How Digital Workspaces Transform Team Performance | Vibe IQ | PI Apparel

Just to introduce myself real quick, I'm Brian Lindauer. I'm CEO of VibeIQ. We're going to talk about digital workspaces today. Hopefully that makes sense, what that is, by the end of my presentation. Please let me know afterwards if I was successful. Okay, warm-up slide. Maybe we'll get some people trickling in. Gotta get you guys attentive. Got a picture of a pillow. This is an apparel event. Assuming you all know what corduroy is. Corduroy. Corduroy. Have you heard about the new corduroy pillows? Apparently they're making headlines. Oh! Thanks. OK. That one goes— that's credit to— thank you. That one, credit to Kwa Hai. He's the head of our customer success department. The department. Come swing by and give him compliments at our booth. Also, just keep you guys— I know we got lunch afterwards, so I got no food for your stomach, but we got some food for thought. There you go. That's my— and I got one last joke. Apparently these videos find their way into YouTube, so I'm talking to our YouTube audience now. Click the subscribe button to get the latest updates from PI Apparel. All right. Just giving that a try. Everyone with me? Yes. All right, let's dig in. All right, more seriously. So what— OK, I like to say I like to keep the audience entertained and to get you one thing to remember when you leave. The one thing I'd like you to remember is there actually is a huge opportunity to improve how you go to market, accelerate your time to market, and bring a better product line to market Uh, so I think it's a relatively new opportunity that we're just coming to recognize, and I'm gonna explain what it is so you guys can think about how to go act on that. All right, I'm gonna start the question. Do you understand your product line, right? Uh, your product companies, that is what you sell. It's the most important thing that you have. Um, do you understand what your product line is as you're building it, as you're taking it to market? That's the question. I have a hypothesis. Let's take a step back and just talk about how you build your product line, right? And hopefully this is familiar. You got lots of teams working cross-functionally, and everyone is working in a lot of documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, increasingly tools like Miro. That's the yellow symbol there, if you don't know what that symbol is. And you get sort of situations like this, but it's actually not this simple. You got all your different categories working together, different teams, different pods, different owners, different directors working together. Things start getting more complicated, but you guys aren't building one product line at a time. You got 4, maybe more, seasons going at the same time. Picture starts looking a little bit more like this. And over the past 4 years of building VibeIQ, we've interviewed a whole lot of brands, a whole lot of customers. And I think it's safe to say that this is a clean picture of reality, not the actual picture of reality. It's actually much worse than this. OK. So this is an analogy. Here's my first GenAI photo produced just for this. This is ChatGPT, by the way. Understanding your product line when you have that much— all those documents laying around, and all these different teams and people and stakeholders and owners and OneDrives and so forth, it's a bit like trying to understand a puzzle when it's unassembled, right? You can see individual pieces, but can you see the whole picture? And I think a lot of companies are building a line. It feels a little bit like this. Anyone resonate a little bit? Okay, I like this analogy. Anyone know about the blind men and the elephant? It kind of goes like this. There's people walking around with blindfolds on. They've never seen an elephant before. They walk up to an elephant blindfolded, and people are assessing the elephant. And depending on what you are interacting with, you have a much different perspective of what that elephant looks like, and you're trying to describe it. And someone's saying it's a rope, and someone says it's a spear. I think it's a little bit like how companies are trying to understand their product line as it's coming to life. As you're going to market for a good portion of the calendar, and that's problematic. Another kind of example I think it's worth noting, when you're trying to understand your product line, there's kind of two halves. One way you can kind of slice and dice it is you got this idea of the qualitative nature of the line, like can I see it? How do I feel about it? What's the color? What's the fabric? Can I touch it? And then you got the quantitative aspect of the product line, the brass tacks, the numbers, the margins, the cost, the price, the forecast. And just thinking about Excel versus Illustrator and PowerPoint, there's a huge problem just right there, like trying to blend those two things together. And I think very few companies have successfully combined these two things into one picture. But an attempt's been made. Miro's come onto the scene. If you're not using Miro, you might be using something like a mural or a concept board. The digital whiteboard went viral, I'd say, during COVID as we