On set at QVC on a recent weekday afternoon, the hosts in the studio kitchen were marveling at a vegetable chopper’s many functions. The cucumbers were sliced perfectly, and the presenters were all smiles.
Off camera, things were more complicated.
President Trump had raised tariffs on Chinese goods to more than 100 percent, a huge blow to retailers that get a lot of their stock from China, like QVC.
The stock market was swinging wildly. Consumer confidence was sinking. The Chug & Sip water bottle pitched as that day’s deal — $39.98 for a pair, down from $48 — wasn’t selling.
QVC, which started broadcasting in 1986, built its business on one of America’s favorite pastimes: impulse shopping. The network now runs 15 channels, including HSN. Last year, its 17,000 employees fielded nearly 80 million calls and shipped almost 200 million products.
Since 2021, David Rawlinson II has been chief executive of QVC, which stands for Quality, Value and Convenience. “Those things will only be more important in a world where the consumer demand is depressed or a world where there’s disruption because of tariffs,” he said, sitting on a soundstage that resembled an airy living room at the company’s studios in West Chester, Pa.
QVC was already under pressure from the decline of cable TV — its main channels reach about 45 percent fewer homes than in 2018. And more recently, TikTok, which allows users to buy directly from its app, is pulling shoppers away. In March, the company said it would lay off 5 percent of its workers and consolidate production at the studio in Pennsylvania.
QVC this month announced a partnership with TikTok, making it the first American brand to livestream around the clock on the platform. The news was quickly overshadowed when, hours later, Mr. Trump unveiled tariffs on nearly every country, on what he called “Liberation Day.”
Mr. Rawlinson, 49, now spends much of his days dealing with trade barriers that could sever the supply chains the retail industry has long relied on to deliver low prices for deal-seeking shoppers. For QVC, which broadcasts up to 20 hours a day, the show must go on.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
How have you been feeling recently? There’s been so much news about tariffs.
We had right here, actually, an all-hands with our employees today. I said something like, “We have to stay agile, because these days we can be disrupted every day.” And there was an awkward chuckle in the audience because it’s been quite a ride.
I work really hard to stay informed. We have a task force that’s meeting on tariffs almost daily at this point. They’re working not only with all of our partners and internally, but they’re working with the National Retail Federation and the Business Roundtable and other organizations to stay on top of everything.
What becomes really important is to help people see a path through to the other end. When headlines are coming at the rate they’re currently coming, it can be very easy to get whiplash and get very distracted.
We may have to buy differently. We may have to source differently. We may have to price differently. We may compete differently, but the fundamentals of what we do are not going to change.
But do you ever wake up with a sense of dread?
No. It would be understandable if somebody did.
So what happens when you sell your inventory and it’s time to order again?
We’ll have to deal with the tariff environment as it is. Where do they fall? The manufacturer, the importer, the retailer or the customer in the form of prices?
We’ll navigate the environment as it changes. One of the good things is all retailers are experiencing this together. So it shouldn’t preference one retailer over another by too much.
You have said during big events, like elections or the Olympics, people sometimes turn away from QVC. Are you seeing that now?
One hundred percent. If people are watching the nightly news, they’re probably not watching QVC. We are sort of inversely correlated to news consumption.
It’s a very newsy time.
To say the least.
People do look for another place to go when they get tired of the news cycle. I think we can be the beneficiary of that. The calendar still happens. People still want to shop for Easter.
QVC recently announced that it would stream on TikTok. Why put your programs on someone else’s platform?
We have to be where our customers are, whether we like the platform or not. We happen to love the potential for TikTok and what it can do in shopping.
As you were putting the deal together, what was the thinking? TikTok’s ownership and future in the U.S. are up in the air right now.
The mind-set was you have to deal with the world as it is today. We don’t know what the world’s going to be tomorrow. As long as that’s the place where social shopping is growing quickly, that’s the right place for us to be. I just decided we didn’t have to know too much more than that to take the bet.
Why continue investing in TV instead of just going to social media?
We’re going to do both. There are still a lot of viewers on TV. I don’t think linear TV and cable TV will ever die.
What will your company be doing in 10 years that it’s not doing now?
