Boost Product Development with Digital Workspaces | Vibe IQ | PI Apparel

We're going to go fast here, a lot to talk about. How's everybody doing? Doing good? Okay, some new faces. Nice to meet you all. I'm Brian Lindauer. You just met me maybe. I'm CEO at VibeIQ. I'm going to talk a little bit about what VibeIQ is, but mostly I'm going to focus on an opportunity to consider as you think about your technology roadmap at your companies and how you could start to work better as a team. A little tiny pitch at the end for 5xQ. I like to warm things up with a joke. I've already used this one. Apologies for those of you who've heard it. Have you heard about the new corduroy pillow? No one? OK, it's making headlines. That's all. I'm sorry. That's just trying to warm you up. That's all. Everyone's warmed up. Okay, now to get to the important thing. There's a huge opportunity, you probably didn't know about it. It's a new opportunity that could really change the way your teams work and help you move faster as you go to market and start to make better decisions as you go to market. So we talk about speed and smarts, right? And the core idea here is that by, working, having your teams work differently in how they communicate, collaborate, and make decisions, we can impact both these things. And by the end of the meeting, I'd like you to know what that opportunity is and maybe how you can go about seizing that opportunity. So I'll start with a question. Do you understand your product line? As you go from concept to commerce, as you're going on your 12 to 18 month journey, do you actually truly understand what your product line is that you're developing? And getting ready to sell? That's the question. How are you managing your product line? Many of you have ERP, PLM, and so forth, but I know for a fact that your merchandising teams, your design teams, maybe some sourcing functions, maybe it's your B2B teams, you're working in PowerPoints and spreadsheets, and then the new entrant in the past coming years are the digital whiteboards like Miro. Anyone in here using Miro? Or something that sounds like Mural, Mural. Okay, you're familiar with the concept? So there's tons of documents still. We didn't get rid of Excel. We were just talking about that in the last meeting. We have not gotten rid of PowerPoint, and now we got even more documents to deal with. But it's not this simple. You got different categories, right? Each category is working on their own portion of the line, but you're not just working on one product line, are you? You're working on, Come on, many seasons at the same time, maybe 4, maybe more. You got documents everywhere. You got silos of information, right? You also have information in enterprise systems. This is all happening every week, every month. You're opening these up, creating them, sharing them, and so forth. It's incredibly complicated. And I like to say that for a company, maybe not for an individual, like if I'm just a designer working on Men's Tops, I can understand what I'm working on, but for the company, it kinda looks like this, right? You may understand an individual piece, but you can't see the whole picture. We were talking to a huge apparel company recently, and the head of product told a story that said, hey, listen, you guys are showing me some amazing products. I like 'em, but the product line sucks, right? They don't work together. It's not the right mix. It's not the right, we're missing, we have too much of this, not enough of that. It's so hard to see and understand the line in all the different ways that you need to understand it. It's kind of like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle. Come on. Which way do I point this? There we go. Here's a story. It's like a fable or something— maybe that's the right word— of the blind men or the blindfolded people trying to understand an elephant. One person walks up and feels a tusk and like, oh, it's a pointy thing. And then someone else touches a— tail and says it's a rope. I feel like a lot of companies bringing their product line to market, this is sort of their experience, right? You all see a different perspective of the product line, but it's hard to understand the whole thing. And there's lots of different aspects of a product line, right? One split is qualitative versus quantitative, right? So qualitative would be what does it look like, what does it feel, how's it feel, do the colors match, Do I like the aesthetic? And then you have the quantitative where you're usually working in spreadsheets. How's this roll up? What's my blended margin? How am I forecasting? Am I hitting MOQs, right? This is just two aspects of understanding your product line, but as you can tell just looking at some of the usual suspects on the documents being used, it's really hard to blend those two together into one picture. An attempt's been made, so in comes Miro and the digital whiteboard, and I think, I believe the digital, Multi-user, real-time collaboration whiteboard might be the fastest and most virally adopted technology, I mean, maybe ever. I don't know how to actually measure it, but it's so easy to get started, so easy to start copying and pasting information into these boards that people are doing just that, right? Like I've seen probably 40 different versions of gigantic boards with thousands of products on them where people are hand-keying FOB, intro date, retail price, and it's crazy, right? Like, you are spending all this time. Why are people doing this? The reason is because it's a very straightforward way to communicate, to see the line visually, is also understand the data, the quantification of the line in a single picture. Trying to skip forward, maybe. Might just be dead. Okay, there we go. Okay, so enter digital products, right? We're struggling with all these documents, Excels, PowerPoints, and so forth. Those documents, those tools actually hate 3D products, right? You ever try pasting a 3D product into a PowerPoint? It doesn't work, right? So there's all this upside around working with a digital product, but it creates more friction. I mentioned