Leaked email shows Amazon’s private label boss moved to a new job internally after the company cut dozens of in-house brands
- Matt Taddy, who led Amazon’s private label business, is now VP of supply chain optimization tech.
- Amazon recently cut dozens of private label brands after regulatory scrutiny grew.
- Taddy now reports to John Felton, SVP of worldwide operations.
Following the company’s decision to axe dozens of house brands, Amazon’s executive in charge of its private-label business has found a new role on the supply chain side, Insider has learned.
According to an internal email reviewed by Insider, Matt Taddy, formerly Amazon’s VP of private brands, is now VP of supply chain optimization technology, or SCOT.
Taddy started his new job last month, taking over for Deepack Bhatia, who left Amazon to “pursue a new opportunity,” according to John Felton, SVP of Worldwide Operations, in an email last month. Taddy reports to Felton now.
“Matt brings to this position a unique combination of customer obsession, science, technology, and financial acumen.” With the Stores business’s critical focus on inbound and placement, this is both a huge challenge and a huge opportunity for Matt and the entire team,” Felton wrote in an email.
A request for comment from Amazon was not returned.
In recent years, Amazon’s private label division has launched dozens of in-house brands in a variety of categories, including clothing, furniture, and electronics. However, the company drew regulatory scrutiny after it was discovered that Amazon used third-party merchant data to develop its own competing products, giving them preferential treatment in search results. In a lawsuit filed last month against Amazon, the FTC claimed that the company “degrades its search quality by stacking the deck against third-party competitors of Amazon’s private label products.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon began significantly scaling back its private label business in response, and decided to cut many of these brands.
Taddy has worked at Amazon for the past six years. Before taking over the private-label business, he was VP of economic technology. According to his Linkedin profile, he previously worked as a statistics professor at the University of Chicago and as the head of economics and data science at Microsoft.