Leading Internal and External Transformation, with Nidhi Puri

Hi, welcome to this week's episode of Fashion Made. I hope you're doing well, and thank you to everyone who's been keeping in touch with messages and sharing the podcast in the last few weeks. It's great to know these conversations are helping everyone remain connected to everything that's going on in the industry right now. On this week's show, I'm speaking to Nidhi Puri. She's Senior Director of Technical Design, and the conversation is really all about how you lead digital transformation and change, both within your organization and with your suppliers as well. So yeah, I hope you enjoy. Here it is. Nidhi, thanks for joining us.

Thanks, David. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, it's great. It's great to chat to you. We're talking about the digitalization of the fashion industry today. Obviously a very broad topic, but one that's very important right now.

Oh yeah, it is, right? Much more important than it's ever been in past. And I think I couldn't agree more. It is, it is a broad topic, but it's an interesting irony. It is broad for the entire industry, I feel, right? Because we've been talking about it for years. But I think where apparel is, we've made fantastic progress, but we are— but it's not that old for us. We're still kind of testing the waters. Companies are still figuring out like how to scale it up and what to do with it. So yeah, for the apparel industry, it's not super, super old. They're still kind of learning and it's a journey where, you know, a lot of companies are on that journey together.

Yeah. And I guess that the pandemic has just accelerated things, right?

Oh my gosh. Yeah. This has been, I don't know. I think things which we initially expect, oh yeah, you know, it's in the works. 5 years from now, 7 years from now, it's gonna kind of come and we'll have to deal with it. I think this pandemic situation has kind of accelerated that, right? So it's become the present. So I think this COVID-19 impact has dramatically changed how apparel industry is gonna think about present as well as future. And digital transformation digitization of the apparel. I think that is the main kind of focus point at this level. Any company which wants to succeed the right way and scale it up and be here for the long run, I think digitization is absolutely a big task to take care of at the moment.

And you work from a product creation standpoint, correct?

I do. Yes. So I've been in my, what, past 20 years now. I'm not dating myself. I'm not that, but yeah, it's, I've always been in product creation. I've been in the world of technical design, which is all about fit perfection and, you know, creating the product to kind of align with the vision of our design counterparts. So yeah, for our specific world, I feel it's a major shift when we talk about what our future would look like. And then I think digitization is going to play— it's already playing a very important role as to how our world is transforming.

Yeah. What about things like getting buy-in? Because, you know, not everyone's always on the same page, especially when you've got sort of large disparate teams. You know, a lot of people that listen to this podcast work in teams that work across global situations, sort of global environments, and it can be difficult to get buy-in across all of those levels, sort of top to bottom and across the world as well. So how important is it to get that?

Right, so, and yeah, I agree, right? Buy-in is super important, and I think that is also the most tedious part of this process. I think the entire kind of team and all levels, and it has to, it always kind of has to start from the top. But I think for digitization to really be a success, every team, including, I'm not excluding our suppliers also, right? Your internal teams, your external partners, your buyers, as well as your vendor partners. Every single team at every level needs to get that buy-in. And I think that buy-in comes from just the fact that I'm going to take the present scenario. In this scenario, to be spending more than 15 weeks just to kind of complete that apparel, physical apparel cycle that, you know, we're going to create the garment, then it's going to be vetted, then a supplier is going to be creating the garment and physically sending it, it's not doable anymore. Right? So it's that situation. I think things or kind of the needs, the immediate needs kind of define the buy-in and they help to like accelerate it. So buy-in in past would take some time. I think people are very aware of digital transformation and the benefits from it and the whole, you know, the biggest advantages, sustainable, making apparel very sustainable and going green. But it was not to the point, it hadn't penetrated to the level that yes, let's just go with it and roll with it. I think just very limited leading companies have really embraced it, but I think others are still catching up and kind of testing waters. So it depends what stage a company is in and the buy-in varies from that. But from my experience, I think it has to kind of come from all teams, all levels, all partners together. And that's the only way it kind of becomes a success because just having digitization in a small pocket and having your traditional process, and the balance of your pipeline doesn't really help your cause.

So how do you get all teams at all levels bought in to something? You know, that's pretty tough.

Yeah, it is tough, right? And it sounds kind of— I have to say it's too much and it's too overwhelming to— if you think about it, oh my gosh, how are we going to achieve it? I think you just have to, and again, it's all about, you have to start from your highest performing category or highest performing teams. You have to start with, you have to start small before you say, oh, we are ready to scale it up. Right. So you just have to pick that pocket where you feel it's the right set of people who are very open to changing and open to kind of trying new things and just open to embracing this idea that we're gonna go completely digital, which means that we are totally walking away from our traditional way of thinking and getting the right set of partners together, right? So it's not just that it has to start small. I don't, I think there is no one-word answer to this, like how to get a buy-in. But in my experience, you start small, you start with the right set of people, you get a buy-in from your leadership. That's extremely important. And I think you just start to put those pieces together. And of course you need the right technology partner too, right? So it just— and that is pretty impactful if it works, even if you can make it work in your one category. Where you can kind of build ROI saying, hey, if we go digital in this one pocket of whichever category that might be in your apparel, and this is what our ROI looks like, and this is how much we can cut down our sampling and our calendar timing. I think that's really the way to scale up in my perspective.

