Why Fashion Brands Still Don’t Understand Their Product Line | Brian Lindauer (VibeIQ)

My name is Brian Lindauer, CEO at BuyBuyQ. Nice to meet you all. Thanks for coming. Having a good day? Yeah. Go Knicks. I'll get that on the record. We are being recorded, so be on YouTube soon. So what I'd like to talk about today is focus on opportunity. For you all to consider as you think about merch planning, end-to-end merchandising at your company. We think there's a real value opportunity that could be transformative and is being integrated into many companies' transformation plans for merchandising today. And I just want to walk you through that and help you understand the general opportunity and then also how VibeIQ as a software Solution can help solve that problem. So I'll start by asking a high-level question, which is, do your teams understand your product offering? Pretty important if you're planning, you know, what you're planning or what you're going to buy, or what is the thing that you're getting ready to manufacture and sell. And explore this question a little bit. We'll just take a look at like some of the teams that are involved that might be trying to answer that question, who are part of answering that question. Merchandising teams, planning teams, design, development, regional groups, regional buyers, regional merchants, channel owners, your retail partners, a lot of people involved in defining and reviewing a product assortment. And generally what we see in the market today is that teams that are trying to explain, present, get feedback on, understand their product lines are using all sorts of documents, some of which you might have heard of. The yellow box is Miro. Anyone not know what Miro is? No? Okay, everyone knows Miro. That's good. But things are actually quite a bit more complicated than just a few documents. We got categories splitting across all those different stakeholder groups. And then you're typically not developing one season at a time. You're developing a whole lot of things. And even this picture is pretty well organized. This is not how reality looks, right? But there's a lot going on here, right? How many of you agree that these documents are kind of like the number one tool still in your enterprise when it comes to like explaining, getting feedback on your product line? Okay, lots of head nodding. And you know, I like to describe it that it's a bit like, you know, all those individual pieces can only be really consumed individually. It's hard to bring them together, it's hard to see the whole picture, and it ends up looking a bit like a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces. We've talked to some very high-level executives of some very large companies and they'll say things like, I don't know what my product line is, right? We're going to market and I'm not sure what my product offering is. I can't actually interrogate it, ask questions, see it, see the way I want to see it. I can see it one way. That one way is not good enough, or I can see just a small piece at a time, which leads us to the famous analogy of the blind people trying to figure out what an elephant is, right? And one guy touching the tail and another guy is touching the tusks and No one really knows what it is that they're looking at. They can only sense or assess one piece of it. One view of it might be in a, in a product line. It might be thinking about the total cost or blended margin or maybe color story, but it's hard to bring it all together into one picture so you can assess its fitness and correctness before you go order tons of it. Right. I think, you know, there's a fundamental sort of issue And this, this links back to the tools that are in the marketplace today. And there's this kind of one split you can take around quantitative and qualitative, right? A lot of today's tools that you use are quantitative. They're a grid of numbers, they're sheets and pivots. They might answer a few questions or several questions about the plan or what you're going to order. You can get that angle. And then there's this qualitative aspect. Where you have the drawings, the designs, the line boards, the design boards, or it might just be racks of clothing on hangers in a room, right? I gotta see it. Many people say they still need to touch it, right, to know what the product is. And these things are rarely, if ever, connected. But you guys are trying really hard, right? Anyone who's tried using Miro is trying to solve that problem, I think, brute force keying information in, typing in pricing, typing in forecasts, and then pasting images from all over the place. So we see boards like this all over the place. Have any of you built something like this at your company? It's pretty easy to create, isn't it? Real easy to create these things. It's like that, few minutes, you're rocking. No, it's very, very difficult to create one of these. And when you're done, you get one look, you get one perspective on that line, one set of information. And it's probably wrong. Odds are almost guaranteed it's wrong. Okay, so where, where do we define our product line? Like, what is our system of record? How do I— where do I get my product information from? For a lot of people, the answer to that question are PLM systems they've been invested in. They've been out there. Modern-day