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#UserManual – Send Us All The Early-Stage Supply Chain Technology Startups

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Brian Laung Aoaeh and Lisa Morales-Hellebo, at #SCIT2019, June 19 – 20, Microsoft, Times Square, NYC. Photo Credit: Ray Neutron.

Author’s Note: This blog post is an updated version of User Manual: The Early Stage Startups I Want To Hear About Most in 2016 and 2017 and User Manual: The Early Stage Startups I Want To Hear About Most in 2017 and 2018. Certain portions of this version may be exactly the same as in the prior versions. However, there are significant differences between the prior versions and this one.

About REFASHIOND Ventures

REFASHIOND Ventures is a seed-stage venture fund that Lisa Morales-Hellebo and I are building to: invest in startups developing technology innovations to refashion global supply chains – across different industries. 

We are in the process of raising our first fund. Once we raise the fund, we will be based in New York City. 

While we are raising the fund, we are collaborating with a family office to make some early investments that fit our investment thesis, and the family office’s investment interests.

The three philosophical pillars of our investment thesis are;

  1. The world is a supply chain.TM
  2. Software is eating the world.
  3. Disruption creates opportunity.

Our working definition of a supply chain: “A network of connected and interdependent organisations mutually and cooperatively working together to control, manage and improve the flow of materials and information from suppliers to end users.”

– Martin Christopher, Logistics & Supply Chain Management: Creating Value-Adding Networks, 4th ed, Pearson Education Limited 2011, p4

We believe that a perfect storm of irreversible social, economic, technological, and environmental forces, has created an urgent and critical need to refashion global supply chains. This process presents the biggest investment opportunity of the next half-century. We are building a fund to invest in that opportunity.

We’ll invest in startups in the following areas; Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Logistics, and Supply Chain Finance – across industries.

Our initial focus is on startups based in the United States, and Canada.

About The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation, which we founded in August 2017, is the collaborative, and mutually supportive coalition of grassroots communities focused on technology and innovation in the global supply chain industry. Each chapter is a community of practice that connects the builders of technology innovations for supply chain with the buyers of technology innovations for implementation in real world commercial supply chains. The New York Supply Chain Meetup is its founding chapter.

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is the world’s first, largest, fastest growing, and most active network of grassroots driven communities focused on supply chain, innovation, and technology. You can learn more here: The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation.

You can check out our Youtube Channel here. Join our community here. Follow @tnyscm on Twitter.

Characteristics We Look for in Teams, and Founders

We look for – we will not learn this until we actually interact with you. But this is what we will be looking for;

  • Teams in which the founders have known one another for a considerable amount of time prior to launching their startup; We look for teams in which the level of trust and respect between the co-founders is high. This reflects our belief that at the earliest stages of a startup’s life, team risk is the greatest risk we must worry about.
  • Teams that will not have difficulty attracting other great people to join the startup; We look for founders who inspire confidence and loyalty from others because they are good at what they do, the kind of people we could picture myself working for. We look for people that others outside the startup can come to look up to as thought leaders in their chosen area of expertise.
  • Founders for whom solving the problem that their startup is solving has become their life’s mission and they will work to solve that problem with or without help from outside investors; We look for founders who have an unconventional opinion about the market opportunity they are pursuing, and can explain their position is with evidence that investors can analyze independently. We look for founders who are focused squarely on solving their customers problems.
  • Teams that can focus on building a simple product that their initial customers love, and who can focus on a niche within which to launch that product. We look for teams that are judicious and frugal in how they deploy the startup’s resources.
  • Founders who value teamwork, and who can become great leaders if they desire to do so; We value transparency, honesty, and openness. We value self-awareness. We like people who are determined and tenacious, who do not give up just because the going gets uncomfortable and things seem bleak.
  • Founders who have a hard time doing something simply because it is what someone else expects them to do; We do not like obedience. We detest arrogance. We admire confidence. We look for founders who are not afraid to be different. We look for founders who have prior demonstrable experience of good decision-making when things are uncertain and information is incomplete. We are not looking for perfection.

Characteristics We Look For in Markets

We look for;

  • Large markets that could ultimately be served by the startup’s product, even though the initial target might be a small portion of the whole. We look for customers capable of and willing to pay for the product, and who are looking for and eager to find a solution to their problem.
  • Markets in which the pain is acute because the problem suppresses customers’ profits significantly, or because the problem makes users far less effective and efficient than they could be.

If currently the addressable market is between $1B and $10B, we want to see evidence that it is growing quickly enough to support the startup’s future goals, and the competition that we assume will quickly follow if the team is successful.

Characteristics We Look For in Business Models

We look for products and business models that:

  • Will benefit from network effects as time progresses,
  • Can scale efficiently and quickly once product-market-fit has been established, and
  • Can eventually benefit from an economic moat as the startup matures into a company, and the business model becomes established.

The Themes We Are Focused On

Notes:

  • These themes cut across different industries and sectors. That is a deliberate choice in the way we are designing REFASHIOND Ventures.
  • The technology sector evolves constantly. Accordingly, our team’s interests might adjust in response. The themes we have described below should serve as a rough guide to how we think about the universe of startups in which REFASHIOND Ventures will invest. It is not comprehensively exhaustive, nor is it mutually exclusive of themes we have not described. If the innovation you are working on fits our definition of supply chain and the descriptions above, please reach out to us.
  • We anticipate that REFASHIOND Ventures first fund will be a pre-seed and seed-stage fund. Our current collaboration will primarily focus on startups raising an institutional seed round, or raising a round between a previous institutional seed round and a series A round.

Our current investment themes;

  • Next Generation Logistics: Platforms or applications that significantly improve how logistics and transportation networks are operated and managed.
  • Advanced Materials: Platforms or products that make it possible to research, invent, and create new types of materials at scale. We are especially interested in the conversion of large quantities of waste of different types into new materials. 
  • Advanced Manufacturing: Platforms or applications that make it possible to integrate advances in software engineering into manufacturing processes. 
  • Data & Analytics: Platforms or applications that help people or other machines to manage, analyze, interpret, make decisions, and take actions based on vast and growing amounts of centralized or decentralized data from disparate sources. Such platforms or products enable large numbers of different types of connected devices, machines, apps, and websites to communicate with one another seamlessly, and with the people managing or using them, within a secure environment. 