What about the people? Because you said, you know, you choose the teams, the high-performing teams. What about the kind of person that should champion digital transformation?

Yeah, so it's so new that if you think about our existing plan, that's a great question. I am a firm believer of it's not that if a person knows or is trained on a tool, that doesn't define how successful that person is going to be in championing digitization. It's all about the openness, openness to doing things completely differently, and openness to just kind of embracing it and seeing, okay, if this is what our existing tools are, how can we make the best use of it to achieve our goal? And it's hard to find that. In my experience, people who know your apparel or that particular product, how that gets created, if you take those people, high-performing people, right, and compare it to people who are just excellent in operating that tool, you're going to get better results of training the high performers on that one tool and letting them go with it. Because what it does is From what I've learned is digitization is not just about, oh, you've created an apparel and it's okay and it's a go. No, it's knowing how to balance what you know of the product, your product knowledge, and combining it with your technological tool skills and kind of finding that perfect balance of it. Because if you just want to create apparel which looks beautiful to look at, that might not necessarily be a perfect fitting apparel which can go through your entire pipeline. So I think the right set of people who can actually be the right champions are the ones who firmly believe in it and who have the in-depth knowledge of creating that product category.

Interesting, interesting. How does this affect the wider teams?

Yeah, so it's all about training, right? It's all about, I think, you know, it's a very old word. There was a time when we were all about like change management. I think it's no longer change management. It's about how can a leader or a particular team can lead the change, how effectively they can lead the change is going to drive how successful this journey could be. So it's all about knowing the product, being open to technology, combining that, and then showing to your peers. It's no longer about, hey, you're being told to do this, this is how it needs to be, and close your eyes and go ahead with it, right? People need to feel that it's okay. It's okay to let go those traditional way of doing things Why? Because we're trying to achieve a new goal in the new world and you just have to be okay with letting go. Letting go of the traditional practices because your new normal has to be just met in a new way. I don't know, it's a lot of words and especially I feel personally in this pandemic situation where COVID has dramatically impacted apparel industry. I feel it's more, it's more and more critical for those high performers to come together and for companies to have those high-performing teams be the champion for this change. Because otherwise there's going to be a struggle between, you know, you just kind of without enough training, you're letting people or you're asking people to deliver on certain certain high-critical objectives.

That's really interesting. What about some of the negative effects that happen to the product creation teams themselves with digital transformation? And also, how can you alleviate some of those?

Yeah, so I think tradition— you know, in the past, whenever you talk about digitization, I feel it's always been kind of indicative of, oh my gosh, so we're going to adopt, we're going to go digital, and that means that we would be needing less number of people who work in the product creation, whether it's technical design teams or design teams or any other role which gets impacted. I don't necessarily believe that's the case. I think it's all about, again, it's all about the level of tools and training, right? Being provided to the teams to kind of make sure the existing teams where there's so much time has been invested are actually getting enough opportunity to elevate their skill set. And once that's done, going digital does not mean that you're going to need less amount of people. Going digital means that the level of work which took much longer, if it took, for example, 15 weeks, right, in order to create your entire sampling process, it's now going to be cut down by— and again, that's a hypothetical number— it's going to be cut down by, you know, 50% the time invested in it. And you would have a much higher success rate, much more sustainable collection, and much less time and cost kind of put into creating that collection. So To me, if you have the right set of people and if the right set of training is provided, you can, you can actually work with your existing teams to deliver digital product. I don't necessarily, as a leader, I don't believe that you're going to need less people. I just feel you're going to see much more output in much less time with your given set of teams. That's how I see it. And yes, in future, yes, of course, you know, when everything is automated, again, it's— it all depends on if you're looking to digitize just a small pocket of the entire pipeline process, or you're looking to scale it up and automate the entire supply chain pipeline of like, you know, how the samples get produced and how it gets created, produced, and delivered, right? So once the entire pipeline is automated, I can then see some level of reduction in the number of people required. Until that happens, I think to me digitization is just a smarter way of working for the teams to achieve a better output in a much less time and having a sustainable collection at the end of it.

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Where do you think the biggest efficiency gains are to be made with digitalization? I guess specifically within a product creation context.