scrambled to figure out how to work together. And there's some good— I mean, the Miro user experience is amazing. And it did kind of that, right? And people started pasting back pictures and text and typing stuff and trying to create this large picture of their product line, a place where everyone can get to it. And it kind of does it a little bit, but at great cost, right? The cost of creating that is incredibly expensive, and the cost of maintaining it is even more expensive. And at the end of the day, you get to see it one way. That's kind of like putting your blindfold on and walking up to the tail of the elephant, right? I can see one piece of it. I can't see it different ways. And I have to talk about digital products. This is mostly a DPC event for the most part. Briefly, this issue of trying to understand your product line, in some ways, 3D is making it more difficult, right? There's tons of value to digital product creation and the sampling and so forth. But if you're trying to pull all your digital products together and you're dealing with large 3D files, it creates more friction, right? It's easier to work with JPEGs than 200-megabyte files, and we've got proprietary formats. We've got render times, access controls. I'm sure these are all familiar issues with you as you guys have been working through your TPC journey. But I always like to highlight that when we're talking about digital products and digital workflows, it's not just about 3D, right? 2D product imagery and graphics are digital representations of your products as well. I made this point, I think, last year. No one's figured out 2D, right? I mean, we're working on 3D, but most companies making 2D images available to the people who need them is still an incredibly difficult and infrequently accomplished task, right? There's all sorts of examples of this, right? People using Excel, they have no pictures. I mean, literally, PLM systems that don't have thumbnails in them, right? It's not easy to get just this, right? So when you start talking about, how do I see and assess the quality or the qualitative aspects of my line, getting to that digital product line is very difficult. OK, but we have PLM, right? And PLM is super, super important. It's essential, right? And it serves a tremendous value proposition to the company, right? It's a centralized aggregated system. It does all the things it's supposed to. It lives in a class of enterprise systems like ERP, DAMs, so forth. It's essential for your company to be effective as it does business. But then we got these documents, right? They're easy to learn. Flexible, visual, collaborative. And there's a huge juxtaposition between these two types of products, right? And if you walked around and polled your users, not the company, but your users, and had them rate, like, do you like using these things? I think you all— OK, I hear some chuckling. They're going to vote up on Miro, and they're going to vote down on enterprise systems, any enterprise system. They're not built for doing work. They're built for aggregating information, right? Not to take any value away from them. They're essential. But this is a problem, and it has not gone away, right? So I worked on PLM systems 20 years ago. Excel was created in 1995-ish, maybe, maybe a little earlier than that. And I mean, you guys are still running your businesses on Excel and PowerPoint, right? Okay, so introducing new terms, made this up. Enterprise System Procrastination, ESP. We can reuse that acronym. Tendency for employees to wait to the last possible minute to take information outta documents and put them into an enterprise system. Tactic used to avoid dual maintenance. That's the problem, right? If I'm working in my Excel and I love it, working my PowerPoint, building my line, jamming with design, and then I gotta go put that information in enterprise system. Now I have two places to maintain it, right? And that stinks. What if I had three documents? What if I had two places to put the information? What if I had to put the image in DAM and then I had to put the, you know, all my product data into PLM? It's a problem. These are user problems that cause issues and it's a leading reason why At the enterprise level, in your enterprise systems, you rarely have that full picture. You're always ahead of things in documents and lagging in the enterprise systems. Okay, so let's start getting towards like the pain here, right? Let's look at a pre-production product calendar, oversimplified. It's way more complicated than this, but typically you're bringing your line together, you're doing your ideation, you're your planning, your briefing, all these things in the early stages of the calendar. It's where your line comes to life. It's where your products are born. Products are born in Excel and in PowerPoint and increasingly tools like Miro. And then we have the users waiting as long as possible to put into a PLM system or some other kind of enterprise system. And that's an issue, right? And then the issue continues, right? Because those documents don't go away. Right, now you've got the same documents continuing to keep, trying to keep them up to date, and then new documents start popping up, right? Regional teams, sales teams start