Connecting With Us

If you know someone who knows us, an introduction would help. If you do not, never hesitate to communicate with us directly. We are both very easy to reach on the major social networking platforms. 

The best time to start communicating with us is before you are raising a round because we believe it is important to build trust and understanding before entering into the kind of working relationship that exists between startup founders and their early stage investors.

That also gives us sufficient time to understand the problem you are solving, so that if REFASHIOND Ventures invests, we are doing so with conviction. Time enables us to become a more effective advocate on your startup’s behalf when we have discussions about you with other investors we know, and who we feel would be a good match for the round you are raising.

Communicating With Us

If we are not meeting through an introduction, we will respond quickest to founders who get straight to the point, and explain why we should speak with them in 250 – 400 words in their first email to us. We try our best to respond to founders who initiate communication with us. However, depending on what else we have going on, we may not respond if we feel the startup is outside REFASHIOND Ventures’ areas of interest. 

Follow up with us once or twice if you believe we have made a mistake by not responding.

Things We Believe Are Red Flags

  1. Exploding rounds: An exploding round comes with a caveat like “Seed round in ground-breaking tech startup closing in 1 week!” We need time to do our own homework.
  2. Meetings led by an advisor: We prefer our first few interactions with a startup to be with the team of co-founders, not with an advisor or an investment banker. It is okay for an introduction to come from an advisor if that advisor is someone we already know. We do not like to have advisors or mentors micro-manage our interactions with startup founders. That does not inspire confidence.
  3. Lack of control over core technologies: We try to avoid situations in which the startup has a product that has launched to the public, but the startup’s team has no primary responsibility for actually building the core product. If there’s IP we’ll spend some time trying to understand who owns the IP.
  4. Founders who are mainly focused on invention: Some founders are born inventors. In and of itself, that is not a bad thing. However, as investors we have made a choice to invest in founders who want to build potentially big businesses. 

Our Commitment To Startup Founders

Based on Gil Dibner’s VC Code of Conduct;

  • We will be transparent.
  • We will respect your time.
  • We will not ask you for material we do not need.
  • We will not string you along.
  • We will let you know about any competitors in our portfolio.
  • We will be transparent about conflicts of interest.
  • We will not share any of your material without your permission.
  • We will not speak with your customers without your permission.
  • We will educate before we negotiate.
  • We will be honest about what standard terms are.
  • We will not issue a term sheet unless we have made a firm decision to invest.
  • We will reflect the term sheet in the final legal documents.
  • We will not seek an unreasonable equity stake.
  • We will avoid surprises.
  • We will always act in the best interests of the startup.

Without doubt, there will be times when we fail to live up to these ideals. When that happens we hope founders will let us know. That is the only way we can get better.

Key Supply Chain Innovation Issues to Consider as the World Becomes More Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous

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Note: A version of this story was first published on June 11, 2019, at FreightWaves.

For a couple of years now, I wake up each morning thinking to myself; “I wonder what insane thing happened while I was asleep.” Initially, it was an enervating experience. Now, I have become accustomed to it, and I do not feel the same sense of dread when I wake up, or of being drained of energy even before my workday has begun.

In the same way that I have adapted to a less serene world, people who buy, build, or operate new technology and innovations for supply chains must adapt and adjust to a world that is characterised by instability and chaos.

This article will briefly touch on 3 approaches for doing so. It is based on observations I made during The National Retail Federation’s Big Show 2019, when my co-founder, Lisa Morales-Hellebo, and I led 9 different groups of visiting executives on tours of the expo hall to learn about innovations in supply chain that they might buy for their respective companies. Being a tour guide gave me a great opportunity to listen to them describe their problems in their own words.

What are the origins of the acronym VUCA, and what are its implications?

The term VUCA first appeared in the US Army War College’s curriculum in 1987. Subsequent attempts to trace its origins in the curriculum suggest that it may have resulted from a synthesis of ideas in the book “Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge” by Warren G. Bennis and Burt Nanus.

VUCA is an abbreviated description of a world that is simultaneously

  • Volatile — change happens more often than usual and the accompanying swings become more extreme with the passage of time,
  • Uncertain — our ability to make predictions of any meaningful nature deteriorates dramatically,
  • Complex — the number of variables we have to track, analyze, and interpret increases beyond our ability to synthesize the accompanying deluge of data and information for decision-making, and
  • Ambiguous — even when we can synthesise data and information, it can appear to lead us towards meaningless and even contradictory conclusions.

It is debatable if the world in general is more VUCA now than it has been at any time in the past. What is not open to debate, however, is that due to the evolution of information technologies, we now become more quickly aware of events around the world. The speed with which news of unexpected and destabilizing events travels contributes to our sense that the world we live in now is more unstable than it was in the past.

Observation #1: Supply chains are becoming less centralized, more distributed, and more integrated.

The days of centralised distribution appear to be well behind us. The trend now is towards more decentralized and localized distribution, and less reliance on centralized and massive distribution centers. This is happening because companies want to increase their responsiveness to changes and disruptions within their supply chain. To accomplish this companies seek to more tightly integrate local stores with one another, as well as to more tightly integrate existing centralized distribution centers with local stores. To accomplish this companies are looking for;

  • Increased automation — freeing human experts to focus on complex cases and issues that arise in the supply chain,
  • More sophisticated forecasting and network optimization capabilities, and
  • The potential to eliminate central distribution centers altogether, so that suppliers ship product directly to local stores.

Observation #2: Supply chain visibility is becoming a more pressing concern.

