Home Depot executive Ann-Marie Campbell rose from cashier to top leadership

From cashier to the top floor

Ann-Marie Campbell’s career is one of the clearest maps Home Depot has ever offered for internal advancement. She started in 1985 as a cashier in South Florida and, more than 40 years later, now leads more than 2,300 stores and more than 400,000 associates across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

That is a long way from the register, but the point of her story is not just distance. It is the sequence of moves that made the climb possible: store manager, district manager, regional vice president, vice president of operations, vice president of merchandising and special orders, vice president of retail marketing and sales, vice president of vendor services, president of the Southern Division, and now senior executive vice president of U.S. stores and operations, Home Depot Canada, Home Depot Mexico, and outside sales and service.

The lessons that started before Home Depot

Campbell’s first retail lessons did not begin in a corporate classroom. Home Depot says they came from her grandmother in Jamaica, who owned a small furniture store and modeled friendly, top-notch customer service. That background matters because it helps explain why her career has always been tied to the basics of retail: know the customer, understand the product, and keep the store running with consistency.

For associates on the floor, that is the first practical takeaway. Campbell’s rise was built on a skill set that starts at the counter and expands with responsibility. Cashiering taught her customer engagement and product knowledge, and Home Depot has pointed to that experience as part of why former cashiers can rise into leadership.

How the job changed at each rung

Campbell’s path shows that advancement at Home Depot is not just about being good at one role. It is about proving you can absorb a larger operational footprint each time the company gives you more. A store manager has to run the building; a district manager has to compare stores, coach leaders and manage consistency; a regional vice president has to think across a wider territory and align execution with company goals.

By the time Campbell moved into vice president roles in operations, merchandising and special orders, retail marketing and sales, and vendor services, her job was no longer just about store performance. It was about connecting supply, selling, service and execution across the business. That is the kind of progression associates should watch for if they want to understand what the next rung actually looks like: not a title change for its own sake, but a bigger operating problem to solve.

Why her remit matters now

Campbell’s current portfolio shows how store leadership and corporate strategy overlap inside Home Depot. She is responsible for outside Pro sales efforts and the Home Services business, which ties frontline store execution to the company’s push to win more contractor work and larger project spending. That is especially important in a business where pro customers often need speed, depth of inventory, and associates who know the trades well enough to solve problems on the spot.

Home Depot’s scale makes that responsibility even more significant. The company says it has approximately 475,000 associates and more than 2,300 stores, while its fiscal 2025 materials break that footprint out as 2,034 U.S. and territories stores, 182 in Canada and 140 in Mexico. The company also says a typical store averages 105,000 square feet and connects to an e-commerce business with more than one million products. In a system that large, leaders who understand both the sales floor and the broader customer network have real leverage.

What her promotions say about Home Depot’s culture

In January 2016, Home Depot promoted Campbell to executive vice president of U.S. stores and international operations, with Canada and Mexico business leaders reporting to her. At that time, the company said she would lead more than 2,200 stores and 400,000 associates. Fortune later described her as running a roughly $87 billion U.S. business in 2017, then about $101 billion in revenue in 2018, and noted in 2020 that she added Canada and Mexico to her portfolio.

That arc tells associates something important about the company’s internal logic. Home Depot appears to reward leaders who can run stores, manage teams, and keep the customer in view while thinking across channels and geographies. It is not enough to understand one department or one building. The bigger the role, the more the company expects leaders to connect store reality to enterprise strategy.

The pro customer angle behind the rise

Campbell’s influence also sits inside one of Home Depot’s biggest strategic bets: professional contractors. Fortune has described her as the principal architect of the company’s effort to capture more pro spending by becoming a central provider of tools and materials for bigger jobs. That work aligns with her current responsibility for outside sales and service, and it fits the company’s broader move to deepen its Pro business.

Home Depot’s March 2024 agreement to acquire SRS Distribution is part of that story. The company said the deal would increase its total addressable Pro market by about $50 billion. For associates, that matters because it raises the bar on what store leadership must deliver: more technical product knowledge, stronger execution for complex orders, and better coordination between stores, service and outside sales.

What associates can take from her path

Campbell’s career is not a promise that every cashier becomes an executive. It is a blueprint for how advancement has worked inside Home Depot when it does happen. The pattern is clear: learn the floor, master customer service, expand into management, and keep accepting roles that widen your view of the business.

• Build product knowledge where the customer is standing.

• Learn to manage more than one person, one aisle or one shift.

• Treat each promotion as a chance to prove you can handle a larger store problem.

• Pay attention to pro customers, because the company’s growth increasingly depends on them.

Home Depot has also used Campbell in its mentoring efforts, including a session with Girls Inc. participants at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. That visibility reinforces the message she has long carried through the company’s culture work, including the career site quote that associates can “truly go anywhere they want to go.”

For workers on the floor, the useful part of Campbell’s story is not glamour. It is the proof that a cashier’s job can become the foundation for running a business that spans thousands of stores, hundreds of thousands of associates and the company’s biggest customer bets.