S5E7: Rathna Sharad, CEO and Founder of FlavorCloud is Unlocking International Supply Chains and Shipping for Startups

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We are so excited to welcome you back to the room. On today's episode, we sit down with the Ratna Sharad, founder and CEO of FlavorCloud. With the constant growth of e-commerce and the impacts of the pandemic, as consumers become more and more dependent on e-commerce to get the products they need and love, there is also increased expectations from consumers on swift shipping times. Especially in the context of Amazon Prime. This is where Flavort Cloud helps out, taking care of the whole cross-border shipping process, including all customs requirements wherever you're shipping to. During today's conversation with Rathna, we discussed themes such as making anywhere-to-anywhere shipping more accessible to smaller businesses such as D2C brands, the increasingly high expectations of online consumers, and a discussion on the future of supply chain as we recover from COVID Let's open the door.

Rathna, thank you so much for joining us in the room today. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. We would love to start at the beginning with your story before we jump into FlavorCloud and all the incredible things that you're working on today. Where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in Chennai, southern India by the coast. My childhood had a very significant impact in who I am today. I went to school in India and then I came here to study. I ended up working and then going back to school. So that's the journey. I have two younger sisters living in India. My dad is a computer science engineer. He's one of the smartest people, the most brilliant person I know. Certainly I look to my dad for a lot of inspiration when I was younger, specifically Specifically, when I was 4 or 5, he built our TV. I remember actually helping him find the right ICs to solder onto this motherboard. So I think a lot of that passion for technology and creating things, building things comes from him. He was an engineer first. And so he approaches everything with that mindset. And I get that from him. My mom, she was a homemaker, extremely creative. She could talk about flowers or colors for hours. She was very inspirational on the creative side of things. I really like to think I'm balanced on both sides because of that. She's also the one that brought us up. For most of our childhood, my dad was traveling and he was in the Middle East working in Bahrain. My mom was responsible for us. Those days in India, 3 girls doing everything by yourself was a real challenge. And when I think about grit and when I think about how she was fearless in a lot of ways, I like to think that those traits I get from her.

It's such a beautiful story of your dad's kind of more engineering mindset, skillset, your mother's creative energy coming together with you and your sisters. Did you ever think that you were going to be a founder from your early years?

No, I did not. My dad was very academic, into robotics and engineering, and it was a very different path. And that's the path that he wanted us to take. All three of us are engineers. And that was the path that we chose as well. But in the early days, I started in the supply chain logistics industry. That's why, you know, FlavorCloud is not something you just dive into. It is a very different world. Transportation, supply chain, and logistics. I accidentally fell into that world as a developer and then as a product leader for over 10 years. And what kept me there and kept me fascinated was really that it was a massive massive business problem, real-world problem, very much in need of technology to really solve it because some of these companies have been around over 100 years and it's very antiquated in so many different ways, from processes to how they operate to siloed organizations geographically, organizationally, as well as lack of technology across the board and not having that mindset. And that's why you see that in the days of e-commerce, there really isn't anybody that's prepared to take on this new digital world. So that was the most fascinating thing for me. I think the massive business problem, I'm always drawn to that. If you look at my career, the common thread is I gravitate towards those problems.

Let's double-click a little bit more into your career and the problems that you were solving before FlavorCloud. Your career background initially started in logistics at Menlo Worldwide. Which was bought by XPO in 2015, and then UPS. Tell us a little bit more about what the logistics ecosystem looked like in the early 2000s. To put this in context for our listeners, this was just 10 years after Amazon was actually founded.

