Crafting a Winning Transformation Strategy Using FC Richmond's Gameplan | EnhanceThat | PI Apparel

I try to come here every year at the conference. Super exciting. Also today, yesterday, I think I've seen a lot of things, right? I've seen a lot of things, exciting new technologies. But I think for me, it's always like key, like what I learned from the others, right? What I learned, I can always get very excited. I get a lot of energy out of hearing the challenges that others have as well, right? The whole year I work, I think we work on change, you know, making things happen, and that is painful. It is challenging. And throughout the year, I often wonder, like, how do others do this, right? How do others figure it out? And have they figured it out? What would they do, right? So for me, this is a moment really to get together and to learn and to listen. So I'm really happy to be here. I have a couple slides that I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you a story that I think I really want to share. I do not have my speaker notes, so I'm just going to go whatever I remember for what I prepared, right? OK. So my name is Dominik Slaeter. Passion is clothing. I have a product development background. Coming from Amsterdam, I went to Amsterdam Fashion Institute and started to work for Nike, an amazing company. Loved it. Stayed there for very long. The first challenge that I had is a lot of things were working in Excel, and I'm a very visual person. Person. So that was not a great fit. It almost caused me, after 6 months, to leave the company because I wasn't doing so well, right? But there's one thing. When I started to see 3D, I realized, hey, this is my way of working, right? This is all visual. This is how I like to work. This is how I can engineer product. This is how I can create clothing just through a visual language. And my journey has been, like so many of you here, about how do we use 3D, right? And for me, that started with, OK, in the beginning, we just need to define what is quality, right? It's similar to what we do with physical product. Like, what is a good product? Like, what is quality? How do we communicate? How do we— How do we share things? So the first thing that I did with a couple of my first project team members is create global digital standards. This is for Nike, is created around 2009. And this was our way of defining that language, thinking like, now we can communicate with any factory, with anyone, right? Because we've written it down. It's now, it's going to work. It's going to change, right? But then, actually, I realized, wait a second. It's great to be able to communicate with a factory, but we need to bring it to the front end, right? We need to get our designers working on this, right? They need to get involved. They need to get excited. But in order to do that, 3D was, and often still is, way too complex, right? If you're able to sketch flat, it's much easier. So what we worked on is, how do we bring this to a design community, right, by giving them a 3D way of working, a workflow that would allow them to work in their own tools without any complexity of rendering, et cetera, right? Amazing. I thought, now it's going to go off, right? Now we're going to do the next thing. But it had to be easier, faster, right? Take out more complexity and actually scale. And I think everybody here agrees, right? It's amazing if you can do it with one style. It's amazing if you can do it with a team of 5, communicate in 3D, digital, share it from your first idea all the way to your e-com. But you need to be able to do it as a company. So my journey evolved from Nike to PVH. And we even started a corporate startup called Stitch to make that all work, right? We started to make technology as well. So going through that whole journey, I'm now at the stage where I'm thinking, wait a second, right? We need to be able to share it. So I'm even, you know, like a step further or different again, right? I'm thinking like, oh, it's great to have technology, to have standards, to have an easy workflow. But how do we make it accessible for everybody? Because if you're just on an island, well, a whole journey, right? And I'm sure a lot of you recognize some elements of all of it. So I'm definitely one of you. But what I was thinking, what I was reflecting on is like, we can have amazing technology. I think AI is going to do really good for us, like make our lives a lot easier. But we've seen other technologies also come. And every year I'm here, I'm thinking like, now it's going to happen, right? Now it's going to change. It's going to go faster, wilder. Everyone is going to actually adopt it. But reflecting on it, I think it's something that we don't speak enough about, right? It's actually about people. We can have the most amazing technology, right? We can have BOMs automatically generated out of 3D or whatsoever, right? Something on the wish list forever, but we need to be able, we need to have people that actually want to embrace it and want to change, right? And actually getting shit done. And I was thinking with all of, like, after a day and a half with the most amazing technology out there, as Dick's taking a different approach and talk about this people. And one thing I learned over the last year, I watched all 3 seasons of "The Glossary." And I wonder who has seen any of the series? Yeah? OK. Half of it. So you might have an idea already of what this is about, right? But for me, it was a really good reflection, right? It made me reflect on what are those key things, right? When we speak about change, we ask a lot of people around us that we work with, our designers, our developers, everyone in the company, to