PLM has been around for 25 years. Our team's got some background there, but I'll use PLM as an example. Of a situation which is this dichotomy between documents and enterprise systems, right? Documents are easy to learn, flexible. You can do whatever you want. Total freedom, very easy to use. Your— our new hires coming from college know how to use them. No training necessary. Many of enterprise systems which are kind of the opposite, right? Difficult to use. You need training, hard to adopt, but they're essential to the enterprise, to the enterprise. They're systems your company needs. I like to say enterprise systems aren't created for users, they're created for companies, right? Documents are the tool of choice for users. This dynamic causes a problem, right? Users like, hey, give me documents and boo to enterprise systems. You know, at least this, this idea that we've trademarked now called enterprise system procrastination, right? And this is the tendency for people of all different sorts of disciplines to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait before they have to put something into an enterprise system. And this shows up in all sorts of different types of systems, from PLM tools to DAMs, PIMs, to, I mean, name it, anywhere you have to go put your information and you have to take it out of the place that you're working and put it into someplace where the company can access it and measure it. This is an illustration. If you think about the product calendar, the lifecycle, typical lifecycle for a season or a go-to-market calendar, You have this front section of the process which is super iterative and conceptual and it's in flux, right? When things are changing left, right and center, you don't want to have to go assign a style number and put in a database and make it official because you're probably going to change your mind and then you'll have to change it again. So this early stage is almost always in documents, right? And then you wait along as long as possible and you put into some system. But then you're kind of in a jam because you keep using the documents, right? And now you've got this problem where you're working over here and then you got to update it over there and now things aren't accurate and there's a mis— now there's almost an issue because what seem, what you think is a source of truth is no longer the source of truth, which is the enterprise systems. It's the juxtaposition of a lot of enterprise systems is this is the case. So back to this picture, right? We got all these documents all over the place. What's the chance that any one of them is actually accurate and up to date? That's— can you trust it? Right? Probably not. And that's a real problem, right? If you don't know, if you can't trust what you're looking at and what's the cost of maintaining that, what's the cost of creating a second version or a different look or a different angle? It's incredibly high. So to answer that intro question, do— does your company understand your product line? If— probably no, but like definitely not in its entirety, right? You definitely would benefit from understanding it better and being able to consume it in lots of different ways for different types of purposes, different roles, different stakeholders, different questions. Everyone agree with that? Okay, so what's the cost of that, right? How does it impact your business? So back to the situation, another look at it. This is probably closer to reality, right? And everything's all aren't equal, like lined up in columns and rows. It's a bit more of a rat's nest like this. But the impact is like it's hard to move fast. It's hard to optimize your product offering. It's really hard to change, right? If you want to be agile, if something happens in market and you want to change, it's really hard in this situation. Which makes it hard to improve your product line as a, as an effect. Okay. And then just kind of introduce another idea, right? And that is this idea that decisions late in the calendar are really expensive. We got to airdrop some samples, got to add in the neon pink, throw margin out the window. We got to get this product into the European market because of that event that just occurred. Decisions early in the process is where you can save a lot of money and set yourselves up for success. But remember our prior picture? What's over there on the left? Documents, Illustrator files, spreadsheets. Does anyone know what's going on? So, I mean, kind of, right? But that's when the— there's the biggest opportunity. If you can really understand what's going on there, you can identify all sorts of opportunities for improvement. What if we saw the gap in the line earlier? What if we figured out that we had way too many running shorts? Speaking of running shorts, there's this urban legend that some sportswear apparel company took all their men's running shorts that were marketed, stacked them up on a table, and they're like taller, you know, like 6 feet tall. And they said, wait a minute, we got way too many running shorts in market. We're just competing against ourselves. And like, this is not efficient. I'm not sure if that was true or not, but it was an easy picture to generate with ChatGPT. But I mean, this— I think this does happen. I know this happens at different levels, right? Even if these are just what you sampled and then you took a quarter of that to market, it's a problem and it happens. You guys agree with that? Heads nodding. Okay. That's an example of like what occurs when people aren't aligned. They're not on the same page. Don't know if you're tracking your plan, you're overdeveloping, you're oversampling, and that can result from not understanding your line early on. Later in the game, because of this split between all things that are still happening in spreadsheets versus what's happening down here, your enterprise systems, it impacts other processes, right? So another example we've seen is a global merchandising team handing off to their regional teams or their channel teams. 