It looks a lot like today. That's essentially the pace of change. We've gone through e-commerce wave and we're in global e-commerce wave, and really not a lot has changed in terms of country-specific trade regulations or policies or how goods are transported, whether it's for wholesale or for e-commerce. But what has changed is consumer behavior. Our consumption cycles have changed. Our expectations have changed. Thanks to Amazon, as consumers, we have zero patience. It's all about, I want it already. A lot has been done in terms of first mile and last mile type of optimization so that you can get stuff in an hour and same day. So that's become the norm. But when you think about international and cross-border and really trade, not a lot has changed. It's simply because it is so complex. It was actually Emery Worldwide that eventually became Menlo, and then it was a progression. We had a fleet of aircraft. It was essentially air, trucking, and then eventually through UPS supply chain, I worked in ocean carriers. So all modes of transportation, those were early days of nascent B2C. So primarily B2B. It was really fascinating times. And I got to work with customs organizations around the world, defining the world of trade tariff regulatory contracts from a technology standpoint and what that should look like. A world of EDI, which exists to this day. We're in this API world and we're trying to make everything so simple with web services and REST APIs, and they still live in an EDI world. So I'm very familiar with that world and really it hasn't changed at all.

You make such an interesting callout that I wanna highlight for our listeners, most of whom really don't remember a time before Amazon, this idea that FedEx and UPS and your former employers were built for B2B commerce for a business and really were asked to do B2C commerce without a proper retrofit or really any shift in the rails, so to speak, of getting those items from A to B. Can you talk about some of those challenges you faced when you were in the thick of making this B2B switch to B2C within the infrastructure at hand?

We faced that firsthand. I went from logistics to Microsoft, where I was fascinated by the world of B2C e-commerce because what we were doing was helping make the connection between brand and consumer through ads. And we were working with the Amazons and Ebays of the world all the way down to SMBs. I was able to see what e-commerce was all about. My own personal consumption, I shop a lot and I was purchasing from these international brands and had a horrendous experience as a consumer that got me thinking about why my past life did not translate to a great B2C consumer future. And I felt best suited to solve that problem, or naively thought I could be the person to do it. So I started the company Runway to Street. We thought it was an SMB problem. So it was a marketplace that enabled brands, fashion, beauty, accessories that used to be 60% of cross-border. And it was a marketplace that enabled these brands to sell internationally. As part of that, the e-commerce was happening, but cross-border e-commerce was even more of an afterthought because it was so hard and nobody wanted to touch it. At Runway to Street, we were really looking at all the different pieces of e-commerce as an operator, really understanding the brand side of things. How do you think about conversions? How do you think about CAC and LTV? And how do you do that with logistics in mind. When you think about cross-border, it's even more complexities. It's things that you don't think about. Like in the wholesale world, what you do is you have a fully landed cost. So if you were in a different country, the old school way was that you would have a retail presence in that country. And for that, you would have to build infrastructure, everything from having a local entity to hiring resources on the ground, warehouses, all of that capability. You had to spin it up before you knew that it had any resonance whatsoever with consumers in that country. And the dramatic shift we were seeing with e-commerce is that you didn't need to do that. And specifically in the context of cross-border, you now have an avenue to reach this audience because they found you on social media and they want it. But how do you enable that. That was the, and it still is, the education that we do for brands, really thinking about how do you go from the old school mentality of brick and mortar, thinking about twice a year drops of inventory to a much more agile cycle, which is what we see today. Everything becomes obsolete 2 months later. So you're in that kind of cycle. So dramatic shifts happening on the B2B B front and what it means, obviously everything going online and away from this model of needing a storefront. And then the third thing I would say is supply chain optimization, cost benefit analysis of should you have an entity? And if so, where?

That's an incredible journey to uncovering all of the magic that's happening behind the scenes when a package just shows up at our doorstep. And frankly, sometimes we don't even know where it's coming from in the world. Those insights you shared on your first company that you started, Runway to Street, really did inform what is now FlavorCloud. Could you tell our listeners a little bit more about that evolution and what the mission of FlavorCloud is to solve for retailers?