In 10 years, social shopping is going to be massive. It’s going to have thoroughly disrupted the retail ecosystem at scale. In 10 years, it’ll be hundreds of billions of dollars. It may be bigger. And we’re going to be playing in a very substantial way in that.
‘We may have to buy differently. We may have to source differently. We may have to price differently.’
You have said one of your earliest memories of QVC was watching your mom watch it on TV.
It was always playing in the background. She would buy something every once in a while, but not that often.
When I took this job, I called her, and I was like: “Why did you always have QVC on? And why didn’t you buy more?” She said: “I didn’t really have it on because I was trying to buy stuff. Every once in a while I would get interested and I would buy stuff, but I had young children in the house and you always knew that it was going to be happy. You always knew it was going to safe. There wasn’t going to be sex or drugs or curse words or anything like that.”
Tell me more about your childhood.
I grew up in a small town: Rock Hill, South Carolina. It had a couple of stoplights.
My family were educators. We were solidly middle class. Both of my parents grew up extremely poor. My mother was one of 18. They were a Deep South sharecropping family. You paid rent in order to get the right to work the land, and you could never quite catch up on the rent.
My father grew up without his father. His mother was disabled. Both of my parents came from really challenging backgrounds.
I would go out to the farm on my mother’s side and do some work during the summer. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard as my grandfather, Solomon Mitchum. He’s no longer with us, but I think about him all the time. He was as wise and as hardworking a person as I have ever met.
He died in debt, penniless, despite that lifetime of work, despite raising 18 children, despite by every account being a totally upstanding guy and fulfilling all of life’s responsibilities. Remembering him reminds me of how fortunate I am.
What job did you think you would have when you grew up?
An astronaut. My dream was to go to space camp.
You became a lawyer.
I grew up in a really weird house. I would get extra allowance if I memorized, word for word, the Declaration of Independence. If the television wasn’t on QVC, it was probably on C-SPAN.
When you grow up with that, you get this itch that you ought to be making a difference. Lawyers were incredibly important to the founding of this country. They were also incredibly important to the civil rights movement. I grew up idolizing a lot of lawyers, and that led me to law school.
Do lawyers make good C.E.O.s?
I don’t think lawyers make good C.E.O.s as a general rule, actually.
The great thing about law is that it allows you to get massively precise and articulate, with a deep understanding of something very particular.
There have been a lot of great lawyer C.E.O.s. People ask me if they want to be a C.E.O., should they go to law school? My general answer is no, for two reasons. The first is, lawyers are taught to control risk: They tend see risk before they see opportunity.
The other is that being pristine in your logic is how you become a good lawyer. Leadership at scale is more art than that. It’s part math and it’s part logic, but it’s also part intuition and part psychology.
What lessons did you learn from your first C.E.O. job, at NielsenIQ, that you’re applying to your second, at QVC?
I did a very poor job taking care of myself when I got stressed the first time around. We were in a turnaround situation. I learned a lot about how I can’t be there for others unless I’m bringing my best self to work every day.
I allowed the rigors of my first experience to impact me in a way where my tank wasn’t full of gas every day by the end. I’ve learned to weather the storms a little better than I did then.
Second, I probably still had a little bit too much lawyer in me, you might say. I was there when Covid happened, and there were moves that I could have made more quickly, that I had the intuition to make. But I was waiting on all the facts before making the decision.
Time for the lightning round. Do you use A.I.? If so, what’s the last question you asked it?
I use A.I. very frequently. The last question I asked A.I. was this morning, and I asked it about Aristotle’s modes of persuasion: logos, pathos, ethos. How you make an argument.
What are you trying to learn about right now?
Social media and where it’s going.
How much sleep are you getting?
From like 1:30 a.m. to 7 a.m.
From 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. is probably my most productive period of the day. I tend to be a very late night person, but then I try not to schedule really early meetings.
Do you own cryptocurrency?
I own a bit, not a lot. I own enough to understand what it is and why people would use it.
Now that you’re deep in the social media world: Who’s your favorite influencer?
I’ll do a shout out to my wife, Nadia. She is co-owner and operating chair of the W.N.B.A.’s Chicago Sky. Angel Reese plays for them, and she’s a very big influencer.
Jordyn Holman is a business reporter for The Times, covering the retail industry and consumer behavior.
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