change their way of working. But I think we also need to constantly change and feel uncomfortable and reflect on how we do things. So what I did, and I said earlier, I don't have my speaking notes here. So I'm kind of guessing on what's going to happen next. But I believe what I want to do is I want to take some of the key, what I found key moments out of the series and reflect on them and see how this actually connects to what we do every day, right? And I actually believe that this series, and you don't need to watch all of the seasons and all of the episodes, but I believe that this should be part of the onboarding program talking about 3D, DPC, about change, right? Because this series is all about change, and there's a lot of lessons that we can learn from it. Okay, but who is Ted Lasso? I'll do a very brief introduction. Ted Lasso is an American football coach who is being hired by FC Richmond. FC Richmond is a Premier League team in Britain with no coach, and they are taking a bit of a gamble by hiring him. I mean, taking a risk there, right? I think that there's a lot of things that we can learn from it, but the first thing I think is like, Taking that risk, that is what we do every day, right? Taking on a challenge is like riding a horse, right? If you feel too comfortable, you know that you're doing it wrong. And I think this really applies to us. And that first sentence that you see in the first episode got me hooked because this is what it's all about, right? We sometimes need to realize that we need to be uncomfortable. Otherwise, we're not doing a good thing, right? And the series is really about belief, perseverance, guts, have fun, but also stay focused, right? I'm going to start with the first one, right? What he does when he enters the club, right? He puts this yellow sign in the locker room. You know, this is like, you have to think about this club. It has a lot of egos, right? It has a lot of different personalities. And when he enters, no one really takes him very serious, right? They think like, what is this weird guy? He doesn't have, doesn't know anything about how this works, right? The first thing he does is puts this sign up. And this actually kind of, It's something that comes back all along, right? It constantly reminds everyone that we're going to do it different here. We're going to make a change. And it stays there. One of the things that I see in this, right, that I can really reflect on this, and I think what is really key for everyone running a DPC team, bringing change in the company, right? You need to have one team, one strategy. You can have as amazing digital artists, experts, right? But if they are not able to work as one team and they're not able to support the single strategy and plan that you created, you're not going to get there, right? It's not going to do you any good. I think that is really key. But there's another thing right here. It's a fine detail, but when I saw this and I read about it as well, he puts the sign up in the beginning slanted, right? It's not straight. And it stays there. And she makes a lot of fun of him by not saying that it's not straight. Straight. But the interesting thing about that is, right, it's really about embracing the imperfection. He doesn't matter, right? He's in there for the long game. And it's actually something that I think we can all learn from, right? In the beginning, when you join, you want to create the most amazing images. But it's not about the images, right? It's about you as a team. Understanding what quality is, right? Develop that eye for digital quality, for what a quality product needs to look like. And it's not something that you can read about and kind of know, right? It's not something that you can hire someone from and say, now you need to show us what the best quality is and how we need to do that. Yeah, you can do that, but you need to learn how to do it, right? And you need to develop that eye. So embracing the imperfection, I think, is a key lesson. I think we also know the challenges about— the challenges that are there, right, that are not yet solved. Like how to deal with color consistency, for instance, on a screen. We can spend hours and weeks and months, right? And we can keep going on about it. But I think it's key to realize that some things might be not there yet. But you have to embrace that, right? And you need to be able to move on with that. I think what he shows, and I think that is a really cool thing about this series, right? What he shows that he's on the floor, right? He's always there. When it's hard, when there is success, when there are things to celebrate, but he's always there. He's on the floor. And that is something that I've seen working as well. If you work with a design team, a development team, and you ask them to do things in a different way, you need to make sure that you're on the floor. You need to be on the floor when it's really hard. You need to be on the floor when there are any questions, because there's nothing as easy to just go back to the old way of doing. And he's always there. And then lastly, patience. The fact that the thing is slanted, that it's hanging there, it stays there, right? He is not in there for just a match or a season. He's there for the long run. And I think that is really key. When you make a plan, you're not going to see results just in a season or not even in a year, right? You need to do it on the long run. Second point, perseverance. One thing I really like, Ted goes to the owner of the club every day. He goes there every day. And he just wants to create a relationship, right? He wants to understand her. He really wants to get close to her. She does not want to