customer cohorts.

“The other thing I would say is, I think once customers come and they discover the product offer, the extent that they have additional disposable income in the future, there’s lots of different ways to spend that, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

Kmart mums, Facebook groups

If Spaseska is right, nobody is too rich to shop at Kmart. The company says 84 per cent of Australians live within 10km of a Kmart or Target store.

“In our customer data, again, we’ve had a large number of new customers come and shop with us for the first time over the last few years, but our retention rates of those customers are improving, so we’re holding on to them, and we’re seeing that we’re able to introduce them to more and more categories across our store, and that’s really what we see as our opportunity.

“We know that when a customer first shops with us, they’ll shop only a small fraction of the products that we sell relative to existing customers, so the opportunity we have is to take those new customers and connect them with more products across the store and continue to increase our share of wallet with them.”

Backing this up will be the launch this year of a new Kmart marketplace to showcase in a highly competitive and interactive way all the offerings that the discount merchant has.

“It will be a very ‘Kmart experience’,” Spaseska says. “And we think the economics of an integrated marketplace offering are favourable to a stand-alone business model and the reason for that is we can leverage existing traffic, existing brand awareness and existing investment in technology and capability to bring it all together into the one place.”

The Anko of everything

She’s happy to admit her ambitions, across stores, product, technology and growth, are “really big, bold” but believes she can lead Kmart Group to that target.

A move to Melbourne by Spaseska and her own young family in 2020 was “timed perfectly” she jokes recalling she arrived with her husband and 18 month old daughter just three weeks before the first rolling Covid-19 lockdowns imposed on Victoria by former Premier Daniel Andrews.

She calls Kmart Group a “fantastic business” and is now reaping the benefits of years of investment by her predecessor Ian Bailey and before him, retail veteran Guy Russo.

Group CEO Rob Scott believes Spaseska, who was also company secretary for Wesfarmers having joined in 2008 in business development, is a loyal lieutenant. She wrote her doctoral thesis on corporate attitudes to investor relations.

Aleks Spaseska next to Bunnings boss Mike Schneider at the Wesfarmers strategy day.

“We have a real preference for internal succession,” Scott told The Australian. “Aleks is super commercial. She’s a great strategic thinker, and she worked really closely with Ian Bailey and was instrumental in a lot of the key strategies in recent years within Kmart. But she also, importantly, has a real aspiration for the future.

“So, it has been a really seamless transition, and I think Aleks will bring some new and exciting ideas and perspectives to Kmart.”

Spaseska may be thinking bold, but anchoring that audacious sales goal is a knowledge of her customer.

“I don’t underestimate the really critical role that we play in customers’s lives. We make a lot of things accessible to families that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible.

“I feel very fortunate too and very privileged, actually, to be in a position to be able to take such an amazing asset and take it into the next phase.”

Originally published as Aleks Spaseska’s migrant story from Macedonia to boss of Wesfarmers-owned Kmart