that in the last meeting, right? File size, proprietary formats, render times. Proprietary, like the inability to share because who you're trying to share with doesn't have that tool, right? It's easy to mail around a screenshot. It's hard to mail around a 3D file. So the representation of your product just got a little bit more complicated, right? Powerful, but a little more complicated. Come on. But it's not just 2D. I'd say there's a massive, sorry, it's not just 3D. There's also a huge 2D problem, right? Just having sketches available to the people who want to access them, whether it's black and white, colored, having the latest and greatest image available to the people who could take advantage of that image is incredibly difficult, right? You have designers doing things like exporting a file to their file system, naming it a certain way, uploading into a SharePoint folder, hoping that it's named correctly so it can find its way into a DAM so it can get picked up by the B2B tool. Tons of friction. Does that sound somewhat familiar, things like that? Yeah, OK. So when we talk about digital products, I think 2D is as much a part of digital as 3D, and we haven't fixed it. We haven't solved it, right? Come on. But we have PLM. So I talked about 3-letter acronyms. I built a PLM system. I've been working PLM my whole career. It's incredibly valuable. It's essential. But it hasn't, it creates another data store, right? It hasn't taken people out of documents. So on one hand, you have where you create and make decisions and present and communicate in documents, and then your company has centralized, aggregated, quantifiable databases, right? PLM, ERP, DAMs, another key one for digital. But these two things are very different, right? And if you were to talk about adoption, they're very highly contrasted. On the one hand, you've got enterprise systems, which users just don't like categorically. They're for the enterprise, right? It's an asset for the company. Documents are typically an asset for the user. They're the low friction, highly collaborative way of working. And there's just been this dotted line between them all along that we've never been able to get rid of. So this is a problem, and it's compounded by this idea— I just made this up— called enterprise system procrastination. So this is like, if I'm working in my Excel or my PowerPoint or my Miro, I'm going to wait as long as possible before I have to go key it into filling your enterprise system, ERP, PLM, your DAM system, I don't wanna upload the photo 'cause what if I have to change it? If I upload the sketch and then we change the sketch, I gotta upload the sketch again, right? If I put it into PLM and then I change my intro date, well, I gotta go update the intro date again. So it's a real problem and it causes an issue because until it gets into the ERP or the PLM system, your company can't see the line. Your company can't digest all those documents, it digests information from enterprise systems. So on one hand, we got these documents that are being used. We got the enterprise systems. We wait as long as possible to key them in, otherwise I have dual maintenance. And then once they're there, you don't stop using the documents. You keep using the Miro and the Excels and the PowerPoints, and now they're not equal to each other. It's a major problem. You're working in one place, your company has a perspective on the data that's somewhere else, and that's— it's not possible to keep them up to date. Okay, so it's very complicated. We have all these documents. Question, take any one of those documents that are out there, like what's the chance that the information in it is correct, right? That you have the right photo, the right intro date, it hasn't been dropped, it's accurate. It's impossibly low that any one document is accurate unless you made it, an hour ago, and even then it's probably a little out of date, right, 'cause something changed. So let's go back to my question, do you understand your product line? I think you have a sense for it. I mean, obviously that's what you guys do for a living, but you don't really truly understand it accurately, and if you do understand it, you probably understand it from one perspective, right? I can see it one way. I've got one giant Miro board that's laid out by category, subcategory. All right, cool. Or I can see one or two reports that aggregate information in a certain way. I think it's a major, major problem, right? Your most important things are your teams, your people, and your products, right? And if your teams and people don't understand your product line as best as they possibly can, you're making wrong decisions as you go to market. Come on. Okay, so what's the impact of that? This is an oversimplification, but if we talk about a go-to-market calendar in its simplest sense and we think about when you're making decisions, as you change things later in the calendar, the cost goes up, right? You've already sampled it, you've already developed it. If you drop it or you add late in the calendar, it's expensive, right? You're gonna impact your margin. Come on. Conversely, the decisions made, if they're good decisions, in the early part of the calendar, they're the most valuable decisions. If I can drop the products before I start sampling them because no one wants them, I just saved sampling costs. I'm not overdeveloping. My adoption rate goes up. That kind of competes with this idea that where do we actually build our product line? We build it in documents. Literally, you're building your product line here. Before it's in any kind of system that you can interrogate as an enterprise, right? So your company has limited and fragmented visibility of the line as it's coming to life when you could be making the most valuable decisions. Then you start sampling stuff and you end up with something like this, right? There's an urban legend of some CEO had a product somewhere that pulled all their athletic shorts that they had in market and stacked them up on a table, and it was taller than they were. And they said, these are all the men's running