Supply chain visibility enables customers, producers, and other participants in the supply chain, to track and trace goods as the goods travel through the supply chain from a producer to a customer. Supply chain visibility is a problem of information creation, storage, transmission, retrieval, and delivery. Supply chain visibility is also an issue of information security. It depends on data standardization between organizations. This is something that has been rather difficult to accomplish in the past. However, the push for supply chain visibility will only increase as former arch-rivals and competitors move towards integrating certain aspects of their supply chain operations in order to collaborate more closely with one another.

Observation #3: Simplicity is a virtue to the users of supply chain software.

This thought occurred to me as I listened to the executives ask questions at each of the stops on the tour; The consumerization of enterprise software is now affecting people’s expectations of how supply chain technology should function.

What does this mean?

  • First, people now expect supply chain software to be as intuitive to use as the software they rely on at home. They expect unnecessary complexity to be abstracted away.
  • Second, people expect supply chain software to be always available, and ubiquitous. That is, it must be seamlessly available across computing platforms, with no degradation in experience or efficacy.
  • Third, customization and personalization are key. In this context, customization means that the software is easily configured to match an organization’s unique business operations and structure. Personalization means that within that customized organizational configuration, each user has an experience that is further configured to that individual user’s role and responsibilities within the company, in a way that maximizes the individual users on-the-job effectiveness.
  • Fourth, more so now than in the past, buyers of supply chain software expect speed, responsiveness, and redundancy.

It is clear the trends I have described create an opportunity for early-stage startups building new software-enabled innovations to help businesses simplify and streamline supply chain operations. What remains unclear is the degree to which switching costs will hinder the adoption of new software products from young startups in a world in which VUCA is the norm.

Why You Should Be Rooting for Startups Like Uber

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Note: A version of this story was first published on May 13, 2019, at FreightWaves.

Disclaimer: The author is not an investor in Uber, or any of its competitors. Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest is an investor in FreightWaves.

On May 9 — just one day before Uber’s I.P.O., The New York Times published; Why You Should Root for the Uber I.P.O. to Fail, an OpEd by Mihir A. Desai — a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. He is also the author of “How Finance Works.”

I couldn’t disagree more. We should all be rooting for startups like Uber to succeed. Our future depends on it.

This article is not an exhaustive examination of Uber’s business model, corporate governance, or how it treats its employees and drivers. That is beyond the scope of this article given that Mr. Desai does not critique Uber on those issues specifically.

What is the case for rooting against Uber?

In his article, Mr. Desai argues that Uber’s pre-I.P.O. investors have thrown an unprecedented amount of capital at Uber — $24.7 billion over 23 funding rounds, to be exact, according to Crunchbase. That capital helped Uber sustain more than $10 billion in operating losses in the 3 years preceding its I.P.O. Mr. Desai urges us to pray for a comeuppance for those investors. Here’s a summary of his reasons;

  • First; The era of bloated venture capital funds, like Softbank, distorts the allocation of capital, talent, and entrepreneurial energy toward unviable business models.
  • Second; The success of a company like Uber can lead young people and investors astray. Young people can view their jobs as lottery tickets. Investors of all kinds can be seduced into imitating these giant venture funds.
  • Finally; The venture capital world will become even more clubby. Startups will compete on funding rather than on the merits of their products.

He makes a seductively compelling case, and I understand his complaints. That being said, his argument fails because it takes a rather narrow view of the issue. Let me explain.

We are entering a new era

In his book, “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of The Future”, Steve Case — former CEO and chairman of AOL makes the argument that we are entering a Third Wave of the internet. Briefly;

  • The First Wave extended from 1985 to about 1999. This was the era during which technologists and entrepreneurs laid the foundation for the online world. It was driven by people, products, platforms, partnerships, policy, and perseverance.
  • The Second Wave extended from 2000 to about 2015. This was the era of the mobile revolution and the app economy, characterized by search, social networking, and ecommerce. This era was driven by people, products, and platforms.
  • The Third Wave extends from 2016. This is the era of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive computing, enabling entrepreneurs to use digital technologies to transform real-world sectors of the global economy. This is the era during which software — made up of bits, and physical products — made up of atoms, intersect and collide. This era is driven by people, products, platforms, partnerships, policy, and perseverance.

Though Uber was founded in 2009, and Lyft’s predecessor company, Zimride, was founded in 2007, it is not difficult to see that they fit squarely in The Third Wave. Together with other startups that were also founded before 2016 you may not know yet, they represent the canaries in the coal mine of Third Wave Startups.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that, with only a few exceptions, in general, Third Wave startups have not been very popular with venture capitalists. Indeed, this is the impetus behind Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest® initiative. Third Wave startups are unlikely to be founded by entrepreneurs who grew up or live in San Francisco, New York, or Boston. Third Wave startups are likely to be building innovations to reinvent supply chains in industries like manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, healthcare, fashion and apparel, consumer packaged goods, real estate — huge, global industries in which the opportunity to exploit the latest advances in software technology to increase efficiencies in the conventional economy has not yet been fully realized, if at all.

Some of the reasons Third Wave startups have been unpopular with VCs are;

  • First, generally speaking, they require significantly more capital than the Second Wave, or even First Wave startups.
  • Second, initially, it can appear that they are operating unviable business models and that they may require more time to mature and experience a liquidity event than VCs can stomach — in fact it can often seem as if they will never become profitable businesses.
  • Third, at the outset it can seem as if such startups will never be able to overcome entrenched norms in legacy industries, overcome existing anti competitive barriers, or work in partnership with regulators and industry incumbents to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

The long-term success of Uber, Lyft, and other startups like them can help start to change that narrative.

Every Third Wave innovation is about refashioning supply chains

A supply chain is a network of interdependent organizations that cooperate and collaborate with one another to manage the movement of goods, services, and information between producers and consumers. The world as we know it would not exist without supply chains. Every Third Wave startup reflects an effort to rethink and reinvent the way the world’s supply chains function and operate. These innovations are critical if we are to have any hope of reversing climate change and creating a more sustainable future for our planet.

