Don't accept the status quo.

It’s no secret that we now live in the age of conscious and connected commerce, where those who emphasize building collaborative relationships and investing in strong partnerships are thriving.

Over the past decade, fashion brands have been laser-focused on the demand side of the equation. Building close relationships and feedback loops with their customers and communities, transforming into customer-driven and product-first businesses.

So with the demand part ‘solved’ – what about the supply side?

To meet demand and grow, brands need an agile production model that consistently delivers on time, cost, quality, and sustainability.

We get it; this isn’t easy. 

The status quo in production is a largely disconnected process, where information is siloed, and teams have accepted uncertainty as standard.

The ‘Black Box’ of production makes everything unpredictable, forces teams to be reactive rather than proactive, and instils widespread acceptance that costly preventable mistakes and delays are unavoidable.

So keep calm and carry on, yeh?

There are a million reasons to accept the status quo—the default mode. Change is hard. There are different ways of working and many systems and processes to consider, including language barriers, different time zones, and travel restrictions.

Change requires systems thinking.

You can’t solve complex system-wide problems by thinking from only one perspective and focusing exclusively on solving personal or internal issues. To see positive change, other organisations and individuals within the system need to be solved too.

The shift towards Collaborative Production Model 

Collaborative Production is a game-changer and is what winning brands are already doing. A McKinsey report showed that brands collaborating closely with their suppliers are already outperforming their peers’ revenue by 10%!

• Patagonia embedded its collaborative business ethos across the whole supply chain.
• Allbirds in covid invested even more in their supplier relationships rather than trying to find alternative suppliers.
• Zara (love or hate ‘em) speed to market is unrivalled thanks to a fully integrated supply chain model.

The world has changed, and the fashion industry needs new systems and new technologies that enable creativity and cross-industry collaboration. 

1. Fashion PLM has been around for decades and, as a big bang implementation model, can be high-risk and takes time to implement. But, most importantly, this wasn’t designed with the modern, digitally native brand in mind.
2. Generic productivity tools like Monday.com and Asana, on the other side, are not designed for the uniqueness of fashion production and fail to deliver industry-specific processes and structure. You have to custom create your whole workflow from scratch, a unique template that makes cross-organisational collaboration much hard.
3. Excel and Google Sheets are accessible, configurable and easy to set up. The go-to for most teams, but a serious barrier to collaboration, requires rigorous versions and heavy reliance on email and We Transfer.

The fashion system, the people who work in it, and the planet needs better.

But we knew we didn’t have all the answers. Hence, we started with a 2-year long research journey and personally visited 300+ manufacturers and suppliers worldwide and spoke to 1000s of brand builders and business owners to understand their challenges first hand.

This is why we started building SupplyCompass – The Collaborative Production Platform.

Flora Davidson, Co-Founder & Head of Product + Gus Batholomew, Co-Founder & CEO