creating more and more documents as the calendar goes forward. Click, oops. Okay, so back to that big huge picture of all the documents, right? Once you've put them into the enterprise tool, and now he's trying to keep them maintained. Just pick one of them, one of those singular documents, and ask the question, what's the odds that that document's accurate? Does it have the latest price? Does it have the latest FOB? Does it have the latest intro date? Is it the right set of colors? Odds are no, right? It's not up to date. And if it is up to date, it's at tremendous cost to keep it up to date, right? And here's where we start leaning towards my answer to the question. I think the question is no, you don't know what your product line is. And if you do, you have kind of one understanding of it, like the elephant problem, right? And this is a huge, huge problem, but it hasn't been solved yet, right? Okay, so what's the impact of that? If you think about the product calendar, again, kind of oversimplifying here, but as the calendar goes on, the cost of making changes increases, right? You add a product, 3 weeks before market, your margin's going down, right? If you're missing stuff and you don't have a chance to react, you don't have the right products on the shelves, right? If you haven't dropped things at the right point in time, you overdeveloped, right? All sorts of issues. So we've got kind of this— I don't know if it's linear. Maybe it's some sort of curve. I just do it like this. The flip side of that is true, right? Suggests that it's the earliest part of the calendars where you have the highest value decision, right? If you can get— if you could wake up on day 1, just lay it down, it's the perfect line, and you just synthesized all the information in the market and just nailed it, then you would just develop the right stuff. You just sample the right things. Your inventory would be perfect, right? This makes sense. But then there's kind of a juxtaposition between the situation I just described and that opportunity. Because your line is born right there, right? Started in documents. So your opportunity to make your best decisions is where you're working in a place where you can't understand what's going on, or you just have a small piece of what's going on. Your company has a hard time weighing in because there's no unified understanding. So second, AI-generated. Have any of you guys heard this story? It might be a myth, like an urban myth. Some sportswear company— brought in all their men's running shorts and stacked them on top of each other in a room. And some VP was like, these are all our in-market men's running shorts. He was taller than I am. And like, how did this happen? This is ridiculous, right? We're competing against ourselves. We got too much product to market. There was no need to ever do this, just the inefficiencies of this. I don't know if that's a real story or not, but I think it serves my purposes. I love this picture, by the way. I mean, clearly AI is not quite ready, but I mean, that's not bad. Okay, so like over-sorting, right? Overdeveloping. It's a big problem. If you don't understand your product line, you can't see it, and you can't slice and dice and understand it, this is going to happen, right? Maybe not this bad. Then as we continue to go through the calendar, you've got this sort of incomplete or inaccurate view of the world. That you're sharing with all your different stakeholders, right? Global merchants are handing off to regional teams. You got internal and external buyers. You got your retail partners. You got your supply chain trying to bring this product to market without the information that would make them more effective. Another story coming from the field, some of the customers we've been working with, I saw how global teams hand it off to regional teams in the old state. And it was basically a spreadsheet with thousands of line items in it, not a single picture, and then a massive Miro board over here. And sometimes the images in the Miro board had a style number, and sometimes they didn't. And literally, EMEA merchant is pounding through the spreadsheet, don't know what that is, Alt+Tab. Control-F, style number. Yes, got one. And then, all right, and they can see that little part of the line on the board. They don't see what's all around it. And then they're literally writing in, I'll take that one, and I'm going to do a medium volume. OK, so they're forecasting. They're basically telling the company what to go buy and what to go develop. And they're doing it with that level of understanding of the product line. That's going to cause problems, right? Like, how do you know? You're playing games with your MOQs, right? You could have a stack of shorts this tall. All sorts of efficiencies can be gained if you could really decipher what's truly going on, right? See it, understand it, all the right information. What's similar to this in my line? What am I missing? What's going on in my region? How do you blend all that together? And we're doing it with Ctrl+F. And I mean, you get the point, right? This is a business problem, massive business problem. You're doing something like this. This is my third AI-generated. I couldn't get the guy to stand further