get close to him at all, right? Send him away. So he does something that I think is quite funny, but also, you know, that's something that we can learn from. He introduces something that's called biscuits with the boss, right? He goes there every day and brings her these, his own-made biscuits, and she likes it so mush, much that that she cannot resist him not coming back every day. So at the end of the day, he's able to go there every day to have a chat, right? I think that is such a good example of what we also do, right? You want to give something that has true value, that even though the people that don't want to change— and I think none of us really want change, right? Every day is like, it's hard. You need to learn new things, but there needs to be a sweet, right? There needs to be something that you really like. And for me, this is such a good example, right? And that says, like, invest in relationships, right? And it's not overnight, right? You need to keep doing that. You need to keep doing that and don't give up. And the last thing that applies to me, I think also to a lot of other people, be light. I can get very serious about my work and the thing I do because I just really like it. That doesn't always help. It doesn't always help to be super serious and just to be super focused. Sometimes it's good to be light. It's good to be able to step away and smile and just move on. But there's more about that. Third one, guts. I think with everything that we do, right? We're introducing something new. We're making people feel uncomfortable. We need to show some guts. Who knows where this is going to? You initially, what do you think? Oh, they, I think they talk about the problems and needs like the— —yelling on the roofs or something? Yes, exactly. The diamond dogs. These guys, and they're all of different levels, right? When they have an issue, when they— and it could be an emotional problem, like, or a relationship thing, or, you know, they're just, like, really angry. They call this group the diamond dogs, and they ask each other for help. And it's really good to see because it shows how it doesn't matter who you are, what level you are, right? It's okay to ask for help. It's okay to be vulnerable. And I think that's a lesson that we need to keep very close in the work that we do, right? Because we need to show some guts, right? But that is hard. We're absolutely going to fail. It's going to go wrong, but we're able to say, hey, maybe I messed up. Or let's try something, but I'm not 100% sure if it's going to work. Let's do a small run, right? Let's just try it and learn from it, right? And then move on. But you need to be able to say that. You need to be able to do that. And in order to do that, you need to create a culture where that is OK to do that. And in the series, you really see how that culture is being created. I mean, such a good example. It looks so simple, right? But I think with all the technology that we have out here, like with all the opportunities, these are some of the lessons that we need to just keep close to ourselves and sometimes reflect. I'm doing a lot of these things wrong, but this helps me to really remind, ah, yeah, you know. How can I help myself? Last one, I believe. Stay focused and have fun. I think this is the quote, the lesson that is the easiest to remember. As I said in the beginning, the team has a lot of egos, right? They have a lot of, a lot, they have a couple of star players. Players that don't even get along well with each other. But there are also other guys like him, Sam. Sam is very social, very intelligent player and teammate. But he's not, in the beginning, he's not very much respected by the team. And here he gets a great lesson. Ted asked him, what's the happiest animal on the earth? What was the answer? Being. Goldfish. He is saying that, you know, don't get stuck on these challenges when people try to lift your foot or whatsoever, right? And actually what happens to us a lot, right? We're trying to introduce new things that not everybody likes right away. So we have these issues as well. And it's so easy to get, like, stuck up on negative feedback, things that go wrong. And therefore, I think we should often say to ourselves, be a goldfish. Don't get distracted by issues, things that happen, people that don't like their render quality, have difficulties with doing everything digital, really want to see or are adamant to seeing a physical sample, sometimes we just move on. And I think that also connects, again, to that beginning thing, right? Have a plan, make a plan, and stay focused. Focus. There are always going to be new things on the way, even new technologies. And sometimes it just helps to say, you know, we're going to stick to the plan. Let's ride it out for another year and see what actually happens. If you keep changing constantly, you're not creating that one focus. And that brings me to the sign again. I think we're almost out of time, but believe. I think sometimes it's just really good to kind of look at— we say always, like, look at other industries, right? I think this is also another industry, another area where we can really learn from. I mean, I think we all know how it feels, right, to be working in a great team. And that's a feeling that you need to be able to kind of capture once in a while, right? That feeling that if you work in a great team, you can do things that you would never be able to do alone. And I think that is the message of this series as well. I'm sure, like, I only took out these 4, but I'm sure you guys, if you've watched it or if you will, There is a lot more that you can learn from this, but these are the ones that I took out. Thank you.