I am not suggesting that Uber is without blame or blemish. I am not suggesting that it is the very best example of a Third Wave startup. It is not yet clear that Uber or Lyft, or any of their competitors is good for the environment — I rarely use Uber or Lyft, preferring mass transit whenever I have the choice. I do not seek to dissuade, Mr. Desai, and others like him who would critique venture capitalists in general, and Uber’s investors in particular. However, while we critique Uber and its investors, let’s also demand that regulators and government fix the problems that are best fixed through policy as Third Wave Startups grow, mature, and implement new business models. Merely praying for Uber’s comeuppance doesn’t fix the very real shortcomings of regulatory authorities.

There is much to critique about Uber. Others have done so ably elsewhere. However, many of the issues that Uber, Lyft and some of their early Third Wave counterparts are facing may be emblematic of the same sorts of issues and obstacles that successive generations of Third Wave startups will face. Reinventing the way the world produces, transports, and consumes the goods and services that characterize life as we know it is a difficult and complex task that will take time and require many trade-offs and compromises.

Third Wave startups are the startups that excite me most. I believe that supply chain innovation is the foundation for all other sustainable innovation, and that supply chain innovation functions as a powerful economic multiplier. We should celebrate the era in which venture capitalists become more willing to fund startups taking on problems in unsexy but important industries — industries in which entrenched interests profit off inefficiencies that harm consumers and damage our environment. We should encourage, celebrate, and champion entrepreneurs of the Third Wave, even while we hold them accountable for their personal shortcomings. We should all be rooting for startups like Uber to succeed.

The Fashion Supply Chain Is Broken

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By Brian Laung Aoaeh and Lisa Morales-Hellebo

Originally published at www.refashiond.com on October 14, 2018.

Authors’ Note: This is the first in a series of six articles about problems and opportunities in global supply chains, with a focus on the fashion industry. This article frames the problem. The next article will delve into a historical analyses of technological disruption, from the perspective of risks and uncertainties for the fashion industry.

Executive Summary: Recent trends present incumbent companies in the global fashion industry with challenges and opportunities related to innovation in supply chain. In this article, we discuss how a historical top-down approach to business is giving way to an emerging bottom-up approach that is driven by consumer preferences. This is placing stresses on fashion supply chains which the industry can only address by adopting a collective, collaborative, ecosystem-driven approach to innovation.

The fashion supply chain is broken and must be refashioned. This is the conclusion we have come to after studying the issue, starting in 2014.

About The Authors

After 19 years in tech, Lisa Morales-Hellebo founded and launched the New York Fashion Tech Lab in 2014 with Springboard Enterprises and the Partnership Fund for NYC while serving as Executive Director for the first year. She then spent a year traveling to Puerto Rico to visit apparel factories, maker labs, cut-and-sew shops, ateliers, and universities in order to learn about the existing apparel supply chain and the challenges it faces.

Brian Laung Aoaeh, CFA spent 10 years in investment research and management, with 2 of those 10 years as the first and only member of the corporate development team at KEC Holdings, a single family office, and 8 of those 10 years as the first member of the small team that built KEC Ventures, an early-stage venture capital investment firm based in New York City. KEC Ventures grew to $98M of AUM across two funds, with 51 investments. Brian was a partner at the fund from its inception till his departure in September 2018.

Our interest in supply chain originated independent of one another. We first met in June 2016, and spent hours talking about supply chain at our first encounter.

After having started thinking about value chains[1] in 2014, by August 2017 Brian had decided to become a specialist early stage investor in supply chain technology after having been a generalist early stage venture capitalist up till that point. So we teamed up and started The New York Supply Chain Meetup: to nurture and grow the world’s foremost open, global, multidisciplinary community of people devoted to building the supply chain networks of the future. Driven by our shared enthusiasm for all things supply chain and our belief in what the future of supply chain will resemble, we are now on the verge of launching sister chapters of The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation: a collaborative, and mutually supportive coalition of grassroots communities focused on technology and innovation in the global supply chain industry.

In September 2018 we decided to team up to build REFASHIOND; an early-stage venture fund that will invest in the startups creating innovations to make global supply chain networks more efficient, starting with those reinventing the fashion supply chain.

Our Goal: To Catalyse Industry-wide Dialogue & Action

In engaging in the work that has gone into this article, and those that will follow, we hope to start an industry-wide conversation about tangible steps that participants in the fashion industry can take to arrive at a common framing of the problems confronting the industry, and then to find ways to work together to address those problems that can only be solved effectively through collective action. We encourage you to reach out to us if you’d like to discuss any aspects of this work, or if you’d like to collaborate with us in some way. Given our conversations with the industry executives in our network with whom we have the closest relationships we know supply chain, technology, and innovation are topics that every executive management team in the fashion industry is discussing and thinking about to some extent. It is time to start taking collective action to tackle the big issues. Please reach out to us by email;

  • Lisa Morales-Hellebo — lisa@refashiond.com, and
  • Brian Aoaeh — brian@refashiond.com.

A Bit of Historical Perspective

It is easy for outsiders to assume that the history of the fashion industry is completely divorced from that of technological innovation. That is wrong. In fact, the history of fashion, apparel, and textiles can be linked directly to some of the most important inventions of the industrial revolution.[2] A few key examples are the Fly Shuttle Wheel to allow one weaver to do the work of two; the Spinning Jenny, which increased wool mills productivity, the Cotton Gin, Power Loom, yarn Spinning Mule, the first factory, and even materials and textile innovations, like those used in the Mackintosh Raincoat.

Having acknowledged the role technological innovation has played in the history of the fashion industry, it is fair to ask: Has the industry’s more recent history lived up to the technological promise of the current era? That depends. We argue that the fashion industry’s incumbents’ collective investments in the industry’s supply chain have failed to keep pace with changing consumer expectations, expectations that change ever more quickly as advances in digital media and telecommunications unfold and shape consumers’ expectations of when and how to shop.