away from the board. So he'll probably still hit the board, but you guys get the point. See, he missed a bunch. He missed a bunch and then landed on the table. This is kind of like what we're doing when we're trying to forecast with all the information. We're guessing. I just plug this idea. I'm not going to go deep here, but— I've been building software for 20 years. We've got this thing called Agile. And one of the key ideas around Agile software development is that you got to show the product as quickly as possible, right? You don't spend 6 weeks collecting requirements and then 5 months coding, and then you pull together a demo, and then you're like, hey, check this out. What do you think? Because you just spent all your money already, right? You've built the product before you showed it. You didn't get any feedback. I think there's something like that going on here, right? There's definitely a waterfall in the product calendar, and it takes way too long for people to see the line and to understand it, whatever your role is. And by that time, the cost of change is so high that you either can't make the change or you're paying the price, right? And that's going to hit your margin. So just food for thought. I think this idea of agile product development is something we should talk more about. but it's not easy to implement, right? Okay, lastly, just gonna round up the section. If we continue this, right? If you continue, like if the what and the why, sometimes I like to say like sourcing PLM is more like the how, but the what and the why, if we're operating our business in these disconnected documents where you can't understand what's going on, you're gonna continue to, struggle, and if you got go-to-market transformation objectives at your company, it's going to be really difficult to cut the weeks out of the calendar to whatever your metric is. It's going to be really tough. And sometimes, like I say, it seems like bringing a product line to market is a mix between art and science. There's no room for magic, right? But it kind of feels like that's what's going on here sometimes, right? You're shaking the 8-ball and hoping for a good answer. Okay, that might be my last analogy. Okay, so is there a solve for this? There hasn't been, right? Because PowerPoint's still king, right? We need a new way of working. So let's take this idea of a digital workspace, relatively new terminology. Digital workspace is effectively a place where teams can work digitally without having to come in sit down and use paper and whatnot and work as a team. The term's out there, right? Like Office 365, you call it digital workspace. You get together, you're in the cloud, you're sharing data. Very well known. Google calls itself a workspace, Google Workspace. Google did a great job of putting documents in the cloud and creating real-time user collaboration, right? All my kids, are on Google Classrooms. I'd like to warn you all, that whole generation that's coming into the job market, that's all they know. Don't email them a document. Just consider that. They don't even know what a file is. I think Adobe Creative Cloud is another example of a workspace, right? Obviously, different type of workspace, but you're working as a team. It's more the qualitative side of things, but They're number one when it comes to designing. And Absolute Mirror also calls itself Workspace. I think the multi-user, infinite canvas user experience, relatively new paradigm. It is the most preferred and probably the highest growing user experience for team collaboration maybe that's ever existed. And it's just going to keep— it's going up. It's a great idea. But these aren't the things that you need. Because since the dawn of PowerPoint and Excel and every other document that's ever existed, none of those tools or companies have ever known what a product is. You are product companies. Products are complicated. They come in different options. They have all sorts of metadata. It's a combination of qualitative and quantitative information. Your data, your product data is spread all over your enterprise. Those documents don't have the first clue what a product is. An image is an image. Style numbers or some text on the screen, right? Can we change that, right? So I think here's what we need to do. We need to create digital product workspace, right? Let's take all the good ideas from Google and Miro and Adobe and how you work together digitally, but then let's add the product, right? Let's build something that is built for you, right? Not for a hedge fund, not for my wife planning a birthday party, but for you, you guys build products. You need something that knows what products are. But you don't want to give up all the things you love about Google and Miro and so forth. Does that make sense? Let's do both. And SurviveIQ, here's our pitch. That's what we built. So we said, hey, listen, let's not build a better enterprise software because you're starting from the wrong spot. Let's take the documents. The people love and figure out how to make them know what products are. Come at it from the other direction, right? So we've built 4 apps that are trying to be like documents, right? We want your users to feel like they're in a document because that's