Thirteen years ago today on May 30th, American Eagle Outfitters helped launch Google Wallet. Beth (Starling) McCormick and I worked with our teams for over six months on a secret mission to prepare 1,000 stores for updates to our point-of-sale systems, marketing, and operations. AEO was the premier launch partner with Google, along with Macy’s and Subway. The day of the launch, we embedded AEO’s loyalty points into the wallet point-of-sale transaction, which was a Herculean effort. It’s very difficult to transmit both payment and loyalty information in a single tap of the phone. Not only that, customers could load coupons into the wallet by tapping signs in-store or out and about. The Google engineering team was incredible (Philippe Dauman Jr.., Stephanie Tilenius, Osama Bedier). We ended up presenting at Recode with Eric Schmidt, Walt Mossberg, and Kara Swisher. We were way ahead of the mobile payments adoption curve. Steve Kubinski always supported my early-adopter Don Quixote missions, and I appreciate it to this day.
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