This is creating challenges for the industry as a trend towards shorter, less complex supply chains appears to be in the early stages of supplanting the long, global, and highly complex supply chains that accompanied globalization and large companies’ insatiable quest to outsource their manufacturing to foreign markets with the lowest combination of fixed and variable costs.

A Definition, And A Reiteration Of The Problem

Throughout this discussion, we will rely on the following definition of supply chain. A supply chain is:

A network of connected and interdependent organisations mutually and cooperatively working together to control, manage and improve the flow of materials and information from suppliers to end users.[3]

To reiterate the problem;

  • First: The fashion and apparel supply chain is broken and must be refashioned.
  • Second: Innovation is happening so fast and is so complicated that there isn’t a single company in the fashion and apparel industry that can reinvent itself quickly enough to take full advantage of new technologies and innovations. Instead, the industry needs to consider taking an industry-wide ecosystem approach to adopting technology and innovation.
  • Third: Because fashion and apparel is the world’s second largest polluting industry, the future of our planet depends on the industry adopting technologies that will accelerate the move towards more economically and environmentally sustainable supply chains.

According to FashionUnited, the global fashion industry is valued at $3 trillion in annual sales, with the United States accounting for approximately $400 billion of the global total. According to the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s Fashion.NYC.2020 report, New York City’s fashion and apparel retailers generate about $15 billion in sales, annually. It is inevitable that an industry of this scale will face supply chain challenges. Yet, as a whole, the industry has been slow to adopt digital technologies to aid in solving the supply chain issues it encounters.

The Current Paradigm

Predicting & Dictating Trends: Style and fashion has historically been dictated by a top-down system of influential designers and tastemakers who set the standards for beauty, taste, trend, and style. The rise of social media has created an unprecedented shift from top-down to bottom-up style and trend mandates, where the designers and tastemakers are now looking to street style, emerging brands, and influencers for inspiration and ideas about what consumers want. A team of trend-trackers monitors global social phenomena, hoping to observe the behavior of youth tribes and other emergent youth-driven phenomena that may be transformed into global fashion trends. The trend-trackers job is to record such phenomena and supply the information to industry clients, while also advising on brand strategies, developing marketing tactics, organizing events, and even providing designers and stylists who may design an entire collection for a brand. This process can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months. By the time it is complete the trend may already be out of style, and the result may be unsold inventory.

Sourcing & Materials[4]: Apparel sourcing is becoming more challenging due to; rising labor costs in foreign markets, increasing compliance costs due to alleged and documented labor abuses in far flung apparel manufacturing hubs in developing countries, and increasing consumer preference for sustainable methods of production as the effects of climate change come into stark relief.

Design: Designers work very closely with trend-trackers to anticipate consumer tastes, and to design clothes that they expect consumers to buy. However, by the time new designs find their way into retail showrooms, consumer tastes may have evolved away from the trend that inspired the designs.

Manufacturing: Apparel manufacturing is largely labor-intensive, concentrated in low-wage countries that are far away from most major fashion and apparel consumer markets, and subject to abuses such as the use of child-labor and slave labor. The process is inefficient, slow, and prone to quality control issues.

Distribution: Consumer behavior is forcing a convergence towards omni-channel and multi-channel distribution with increasingly decentralized warehousing, technological complexity arising from multi-platform selling channels, last-mile logistics, and automation all playing parts in making todays apparel supply chain more complex to manage than in the past.

Sales & Marketing: Technology has provided numerous distractions and shortened attention spans, making it more difficult for fashion and apparel brands to cut through the noise long enough to generate sales. Technology is also making it much easier for consumers to engage in comparison-shopping before they make a purchase.

With the proliferation and popularity of on-demand business models, consumers’ shopping behavior is shifting away from norms the global fashion and apparel industry is accustomed to and can control, and towards norms that favor consumers’ preferences. This shift is resulting in the hyper-segmentation of consumers who used to be seen as too “niche” to address because expectations built around sales volume didn’t make sense, or the industry deemed certain consumer segments as not meeting the standards for beauty imposed from the top. Plus-sized clothing is only recently being accepted as the untapped opportunity that it has always been in the United States where the average woman is a size 16, according to Racked.com’s article, “Size by the Numbers.”

Factors Driving Industry Profitability

Below, we highlight a few measures of profitability. There are others, but for brevity we have chosen to focus on a handful. To do analyses of this sort it is most useful to analyze trends over time for a company, and then compare that data on a relative basis to data for the industry as a whole or to data for a designated subset of peers.

Gross Profit Margin: Gross profit is measured by deducting cost of goods sold from revenue, and gross profit margin is calculated by taking the ratio of gross profit to revenue. Gross profit and gross profit margin reflect a company’s pricing power, the power exerted by its suppliers as reflected in its cost of goods sold, as well as the impact of competition.

Operating Profit Margin: This is also often referred to as EBIT Margin. It is calculated as the ratio of operating profit to revenue, with operating profit obtained by subtracting operating expenses from gross profit. Operating profit margin is a measure of how variable costs affect a company’s profit margins, and can be used to assess how much control a company has over the costs associated with running its operations. One-time charges should be excluded from the calculation. In the fashion and apparel industry generally, we expect that IT infrastructure investments that are required to operate in a multi-platform and multi-channel environment, increasing freight and supply chain logistics costs, as well as labor inflation in foreign markets will each have a negative impact on operating profit margins. Moreover, as we have previously stated, the trend towards increasing marketing expenditure in order to hold consumers’ attention long enough to generate sales will also have a negative impact on operating profit margins.

Return on Equity (ROE): A firm’s return on equity is calculated as the ratio of net income to average shareholders’ equity. It is a measure of how effective a company is at converting its assets into earnings growth. For example, if ROE is 15%, a dollar invested generates 15 cents of assets for the business. ROE is affected by revenue, selling and general administration expenses, taxation, operating efficiency, and inventory management. Management may use share buybacks to offset declines in ROE.