what they like. That's how they got the thumbs up, right? So we got— I'm going to go through this quick. We've got an app called Board. It's like Miro, right? Is there to replace Miro but have your product data at your fingertips all the time and all the correct digital assets. You can use it for anything— briefing, inspiration, line review, design boards. Whatever you're using Miro for or Adobe XD for today, this is better, right? Because it knows your products are. Our Showcase app replaces PowerPoint, Google Slides. It has the same user experience effectively. When you log in, you're like, this is a slide presentation tool. Okay, cool, I know how to use it. But your products are at your fingertips again. Plan replaces Excel, right? And it replaces Excel when you're putting products into Excel. If you're not putting lines of products into Excel, this isn't gonna replace that, right? You can use Excel for all sorts of things. We're not going to do all those things, but if you have lists of products in Excel, this is the tool you want. And then we also created a showroom, a virtual showroom. It's like, hey, if we got all the product data and we got the digital assets and you're making product line decisions, this is another great qualitative user experience and way to bring a line to market. It seems like a nice add-on, maybe something you don't see in Google and Microsoft, but very relevant for this space. And what we do is we come back to this picture and we replace the documents, right? We're not gonna replace Office 365 at your company or Google if you're using it, but if you're using it to manage your product line, we will. That's how we unlock value because now we are connected to, we are connected to your enterprise systems. We can bring data in, we can push data out. You can create products in our user experiences and then send them to your PLM tool or to your DAM. And it resolves a lot of those issues that you had around not understanding what your line is because we can always query all that data and show it to you in lots of different ways. And I'm not gonna go deep on that 'cause I don't wanna plug Vibe too hard here, but you know where to find us. Just a few things I wanna highlight though is that we made these feel like documents, right? Your biggest problem with technology has always been adoption and change management. And designers, any designers in the room? There's one, okay. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] You guys hate technology, like so much, but you like Adobe, right? And I think you probably like Miro as well. So we made our apps feel like those documents, right? It has to happen or you won't use it, or it's just another enterprise system, right? So it feels like a doc. You get multi-user authoring, you get comments, all the things you expect in documents. The big difference is that wherever you have a VibeIQ document, if you see a product, it's referencing a centralized definition of the product. There's a product database hidden from you under the covers, right? Sometimes I like to say we're tricking designers and other people into using an enterprise system. We're tricking them. They didn't even know they're using it. But the company is like, ooh, yeah, this is nice, right? Now I can see what's going on, and my users don't even know what's going on, but I do, right? I wish it wasn't deceptive like that, but sometimes that's what you gotta do if you wanna get a designer on the system, right? It's just like Adobe, just use it. The other key thing is that it supports 2D and 3D, right? You guys have heterogeneous CAD. You may have multiple 3D vendors, you might have all sorts of different kinds of 2D images at various, levels of lifecycle. These tools have to support all that. And it can't just be one thing. It can't be just 3D. It can't be just 2D. You need both. And you get all these benefits, right? Like, you don't have to type any product data anymore, like copy and paste. You can just drag products in, lay them out lots of different ways. I'm not going to— we're not doing a demo here, but I just want to highlight some of the key aspects. The other thing is that data stays accurate. If you have your FOB and PLM and it changes, and then you got that product showing up in 100 VibeIQ documents, the FOB updates in 100 VibeIQ documents. You don't have to worry about if it's accurate, right? It's always accurate. So you're like, oh yeah, right, Brian, you're not gonna replace documents. No chance, right? We've been doing this for 4 years now. We have customers. Some great partners have helped us kind of work our way through our early stages of, of building a new software product. And it hasn't been easy, but they're in there, and it's working, right? We have taken multiple companies who their whole design team was on Adobe XD, they're in our boards app. They're all in there now. Another company we have, they're all on Miro. We love Miro, you'll never get us off Miro. They're on our boards app, right? So it wasn't easy, wasn't easy at all. All these little user experience things that they needed and demanded we had to do. Took us a long time, but they're in there now and they're happy. And everyone's benefiting from it. Design and merchandising