When we started Runway to Street, we thought it was an SMB problem. We were able to refute and learn that as the size of the brand increased, the complexity increases. With that in the sense that your trade challenges, your supply chain challenges, your logistics challenges, the number of SKUs that you need to understand in terms of understanding commodities for trade and duties and taxes and all of that, it just increases manyfold. So it's not an SMB problem. It really is a much bigger problem as you scale. That was the first learning that we had. The second thing we did was in leveraging every technology that was out there. It was all piecemeal and we tried everything and nothing actually worked because we scaled Runway to Street to over 300 brands and they were from 100 countries and we were selling to 200. That kind of a complicated anywhere-to-anywhere equation had never been done before. We literally built everything ground up and put it together for shipping and returns and said, how do we make shipping and returns easy, affordable, friction-free, anywhere to anywhere? That came from Runway to Street. Those were the two major learnings. The larger the brand, the greater the complexity, and that we needed to focus on the logistics because that is the problem that's completely unsolved and needs solving. If you want to have a great brand experience and consumer experience. As a result of that, the logistics became the most important thing that we offered these brands. And we started getting requests from larger brands who didn't want to be in the marketplace, but wanted to leverage the logistics. It was an easy transition, if you will, to FlavaCloud. We specifically took the backend technology, created a new company, FlavaCloud, and created web services for that logistics anywhere-to-anywhere infrastructure. That allows any brand anywhere in the world to plug in and offer a seamless international shipping experience. And we've just gone from supporting SMB brands to sell internationally to really saying that we can enable cross-border. We're the logistics horizontal layer that can enable any brand anywhere. It doesn't matter if you're a big box retailer or you're a mid-market e-commerce direct-to-consumer consumer brand, it, it, you just plug into the service and you go. That feeds into our mission, which is enable every brand to be a global brand.

With the onset of the cloud, where all of a sudden the physical infrastructure that you would've previously needed to spin up a SaaS enterprise tech company was obfuscated for those founders. You didn't have to buy the server infrastructure. You could just rent it essentially from AWS. And I feel really strong parallels to what you're building, which is, hey retailer, you want to be a global brand, you have demand worldwide because of social media, but you don't have the capacity to build your own servers, build your own logistics rails.

One in three e-commerce purchases pre-COVID used to be cross-border. So the other thing that we saw during our Runway to Street tenure was that Initially, cross-border was an afterthought. It was less than 10% of your traffic was international. But now you're looking at, with COVID well over 40% on average is international traffic. We're just a much more connected world. Consumer behavior is what has accelerated that. And with COVID we're seeing that international is the number one growth strategy in the minds of brands. And just in the last year and a half, that has completely transformed the thinking. You really don't need to be focused on a specific country. It's no longer how you think about e-commerce. You really think about your end consumer. Who does your brand resonate with? How do you connect with them? It doesn't matter where they are. The true power of e-commerce really is that you can sell to anybody, anywhere.

With that mindset, Flavourcart has built a product that is enabling what is at the forefront of many brands' goals for 2021, 2022, and looking forward. I'm no longer on the brand side. Obviously I had a lot better of a touchpoint on what brands were doing when I was at Gap, but this does feel reminiscent of some of the key initiatives that we were focusing on, which is to unlock a seamless consumer experience no matter who that consumer is. For our worldwide customers.

The challenges of international are insurmountable, and that hasn't gone away or changed. Consumer expectation has changed, the need for growth has changed, but the complexities remain the same. And how do you do that at scale and allow them to grow? That's what we focus on. We are the largest cross-border network of carriers, 300+ and the The reason for that is so fragmented. It's not like you can get a DHL account and call it done because it's death by a thousand cuts after that. And brands quickly learn that. We see that all the time. Either they come to us because they say, oh, we hear it's too complex, or they've tried FedEx or DHL and said, oh, this is too much and the unit economics don't make sense.

You announced your Series A raise of $6.5 million. $1.3 million led by Mucker Capital. Congratulations. That's a very exciting milestone.

We're curious.

We love to ask this question because everyone has a different answer on who was the first person to say yes to investing in this vision of worldwide e-commerce for FlavorCloud.

I have this amazing initial set of investors who actually started with Runway to Street that came along on the journey to FlavorCloud. It just went from a small-scale startup to a huge vision with FlavorCloud, a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. These were my managers at FlavorCloud. They are my network. They are my go-to people since early days of Microsoft. So I want to say they were my first check, multiple checks actually.

One of the incredibly exciting things once you've raised and raised a Series A is really growing the business. Continuing to solve for your customers' needs and scaling that solution. In an interview you gave with Forbes, you mentioned Clover Cloud saw a spike of 3x growth in customers in 2020 alone, which is pretty incredible. Tell us a little bit more about who your target customer is in the retailer world.