Inventory Turnover: The inventory turnover ratio is an efficiency ratio that measures a company’s effectiveness at generating sales from the inventory it holds. It is calculated as the ratio of cost of goods sold to average inventory. Inventory turnover ratio is affected by the rate at which sales occurs, which, in-turn is dependent on consumer sentiment. Companies in the industry often overestimate how much to stock in inventory, leading to steep wholesale and retail discounts. In the worst cases, inventory that cannot be sold is destroyed.

Earnings Per Share (EPS) Growth: Earnings per share is calculated as a company’s net income minus its preferred dividend payments, divided by the weighted average number of shares outstanding. Generally, earnings per share is affected most negatively by factors that reduce net income. As the industry generates increasing proportions of sales from the BRIC nations and other emerging markets, foreign exchange risk imposes negative pressures on revenues and net income. It is important to note that companies can easily manipulate earnings per share growth by instituting share-buyback programs.

Inventory Forecasting & Management Issues

The issues at play here are illustrated best in H&M, a Fashion Giant, Has a Problem: $4.3 Billion in Unsold Clothes a story by Elizabeth Paton that appeared in The New York Times on March 27, 2018. The article highlights a drop in quarterly sales accompanied by an increase in unsold inventory. According to the article, H&M’s customers have either moved to doing more of their shopping online or have gone seeking lower-cost offerings elsewhere. This is ironic since H&M has been a fast fashion stalwart for two decades during which it has experienced massive growth. The article describes some of the supply chain challenges H&M is grappling with, and how the company intends to respond: “H&M has insisted it has a plan, saying it would slash prices to reduce the stockpile and slow its expansion in stores. It said it hoped its online business would expand 25 percent this year.”

Lack of Efficient & Agile Supply Chain

What happens when the information or forecasts at one node in a company’s supply chain is incorrect? Incorrect information at any node in a supply chain creates a phenomena wherein the flow of goods is unexpectedly distorted over time due to differences between actual demand by end-consumers and forecasted demand by suppliers.

The phenomenon is known as the bullwhip effect, and it arises because demand signals are incorrectly amplified as information is transmitted along the supply chain. The bullwhip effect arises due to; poor coordination along the various nodes in a supply chain, and rational decisions that are made by supply chain participants using the best information at their disposal. The distortions are made worse because of the uncertainty that accompanies activities at every point in a company’s supply chain. The general consequence of the bullwhip effect is poor customer service.

How might a fashion company counteract the bullwhip effect? First, some companies are reversing the effects of globalization by creating the cyber-physical infrastructure required to enable networks of small-batch, quick-turn, and localized manufacturing hubs in order to make it possible to manufacture goods for consumers in the key markets of Western Europe and North America in small batches, closer to the ultimate end-consumers. Second, some companies are developing and using more advanced software for predictive analytics. Advances in artificial intelligence make this a much more feasible proposition today than at any time in the past. Third, some companies are improving the real-time flow of predictive information and data between key nodes in the supply chain. This allows every participant in the supply chain to anticipate future demand more accurately, and to stock raw-materials inventory more efficiently. We will discuss the technology trends that are making solutions to this problem possible in the fifth article in this series.

Conclusion: A Race To The Bottom?

Prevailing economic, social, and technological trends point towards a challenging future for the global fashion industry. Incumbent players may choose to operate with a business-as-usual attitude. Alternatively, they may opt to address the industry’s supply chain challenges by adopting an ecosystem-based approach to solving the problems that are too big for a single company to solve on its own. This will require adopting a systems-thinking approach to how companies in the industry are run, and how they view their relationships with one another.

The companies that win will adapt to the changing landscape by building on their historical strengths, while simultaneously developing new supply chain capabilities through partnerships with former sworn rivals or relatively new technology startups.

The companies that lose will remain entrenched in the old ways of doing business, following one extreme round of price-cuts by even more extreme discounts. This race to the bottom will be exacerbated by additional measures like reducing the number of brick-and-mortar locations — measures that do nothing to solve the fundamental problem: The fashion and apparel supply chain is broken and must be refashioned.

Next in the series: Where Will Technological Disruption In Fashion Come From?

About REFASHIOND Ventures: REFASHIOND Ventures is an early-stage venture capital investment firm that is being formed in order to invest in early-stage startups creating innovations that make global supply chains more efficient, starting with startups at the intersection of fashion and retail.

About REFASHIOND CO:LAB: REFASHIOND CO:LAB is the systems design, research, and strategy consulting arm of REFASHIOND Ventures. REFASHIOND CO:LAB helps organizations create competitive advantage through supply chain innovation.

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[1] One may think of a value chain as a company’s internal supply chain. The term is used to distinguish internal operations from operations that rely on a network of external parties.

[2] McFadden, Christopher. “27 Industrial Revolution Inventions That Changed the World.” Interesting Engineering, 18 Feb. 2018, interestingengineering.com/27-inventions-of-the-industrial-revolution-that-changed-the-world. Accessed Oct. 12, 2018

[3] Christopher, Martin. Logistics & Supply Chain Management: Creating Value-Adding Networks. 4th ed., Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2011.

[4] Berg, Achim, and Saskia Hedrich. “What’s next in Apparel Sourcing?” McKinsey & Company, May 2014, www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/whats-next-in-apparel-sourcing. Accessed Oct. 8, 2018.

Originally published at www.refashiond.com on October 14, 2018.

#CountDown: 3 Days to #TNYSCM04 – Supply Chain & Artificial Intelligence

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A cross-section of the audience at #TNYSCM #02, January 2018.

We’re now less than a week from The New York Supply Chain Meetup’s fourth gathering. The purpose of this post is to outline our plans for that event, and preview what we expect to do between now and June 2018 . . . We’re still in the early days of building this community, so much of this is subject to change, especially as we go through the process of recruiting sponsors.

Our Mission

To nurture and grow the world’s foremost open, global, multidisciplinary community of people devoted to building the supply chain networks of the future – starting in NYC.

Become a coporate sponsor. Email me at: brian@tnyscm.com for more details about our vision, and the team that’s working behind the scenes to build this community.