are in the same spot, collaborating every day, marking stuff up, changing their mind, changing their mind again, changing their mind again. It's all happening right here. They're working together. This is where they work. So it's having immediate impact. I can't give you some names here, but I can generalize. We have one customer who— In their product calendar, normally, their product line would be visible in September, right? That's the first time people keyed stuff into their enterprise system, and then the company could go, okay, what are we dealing with here, right? I got all my categories and all my teams, I've plugged it in, now I can do some math on that and see what's happening. Used to be September, this year it's 12 weeks earlier. Their company can see their line 12 weeks earlier. Think about what you can do with that lead time, right? What's— what are we missing? What do we have too much of? What's the math look like, right? 12 weeks. And they did that by stop— they're not using Excel anymore. They're using our system to do their line planning. And just by swapping that dock out, now the company has line of sight and they're making better decisions. Another customer, of ours that's focused initially on global to regional handoff and adopt and forecast and all the presentations you have to create to do that and all the back and forth you need to work on with their regional teams, they think they've saved 10,000 hours of time already. So think about what you can do with that extra time, right? That's where you start to see opportunities for compression of the calendar, right? And it's not just time saved, like they're working with more accurate data, they're making better decisions. Hopefully it's impacting their understanding what the regions need. They're hitting MLQs better. Maybe they're dropping products out quicker, faster, saving sampling costs, all sorts of opportunities there. Vera Bradley, we did a webinar with them earlier this year. There's a QR for that, QR code at the end of this presentation. They turned on VibeIQ. And we got them up and running in just a couple of months. And right out the gate, they could see their line. And they said, we have— we're over-assorted. We got too much stuff in here. We can start dropping things, just like that. And like, an immediate impact just in their first season, they started pulling the stuff out that was unnecessary. And you start dropping products early in the calendar, you're going to save money, right? And you're going to save time. I mean, there's literally less to do technical development, less to sample, less to wait for. Great case study, a lot of content we have online. You can check that out. Okay, so just to wrap up and get you guys lunch, just a conclusion, right? So I'd say one of the things we've struggled with is we've been talking with brands and we're like, "Hey, guess what? You can do this thing." And the brands are like, "No, you can't," or, "We didn't know you could do that, so we're not ready for this." We don't have budget for this, right? And it's been one of our challenges over the past few years. But this is a real thing, and we have customers who can attest to it. And I would say relative to a lot of the other, let's say, initiatives that we see in play in companies trying to improve their go-to-market efficiency, this is a huge impact. And it's a real thing, and you should know about it because maybe you'd never considered something like this before. Now you can. And we're happy to collaborate with you about what that looks like and how to plan for something like that. But very optimistic about how it could help with your transformations that you're probably already working on. So just call to action, think hard on this and how it could help your company. Don't wait. Come by our booth. We only got a half day left. But if we haven't talked already, swing by. And that is a QR code to the Vera Bradley webinar that you can download if you're interested. Customers say it way better than I do. Question. So this has open APIs that can connect it to a variety of apps. Absolutely. Absolutely. We won't get in the tech demo here, but yeah, we built from day one to be integrated because you guys have all these different enterprises. Systems. Some of our customers have connected it to like Snowflake and BI to pull historical sales data out. So when they're doing their new line plan and they're thinking about what should I carry over, they have some data, right, that they never had before, as an example. We also push products to PLM. We pull data back out of PLM once it starts getting set up. Some customers have also realized that it's an easier way to get assets into their DAMs. Designers can literally copy and paste right into a board and then drag onto a product. And as soon as they do that, we know what product it is, we know the style number, and we can just send it to the dam, and they don't have to just spend any time saving it to OneDrive and naming it a certain way. And so there's lots of integration opportunities. Okay, any questions? How do we use the Slido thing? Anything on there? No? Oh, that's what that's for, is the question? I think so. Or you can just ask me. All right, well, thanks so much. Take care.