shorts we have in market. They're competing with each other. What's going on here? It's because they didn't— they couldn't understand that they had all those different shorts in the different regions and the different colors and the different fabrications. This is a Gen AI photo, by the way. I used a few of those in this presentation. OK, so fragmented understanding, and then as you move down calendar and you start adopting, you start building regional assortments, the same thing's happening, right? Now maybe you've got the wrong information. Maybe as you're adopting, you're not realizing the synergies that you get across the regions and your adoption rate's low across regions and then you have low volumes and you've got all sorts of like no leverage to buy. It's so difficult to see what's going on. And if you're handing spreadsheets and PowerPoints off to your regional teams to adopt, you're gonna have problems, right? I've heard these stories. We're working with customers and their adoption process was get a gigantic spreadsheet with 5,000 rows in it, go through the section that's important to you, Alt+Tab over to a Miro board, Ctrl+F, type in the style number, see if you can get a hit on the image. You might not, right? And then put in your forecast. I mean, literally, that's how sophisticated adoption is. I think we can do better, right? Imagine there's opportunity there. That's what I'm trying to get you guys to see. This is another AI folder. See, he's missing the dartboard because he's blind and the darts are going straight down. This one doesn't work quite as well. They're only so good, the AI tools. They're getting better. Come on. There you go. There's another idea here, which maybe it's the next presentation I'll do. Which is right now, I'm a software developer. In software, we've been doing agile software development for quite some time. Does anyone know what that is? Some people in here are familiar. It's my IT team members. We demo every week. We prototype, right? We don't code all the software and then present it to people and then say, hey, what do you think? We prototype, we iterate, we show, we get feedback, we change it all the time. Retail go-to-market is a stage gate waterfall process. If we worked a little bit differently, you could present your line more often every day, wake up every single day and understand what it is and make decisions to make it better. That's called being agile, right? A headline comes in on Google, you can react to it. Something's trending on TikTok, you can react to it. When you're incredibly stage-gate, you have limited opportunities to make a change. And I think that one of the reasons that it runs this way is because of how hard it is to collaborate and communicate and understand and synthesize data and make decisions. And since we're flying in that kind of void, we talk about the art and science, but like I said, well, maybe, maybe it's a little— there's a little bit of magic and luck here too, right? Like there's a lot of guessing going on. Huge opportunity here to change how you work to make your why and what decisions. Sometimes we get overly focused on the how— my supply chain, the BOM, controlling data, materials. That's what you're— that's how you're making it, but what's the why? The why and the what, like what product should I take to market? How does it work together? How do I solve it? We need to spend more time on that, and that's locked up in these documents. So there is a better way, and here's some of the new thinking that we're doing at VibeIQ to help solve this problem. We have never gotten rid of Excel. We've never We've gotten rid of PowerPoint. Can we do something differently? A new way of working would change how teams collaborate, communicate, and synthesize data to make decisions. There's this idea of a digital workspace. We didn't make it up, right? Google Docs calls itself a digital workspace. Office 365 calls itself a digital workspace. It's where you work digitally as a team, right? Google Workspace. Adobe Creative Cloud is a digital workspace. This will work. Maybe I might have like 20 clicks left in this thing. Whoops. Miro calls itself a visual workspace, real-time collaborative visual workspace. All these solutions are missing something though, right? Your teams are collaborating. What are they collaborating about? What are they communicating about? They're communicating about the hundreds or thousands of products that you're developing and bringing to market. None of those tools knows what a product is. They have no clue. It's a line in a spreadsheet, it's an image on a Miro board, and there's never been a solve for that. Products are complicated. How about a digital product workspace? What would that look like? A suite of tools that your teams can use to communicate that are easy to use, visual, collaborative, but actually know what your products are, right? That's the maybe novel idea here, and that's what we've been working on at VibeIQ. So we've built a suite of apps with the purpose of replacing Excel, not for every Excel use case, but for a whole lot of 'em. Anytime you're gonna copy product information into an Excel, There's a better way. We built an app to replace Miro. We built an app to replace PowerPoint. We've made them feel like those apps. We built an app, our boards app is like Miro. We made it feel like Miro. It's table stakes collaboration. We built a product called, come on, Showcase, which is like PowerPoint or Google Slides. These are all in the cloud, by the way, multi-user real-time editing. We built an app called Plan, which is like Excel, has pivot tables and all the things you want in Excel. But these apps, including our 3D showroom app, are different, right? And I'm not here to demo to you. I'm not here to kind of dig into the weeds. You guys can come talk to us about this. I wanna get the concept across. But what we've done is we've lifted Excel out and PowerPoint and Miro out and put a new type of document in the mix, right? Sometimes talk about VibeIQ as a new type of document tool, but these documents know your products and they talk to