The New York Supply Chain Meetup is powered by Particle Ventures, a seed-stage fund based in NYC that invests in Supply Chain & Industrial Intelligence. Particle is built by the same team that launched KEC Ventures.

Logistical Details: #TNYSCM #04

  • Date: Thursday, March 15, 2018.
  • Time: 17:30–20:30
  • Location: SAP America, 10 Hudson Yards - 48th Floor, New York, NY. An organizer will be downstairs, at the security counter.

#TNYSCM #04 combines a Lightning Talk, a "Fire-Side" Chat, and a Showcase. It is sponsored by SAP.iO and co-hosted by The New York Supply Chain Meetup and the New York City Bots and Artificial Intelligence Meetup.

SAP.iO helps innovators inside and outside of SAP build products, find customers, and change industries.

REGISTER HERE!

Agenda

5:30 PM - 5:55 PM: Pre-event Networking
5:55 PM - 6:00 PM: Welcome Remarks (#TNYSCM, NYCBAI, SAP.iO)
6:00 PM - 6:30 PM: Lightning Talk (15 Minutes), Q&A (15 Minutes)
6:30 PM - 6:50 PM: "Fire-Side" Chat (15 Minutes), Q&A (15 Minutes)
7:00 PM - 8:00 PM: Showcase (10 Minutes, with 5 Minutes of Q&A, each)
8:00 PM - 8:30 PM: Closing Remarks, Post-event Networking

Lightning Talk: Evolution & Use Cases of Artificial Intelligence in Supply Chain, From An Industry And SAP Point of View

David Judge (@DHJudge) is Vice President of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning products at SAP. He guides product strategy and drives increased market awareness for SAP Leonardo.

Geoff Maxwell (@geofflm) is Global Head of Business Strategy and Execution Analytics and SAP Leonardo. He is responsible for go to market strategy for SAP’s portfolio of Leonardo solutions.

Fireside Chat: The Future of AI-Driven Transformation in Retail Supply Chains, and in Government Agencies.

José P. Chan is VP Business Development for Celect, a predictive analytics firm founded out of MIT, which helps retailers optimize their inventory portfolios in stores and across the supply chain. Previously, he worked internationally in retail for over two decades with LVMH, Richemont and Roberto Cavalli. José has held senior management positions and has extensive experience in buying, marketing, merchandising, planning, and has run retail store networks. He holds an SM from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MBA from University of Rochester, a BS from Cornell University and an AAS from the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Sameer Anand is a Partner with A.T. Kearney’s operations practice with over 16 years of experience in management consulting. He advises clients on large scale transformations to drive step changes in productivity with an underpinning of analytics and digital across CPG, retail, industrial products, and high tech industries. His areas of expertise include consumer products, manufacturing, supply chain planning, sourcing, bracket pricing, logistics, and advanced analytics. Prior to joining A.T. Kearney, Sameer worked at Deloitte and American Airlines.

REGISTER HERE!

Showcase Presentations

At #TNYSCM #04 we'll have 3 startups talk about the artificial intelligence-driven products they are building for the supply chain logistics industry. They will appear in the following order;

ClearMetal (@ClearMetalInc): Founded in 2014, and based in San Francisco, CA, ClearMetal provides predictive data and analytics for the supply chain logistics industry, enabling its customers to unlock increased efficiencies in global trade as ClearMetal enables them to solve complex problems using a data-driven approach. According to CrunchBase and CBInsights ClearMetal has raised $12M over two rounds of financing, most recently raising $9.0M in its Series A financing which was led by Innovation Endeavors. SAP.iO is an investor in ClearMetal.

Wise Systems (@goWiseSystems): Founded in 2014, and based in Cambridge, MA,  Wise Systems develops route-optimization software that schedules last-mile delivery truck drivers while considering multiple constraints like customer time windows, traffic, and service time. Wise automatically dispatches schedules to drivers and the software recalculates and updates schedules in real-time as things change in real-time. According to CrunchBase and CBInsights, Wise Systems has raised $1.1M in seed capital. Dynamo Accelerator is an investor in Wise Systems. Santosh Sankar, a co-organizer of The New York Supply Chain Meetup, is also a co-founder & director of Dynamo.

Optimal Dynamics: Based in Princeton, NJ, Optimal Dynamics brings AI to the trucking industry based on over 30 years of academic research and development centered on the use of Computational Stochastic Optimization and Learning in solving problems related to dynamic assignment problems in transportation and logistics. Optimal Dynamics recently raised an undisclosed amount in pre-seed funding.

REGISTER HERE!

Preview — #TNYSCM  in April, May, June

Here is what our team of organizers is working on, between now and June.

  • April 26: A panel discussion and keynote presentation, focused on the issues that have kept blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies in the lab and out of the real world. The keynote presentation is by Silvio Micali, he will talk about his work creating Algorand. THIS IS GOING TO BE BIG!
  • May 24: A showcase of startups in Fashion, Apparel, and Retail supply chain. THIS IS GOING TO BE BIG!
  • June 21: A Sourcing 101 workshop for startups building physical products.

Other "Upcoming" Supply Chain Events

  • TPM2018: Is now behind us. It was awesome. Read my blog post about it here: #TPM2018: The Woodstock Of International Container Shipping & Logistics
  • Maritime Global Technologies: Reverse Pitch on March 15, 2018 from 09:30–12:30. MGTIC is an initiative of SUNY Maritime College to build a global maritime technology innovation hub by bringing together all that the New York City metro-region has to offer entrepreneurs building software for the global shipping and maritime logistics market. I’m a member of the advisory board and have previously blogged about it here and here. I will be there. Say hello, if we've never met before
  • Transparency18: This is the flagship event series started by the founders of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance. It follows BiTA’s Spring Symposium, a members only event that occurs on May 21, 2018. I will attend both days of Transparency 18 May 22 and May 23.

Updates – Industry Study: Freight Trucking (#Startups)

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Brick by brick . . . Solve it one step at a time.