We focus on mid-market, direct-to-consumer, digitally native brands. That's our sweet spot. We also support enterprises, but when we say mid-market, that means $10 to $100 million in GMV, so gross merchandise value sales. This is across domestic and international. So that's really our bread and butter, if you will. The $10 million seems to be the magic number where the brand has figured out who they are. They have a product, they understand their end consumer, and they're ready to go global. So that was one of the interesting learnings that we had in the early years of Flavocloud. Certainly the $100 million plus is our enterprise and we do support them. But for SMBs, we work with channel partners. So we work with a lot of 3PLs, channel partners, OEM partners. They do the handholding for them.

From SMBs where you're working with channel partners to your target mid-market customers, customer, it seems that unlocking international markets and new markets is truly a key priority. You've been quoted discussing partnerships in unlocking markets such as China and parts of Europe. From your macro worldview, which international markets are growing the fastest, and where would you recommend a retailer expand into first?

There's two sides to this. Flavocloud, think of us as a marketplace, right? Let's say the brand originates in the US and they want to go global. That means they are shipping from the US to 200+ countries that we support around the world. So essentially any country that has a carrier that's supported, we will support them. So unless they're embargoed or no carrier is traveling to that country, we support that. So that is the global view of Flavocloud. We were global from the get-go. That also means that we support trade and complexities with customs and custom clearance networks in all of these countries around the world. The flip side of your question is what are the outbound countries that we focus on? So really, where do we want to enable brands and which parts of the world? Now, yes, we can do that in 200+ countries, but really the core cross-border growth opportunities outside of the US where we have a really big presence. US, Canada, certainly EU and UK became a really big focus. Now, those countries, they were doing cross-border before the term was even coined. It's just geographically, that's where it started. With the VAT changes that happened in EU in July this year and then Brexit that happened in January, essentially every government wants a slice of the tax revenue for e-commerce. This is a trend that's going to start happening around the world. You're just going to see a lot more fluidity, a lot more complexity. Everybody wants to get in on the e-commerce game. And so you're going to see more and more of this over the next couple of years. And this is just a precursor. So EU and UK became really important countries in terms of outbound and supporting brands in those countries. Outside of that, India, China are really big. China represents 30% of cross-border, enormous market opportunity. And then outside of those, Australia, simply because they do a lot of import and export, and Middle East, which is very high purchase power. So these are the pockets that we care about. When we say worldwide, it really is outbound optimization. Every country requires a specific set of optimizations to light up multiple services. And so FlavorCloud Global Network is this complex entity that allows for all of this to happen in a very seamless way so that your brand can plug in and go. And then for each of these countries, depending on the brand, we recommend they focus on a data-driven approach to say, where are your customers and who is your product resonating with and letting that drive rather than what you normally see, which is, hey, let's go with English-speaking market. You're in the US, let's go with Australia, UK, and Canada. Yes, they are big. They're very important. They're big lanes. But really taking a systematic, data-driven approach of letting the conversions decide and then understanding your CAC and LTV and how you want to pour dollars into your marketing campaigns and where it makes sense. That's the approach we take. So it's not a go do this for 3 countries. It's really about let's look at the global e-commerce world and come up with a plan for how you scale up.

It's never really a one-size-fits-all solution. 2020 was obviously a very challenging year for e-commerce, even though there was a ton of growth. Which international markets have what have you seen impacted the most, either positively or negatively, by the COVID-19 crisis?

Last year, March was the worst. Everybody came to a crawl. Obviously, we didn't know where this was headed. We saw a complete change overnight, if you will, starting April. And then it was just uphill from there. I think in general, the e-commerce brands, it wasn't so much country-specific. Was just digitally native, e-commerce savvy brands did better than brick and mortar. We saw them struggle a lot. Even when things came back up, they were the ones that struggled because they couldn't move fast enough.

One of the key issues that we've heard is like supply chain and how difficult it is for them to get their products in on time in a consistent, reliable manner. What are your predictions for how the supply chain will shape up? Next year?