your enterprise systems all the time, right? So if you're looking at a board or a sheet or something that has your product in it, some new running shoe you're working on, that information is accurate, the picture's up to date, and you don't have to manually maintain them. And what that means now is that all along this process, your company can assess the state of your line all the time. And as you move through the calendar, your documents are always up to date. You're working off the same sheet of music and your data is enterprise data from day one. It's not a bunch of text in sheets. It's actually information that your company can synthesize and process in bulk. So there are applications, and this is where I talked about friction in the last meeting and freedom. We didn't take away the ability to create and flex and lay things out the way you want. We built it just like PowerPoint and just like Miro, just like those documents. So your user may not notice the difference except when things get easier. Come on. All the table stakes, multi-user authoring, undo, redo, change tracking, things you see in document-based systems. but they all reference a common definition of the product. They have product DNA. There's a product database. There's an asset database. Wherever you see a product in any document, you're looking at the same information. You could have 100 plans, 300 boards, 270,000 showcases. If a product's in there, if that feature t-shirt is being developed and put into all those different documents, it's always gonna be accurate. Come on. It supports 2D and 3D. It has to because no one has all 3D and very few of you have just 2D anymore. It's hybrid, it's heterogeneous. So you want to visualize your 3D or your 2D asset. You have a product line, some of each, that's fine. We can show it to you and help you understand it. You can do fun things like just drag products into documents. And if someone changes a price, update all the documents that you've edited. And that change may have come from a user working inside of a VibeIQ document, or it might have come from someone changing something in an enterprise system. That edit's gonna come back up into these documents that are connected to your enterprise systems. You guys probably have lots of questions. Again, I'm not trying to demo the product here. You guys can come and talk to us and we'll explain it to you in detail. But you might be saying, yeah, right, okay, you're not gonna get rid of PowerPoint and Miro Excel? Yes, yes, we have. So we've been doing this now for 4+ years. We have several customers. Some of them are very large, complex brands, and we've moved their users, right? We moved the whole design team off of Adobe XD and into our boards app. Designers, people who are like, hate enterprise technology. I mean, hate it. We had to trick them into using an enterprise system. You do. Same thing with Miro. We're not shutting off Miro inside of enterprises, but we're taking any Miro board that has products all over and replacing that, right? And the users are happy. It's created a pull. The users are asking to go use this tool, and it's having immediate impact. So we turn on VibeIQ at one customer, they had all their data in a PLM system, and then they could start seeing it in new ways and sort of slicing and dicing it visually. and they immediately realized they had too many products. Like, hey, we've got to print way too many times. Let's cut out 6, 7, 8 styles. They reduced their overdevelopment. We have another customer said, hey, since I've rolled this out, I've saved 10,000 hours a year just manually creating presentations. Just that one tactical thing, design teams, merchandisers, B2B salespeople just trying to create presentations just pulled off 10,000 hours of time. That they could use spending on more high-value tests. We did a webinar, I don't know, 3, 4, 5 months ago with Vera Bradley. You guys can watch it. They tell the story, right? Like how just seeing and understanding their line differently immediately impact on some really important KPIs. Okay, so just a call to action, right? This is a real opportunity. It hasn't really existed. I don't think it's existed till now. We have not come up with our 3-letter acronym. Maybe we'll have one one day. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's DPW. Isn't that Department of Public Works? Yeah. Naming's so hard, tell you what. But this is actionable. It's not a huge lift. We've worked with some brands to get live in a month. 2 months, very quick time to value, and we're replacing documents. And if you think about all the ways you use documents, briefing, line planning, adoption, supply chain collaboration, B2B sell-in, visual merchandising, there's all these different things you use documents for. How could that be more effective if you always had accurate, up-to-date information all the time, including the visual aspects of your product? You could tap into while you were having a conversation or you're working with a team, if you could tap into information at your fingertips versus having to go search for it, hunt for it, and so forth. Like, how could you become more agile, faster, make better decisions? We have case studies we can share. Like I said, don't wait. This is a real opportunity. I think what we've struggled with, with brands to date, having been relatively new on the market, is you've set budgets, right? You have initiatives, you have a technology roadmap, and maybe this opportunity wasn't clear that you could do something here. So what we've been doing is working with brands to take a look at what they've been thinking about investing in and just trying to give them a way to rationalize what the ROI is on a project like this, like what the opportunities are relative to other things you might be working on. And like I said, we've had a lot of success stories coming out of our early adopters that can be used to kind of guide that process, like to understand what your opportunities are. I'd be glad to talk with you. We have a booth here at the event. Brian at ViyaIQ, feel free to email me and glad to talk.