Note: John Azubuike (@jnazubuike) and I are currently conducting research on software startups in the ocean freight shipping market. We expect to publish that towards the end of January 2017.

Our blog post about freight trucking startups opened the door to numerous conversations that we may never have had, with people who know more about the freight trucking market than we do. This update is my attempt to augment our original article with some of what we learned from those conversations. If it comes across as somewhat unpolished, that’s because I decided arbitrarily that I should not let 2016 end without this update being published.

So without further ado . . .

  1. The barriers to success for startups pursuing the “Uber for freight-trucking” business model is even more fraught with danger than we were able to convey in our article. It is even more clear to us that brokers do a lot more than field a couple of phone calls, and that assuming it will be easy to cut them completely out of the picture is probably a dangerous assumption. We heard numerous anecdotes about the difficulties freight trucking services marketplace startups are facing . . . Yes, that including some that have been lionized by the tech press. Presumably, many are running on borrowed time.
  2. Compliance is as acute a problem as we have imagined. In fact, Walmart Transportation was hit with a $55 million settlement only 5 days after we published our article. Many settlements and fines do not attract the attention of the news media. If Walmart is stumbling, imagine how tough it must be for less sophisticated trucking companies to stay abreast of the complex state and Federal regulations. Compliance software that is easy to deploy, and easy for fleet managers and truck drivers to use is a necessity. A number of new entrants into the market are taking that path. Notable among them; San Diego, CA-based Platform Science whose co-founders previously ran OmniTracs, the fleet management software division of Qualcomm that was sold to Vista Equity partners for $800 million . . . in cash.
  3. Ty Findley, a member of the GE Ventures team covering Advanced Manufacturing, Logistics, and Supply Chain pointed us to the 2015 patent lawsuit between Fourkites and Macropoint, two developers of Fleet Management Software that enables fleet operators to track and trace the activities of individual trucks. In this lawsuit Macropoint accused Fourkites of violating patents held by Macropoint. The court ruled in favor of Fourkites; dismissing the Macropoint patents as invalid under the United States Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank Int’l ruling of 2014. It will be interesting to see what forms of intellectual property prove most valuable in this market. If you have an interest you can read my work on Economic Moats in order to understand how we think about these issues.
  4. Based on her years of experience with technology innovation in the freight trucking market Debra T. Johnson of Eco-Edge discusses what she calls the “invisible barriers to innovation” that impede the success of startups in this market. She groups them under; Product, Customer, and Sales. Overcoming all of these invisible barriers to innovation requires founding teams that have; strong technical experience in order to build a product that works for this market, AND sufficient industry experience in order to build trust, and win credibility with potential customers.
  5. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher of Starsky Robotics sent me the following comments by email – modified, and paraphrased for clarity. Starsky is a Y Combinator startup.
    • The huge inconsistencies in data about the industry are really frustrating. It would help to know what the most authoritative sources of industry data are.
      • I agree. We generally relied on data from industry associations, and then we extrapolated to fill in the gaps we wanted estimations for. Our estimations could be wrong. We relied mainly on: OODIA Foundation, and American Trucking Association. Data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics is more difficult to parse if one is in a hurry. We did not have access to proprietary sources of data on the industry, but some times I wonder if they are any more accurate than data that is available from public sources.
    • The market map was a bit odd in terms of how you classified some of the startups, some of the startups may have been misclassified.
      • I agree. We expected this to be the case, since the way an investor thinks about a market is often not entirely congruent with how others see it. Our market map was only an approximation about how we think of the market – for example, we would group “truck automation” together with “automated cars” . . . Since the way we see it the key outcome is “automated land transportation” which can then be applied to trucks and cars – by the same startup/company, with adequate modifications to account for the structural differences between a truck and a car. Think smart-phones versus tablet computers; iPhone versus iPad. Or, think laptop computers versus tablet computers; MacBook Air versus iPad. That being said, we’ll take another look at the market map when we feel it makes sense to give it a major update. There are many startups we did not know about when we put it together.
  6. Craig Fuller, CEO/Managing Director of TransVix stopped by our office to tell us about what they are doing to solve the dynamic assignment problem using the contract theory approach by building a derivatives market for trucking, rail, and containers. If you believe their estimates, this could be a $1.4 trillion opportunity in the United States, and possibly an $8.0 trillion opportunity globally. Yes, you read that right. Trillion, with a “capital tee”. Craig shed further light on some aspects of the trucking industry that we did not fully understand. He also laughed at me when I told him I had developed a headache as we were trying to unravel some of the mysteries of the maritime freight shipping market. He gave us some good ideas for paths along which we might conduct some research.
  7. We also heard directly from startups based outside the United States that are building software for domestic freight trucking markets in; Israel, Brazil, Germany, India. We heard anecdotes about startups in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
  8. These news reports caught our attention in the days and weeks after we published;
  9. Daniel Burrows, founder and ceo of XStream Trucking, a seed-stage tech startup – thinks about the problems in the freight trucking problem from the fuel efficiency side of the profitability equation. Fuel costs account for as much as a third of the operating expenses of a truck fleet. The team at XStream reports that its technology can generate fuel savings of between 2.5% and 8%. You can see the potential for those savings to add up to something significant for the industry when you consider that, according to the American Trucking Associations; ((Source: http://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Energy.aspx. Accessed on Jan. 03, 2017.))
    • Trucks consumed 52.3 billion gallons of fuel for business purposes in 2011; 37.2 billion of that in diesel fuel and 14.8 billion in gasoline,
    • The industry spent $143.4 billion buying diesel fuel in 2011

This seems to be a market that will remain active for sometime to come, and we are eager to see what new developments occur as time progresses.

We’re studying startups building technology for the ocean freight shipping market. We expect to have made enough progress to publish it in a few weeks. Stay tuned. Better yet . . . Send us ideas; @brianlaungaoaeh and/or @jnazubuike.

Update: January 3, 2017 at 17:30 to include insights from Daniel Burrows at XStream Trucking.