This year, the supply chain implications were felt a lot more. Last year, it was more about the network delays and how do you deal with COVID and what does that cause for your parcels? Having supply chain redundancy and resilience built in is going to be key going forward, not just in terms of e-commerce, but really thinking about it from a B2B standpoint as well. Because this year, a lot of the supply chain issues have been about just inventory getting in. In the summer, we saw a slowdown actually with brands because they didn't have inventory to sell. So the second really massive shift we're going to see is— I talked about agile wholesale cycles. I think manufacturing in general is going through a transformation. You're no longer doing these massive drops of inventory. Inventory. Now, this inventory that's sitting on container ships probably needs to be offloaded because it's not going to be sold. It's obsolete already. And so there's massive waste that brands have to deal with. So really, it's going to be about much more nimble cycles, rethinking how you do manufacturing cycles and B2B fulfillment cycles. We're already seeing that across our network. We're no longer just doing B2C. We help brands with all of their international needs, and that includes wholesale. So if they are bringing inventory from China to the US, that's what we enable. A lot shorter cycles, much more nimble, as well as air. So a shift from ocean to air network, it's surprisingly cost-effective. That's the thing that they're learning, that ocean has actually gotten significantly is significantly expensive and that we're able to do within 2 weeks. That's the longest it takes for international deliveries. And I keep getting requests for faster, faster, faster, nothing longer than that. That is again, the trend that we're seeing aside from the nimble cycles. It'll also be a transformation in how you think about fulfillment and go from ocean to air.

I'm fascinated by the switch from ocean to air. That was something that we did talk a lot about at Gap, particularly on the nimble point though. I wanna illustrate to our listeners like how vital this is or how much of a delta there is between some brands. So just for example, I think I can share this here. I hope Gap doesn't find out, but I'll say this. Gap cycle from inception to production to in your store takes 7 months when I was there, which sounds like both a long time and a short time when you think about the number of iterative cycles it is to create the product, have vision, and then how massive Gap supply chain is and how much reach they have. In contrast, Zara is quoted at having that turnaround time be 5 weeks. You can see how each presents its own set of problems, but at the same time, if there is an interest in demand for X item, Zara can get it to its customers in 5 weeks and it will take Gap 7 months. What you're saying is that's just not acceptable anymore for the consumer.

How does a small brand, let's say a $30, $50 million brand, do this? That's the key. It's about ensuring that you have a supply chain and it's all the way from manufacturing to fulfillment.

This is one problem you could say of how do we create a more nimble ecosystem? And a solution you've said is using air rather than just using cargo boat shipping processes. What always gets me in this whole supply chain question is it's such a different problem than the other technology problems we're solving because it's always tied to a physical good. Could you highlight where your brands are storing their items and how that's part of the FlavourCloud recommendation in Marketplace? Because the question that's coming up for me is, if I'm a brand selling in the US, but I want to sell to the consumer in China, but the shirt that I am selling is produced in China, I have it shipped to my distribution center in the States, and then I'd like to ship it back to my customer in Shanghai. That feels inefficient.

What a waste, right? It's a great question. And that's, again, another aspect of supply chain optimization that we look at with brands. So there is no reason for something that's manufactured in China to not be fulfilled from China. It's not done because you didn't have the Flavocloud to do that for you. So that's one of the things that we work with brands on. If you're manufacturing in say China or India, wherever, you should be able to do e-commerce fulfillment from that country. That's a great way to think about it. Just because you're a brand based in the US doesn't mean you need to pay import duties to bring that product into the US to only then try to ship it back to the consumer in Asia and then have them pay import duties and taxes just because you're transporting the goods again to that country. It's also obviously— I think a lot about this— its carbon impact is greater, right? So there's lots of reasons to not do this. But the reason it wasn't done was because it couldn't be done. Now you have the ability to do that. So you really need to rethink how your supply chain should be designed. And it's different for each brand. If you're assembling or making your product in Italy, it's going to be a lot different. The other piece we talk to brands about is as you scale to, let's say, a $100 million brand, you want to think about possibly having additional fulfillment center or a warehouse in a different region. For example, you want to have faster deliveries, easier shipping options, whatever that needs may be. You might want to have a Netherlands entity or a UK entity that allows you to do fulfillment for US Europe and Africa. So those are the types of things where you go from one single fulfillment warehouse to multiple around the world as your business scales. And there may be reason to do that, but it's no longer one that says you need to have entities in every country that you want to set up a business.