Yeah, so that's an interesting question, right? And I think it also is not just focused on one little aspect of it. So when you talk about the gains, I think it's a combination. A, when you talk about product creation, your first ROI item, like return on investment, could be just your— the dollars spent on creating your physical samples, right? So however, I'm sure companies spend millions and millions of dollars on the physical sampling to create, to set up the showrooms, to kind of present it to the buyers. I think that cost definitely comes down. If you think about it, your sampling process, kind of making it digital makes it more sustainable and green because then you're not spending, you know, A, money, B, kind of going against the environment by shipping the garments, shipping the physical garments. So that kind of goes away. So that to me is like too big physical return on investment. In addition to that, it's the time spent. I mean, companies, apparel companies have struggled with having long calendars. Going digital can have a great reduction on your calendar timing. Just because not only your teams, and I say your teams, not only the, you know, the apparel company companies would gain in terms of their calendar time. It also has a great benefit for your vendor partners, right? They're not spending weeks and weeks just creating these physical garments. They're actually being able to have their digital teams create it for you, get it approved, and go into the pipeline, the manufacturing pipeline directly. So I think— Yeah, so it's not like a one-line answer to define the return, but you do see some physical returns and then some are just more broad, you know, well-being of the company at the end of it and well-being of the environment at the end of it, which cannot be quantified that easily.

Hmm. There's still massive gains to be made though.

Absolutely, absolutely. Listen, it's not So it's not a process where you just turn the switch on and everyone goes digitized. You know, it doesn't work like that. But once you've figured out what's the right recipe for it, absolutely, this is the way to go. And especially given the current environment, how, you know, what the impact you're seeing generally with COVID on the apparel industry, I think this is a must-have, right? I think it's a big one for companies to embrace now and scale it up.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think sort of other people in the industry echo that as well, you know, certainly in some of the conversations I have, but perhaps I work in a little bit of a bubble, you know?

No, I think you're right. I mean, I think you're right, right? Even other industries too, it's not just limited to apparel. I think I feel the closest to the apparel industry and that's why I'm kind of focusing on that. But yeah, it could, it could apply to any product creation in any industry. I mean, whether it's soft goods or whether it's hard goods, we have seen some really successful companies embracing digitization in non-apparel industries as well and doing an excellent job with it. Right. So it's not as As we both kind of said in the beginning, it's such a broad term. It's not limited to a small part of it. It just depends on how and how far a company wants to take it. And there've been some excellent companies have done great job who are already in a great space when you talk about digitization and the others are kind of testing waters and, you know, getting there. Enjoying the journey. Yeah. Yeah.

What does this all mean for the next 10 years of fashion?

Yeah, I wish, um, you know, if a couple of months before we've had this podcast, I would have said, oh yeah, 10 years from now, this is what it's going to mean. I think we look at the, um, uh, I think we look at the future, we define, we're gonna all define the future so differently. To me, 10, just with COVID right, things have accelerated so much. So I would say, yeah, maybe in 5 years, I'm not gonna go as far as 10. I think it's, I expect a far more scaled-up automation just in general, whether it's, and much more regionally. Than kind of offshore. I feel, you know, things are going to get very automated. I think perspective of just traditional companies is going to change quite a bit. Just the way we look at the process. I think we've kind of all have come to the conclusion that things need to change and things need to get smarter if we need to be successful. You know, in long term. So I think this is a perfect way. I feel it's going to be automated to the point that— and when I say automated, it's digitization and automation in combination, right? Especially if I take apparel industry, I think the front end of the process, we are going to see much more scaled up digitization. And then when it comes to the manufacturing pipeline, pipeline of it, I expect a much higher level of automation. I expect usage of the tools which were just being tested and kind of saying, oh, yeah, let's see how it performs. I think AI is going to play a big role in it. AI, VR, I feel our industry is going to evolve for for the right or the wrong reason, but for the right goal. I think, yeah, apparel is going to go through a major shift. And to me, automation is the way to go.

Okay. What about this AI thing? So what do you think is going to happen in your opinion?

Yeah. So see, again, there have been some I've seen some companies in like near past who've done great work in kind of looking into AI, understanding how they're gonna apply and what can they do with this data and how far they can kind of understand their own customers through kind of analyzing data. I feel that is again gonna be accelerated. I feel just because consumers have always been important, but I think now given the scenario that you have a limited consumer base, they are very focused. I think understanding what the needs are is going to become even more important. And to me, AI plays a very key role in that. Just helping analyzing data in the right way so that a company can understand what's the pattern with the customer, what are What is it that they're liking? What is it that they're gravitating towards is going to be one of the focus in near futures.

Yeah, 100%. Well, Nidhi Louie, it's been really, really interesting talking to you about this all today. So yeah, thank you for joining us.

Absolutely. It's been fun. You know how passionately I feel about just apparel and digitization in general. So it's been great. Thanks for having me, David.

Yeah, thank you to Nidhi for joining us this week. It's been a really interesting chat. Um, that's about all we've got time for, but on next week's show you can join us again, and we'll be speaking with Isaac Korn, who's Director of Innovation over at Periellis, and again, obviously talking about fashion technology and sort of all of the nuances around this space. So I hope you can join us then. Until then, stay safe. All the best. Bye-bye.