There seems to be this kind of shrinking of the world as borders become more and more open, as technology is being invested in to make cross-border order trade easier. On the brand side and the consumer side, there's also so many new trends around how people shop, whether it be through mobile commerce or live shopping or the role that social media plays, coupled with this feeling of instant gratification that you get when you're shopping online. And you've discussed how consumers are becoming less and less patient. How has consumer expectations shifted the need for logistics to become faster and faster? And how has the supply chain constraints of today kind of stunted e-commerce growth?

I think the consumer behavior is the fundamental change agent. We find these brands so easily, or they find us through ads or through referrals. It is so easy to find that beauty product in South Korea and You want it now. You don't care that it is being shipped from there. Thanks to Amazon, we want free shipping. We want really low-cost shipping. We want instant delivery. You want returns to be great returns. You want all of these things and they are incredibly hard to do. They're hard to do with domestic. We're still dealing with issues of how do you deal with returns and all the capabilities in domestic. I don't think the challenges have even been solved there. But now with cross-border, you're looking at 10x complexity for returns. You're looking at trade tariff regulatory barriers. These are age-old country-specific regulations. They're still relying on paper. They do a lot of things the manual way. It's very cumbersome and error-prone, and there is no automation. And it's every part of the supply chain. There is a first-mile optimization. There is a last-mile in-country optimization in that destination country. And then there is a global mile. And then on either side, there's an export and import customs organization. All of these complexities have to be handled to offer that experience. But consumers don't see that. They don't care. That is what is driving the change. That's why brands are essentially looking to have a solution that is seamless because we don't have patience as consumers. And this is going to continue to be this way. I expect international to go to a free shipping model within the next 2 years. That's where we're headed with Flavocloud. It is a huge challenge, but that's the challenge we're up against.

Selfishly, I'm thrilled Flavocloud exists so that I can continue to shop my favorite international brands in a more seamless way. You also just have this awesome, unique background to be the person to solve this problem for the world. From your upbringing in India to your career in logistics, to your also deep empathy with the consumer as a self-proclaimed shopper yourself. As you look towards the journey of what's next for your company, what's next for you?

Next 5 years, looking at an IPO. That's what I'm gonna be focused on.

You heard it here first.

I love that. We'll be honored to continue watching your journey and amplifying all that you're building with FlavorCloud. We're coming up on time and we have our our favorite hero question that we like to ask all of our guests, which is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you?

You know, so many fabulous women have inspired me. In logistics, there aren't a lot of women. It wasn't— but interestingly enough, Microsoft, when you look at leadership positions, there aren't very many women. There certainly weren't women when I was in the room. So it was, um, Much later, I think the first person I can think of in my early days of Runway to Street was Jane Park. She was the founder of Julep. She recently took the company to IPO, and she's been an incredible friend and mentor. I remember she was local and the one person I could think of that had been through the startup journey and was extremely successful. She spent a lot of time listening to my pitches and looking looking at my early decks for Runway to Street as well. And then I know you've had Michelle on this program, Michelle Zaplin. She's been an incredible inspiration and mentor as well.

Thank you for sharing that. I, as a local Seattleite myself, was an early Julep customer and loved going to their initial salons. And that's so wonderful to see the threads of some of our previous guests as well as local partners who've been able to be mentors to you and your journey with FlavorCloud. Ratna, thank you for coming on The Room today and sharing your incredible journey to building what is future of global logistics.

Thank you for having me, Madison. A lot of fun.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Room Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Ratna. We hope to also see you next Tuesday at 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific for another inspiring conversation. Please like, subscribe, join our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, Medium, Instagram. We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, we'll see you next week in The Room.

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