98% of the time that's going to occur through some sort of spreadsheet handoff or PowerPoint handoff. Here's the line. What do you guys want to adopt? I saw one particular example where someone got 2,000 line items in a spreadsheet and a link to a Miro board, and they're literally like they had to fill in a forecast. They copy a style number out of the spreadsheet, Alt+Tab over to Miro, try to do Ctrl+F, find the thing on the Miro board and like, oh, that's the thing. And then fill in a number back to the spreadsheet. That's a, that's a real problematic situation, which is going to lead you to like, like how can you possibly ensure you get like high adoption rates into your channels and your regions so you can compute MOQs and like buy the right stuff when your process is running this way, right? Just another example. So that's real impact, right? Like we've, we, VibeIQ, I think we have like 20-some customers now, but we've talked to hundreds of companies But the data is out there. Everyone's struggling. Everyone wants to get faster to market. Everyone wants to reduce sample costs by sampling the right stuff. Everybody wants to stop scrapping and marking down their product line. Like, these are— these metrics are probably very familiar to you. But I'll just ask the question: do you think if your teams could see and understand and iterate and all be on the same page, across that whole calendar, could we move the needle on these? Yes, I think so. A lot of companies we work with talk about transformation, merchandise transformation, product development transformation, and many of them then say what we're prioritizing are merchandising efficiency, decision-making in the, in the efforts and hopes of cutting weeks out of their calendar. Impacting these metrics. Okay, so now I'll present to you an idea for a different way of working. Ready? And so just to kind of illustrate, I'm going to put a couple boxes on the screen. There are other boxes we could draw here, but two that are probably very familiar to you would be your merch planning tools, MFP, assortment. I'm going to stay away from demand right now, but that's— I put that left on purpose, right? That's kind of early stage planning. And then we got our PLM systems, right, where you're doing your, your development and your sourcing, your costing. There's kind of a question right in the middle, which is which product should we put in market to fill this plan and which product should we be designing, developing and sourcing that matches that market plan? People really struggle to connect those two questions together, like really struggle. And there's really— one of the problems is that that middle, once you move kind of that middle space, it's very qualitative, it's creative, it's visual, it's collaborative. You have all these stakeholders that have to get in the game. It's not just planning, it's not just merchandising, it's designers, it's license management managers, it's retail partners, it's vendors doing vendor-driven development. There's all sorts of stuff happening here. And if people need to be in lockstep, people need to understand, but it's a lot to pull together because there's nothing filling the gap. And that's where documents have flourished. This picture resonates. So this is where VibeIQ sits and what we're calling that right now. We've got a couple of different words that we've used. We've used— if you look at our banner out in our— in the expo room, we talk about an assortment lifecycle platform, like how do you move an assortment from concept, commerce, I often use this other word, digital product workspace, which is basically saying, how do we foster a place where teams can come together of different disciplines where they can all see the same thing? And it's a mix between quantitative and qualitative data. So that's what we've developed at VibeIQ. And we've taken an approach of trying to effectively create a better type of document, right? People love working in a spreadsheet. Let's give them a spreadsheet. People love working in a Miro board. Let's give them a board, but let's do it a little bit differently. Let's verticalize it, let's specialize it for product development. So we built 3 apps. One's called Plan, and it's like, it feels like Excel, but wherever you're working as you're building up global or regional or channel or a cluster assortment or like an assortment for a particular retailer that you're working with, you get the Excel feel, you get the Excel-like data, but it's connected to a common data model and it's connected to a common product database. You're always looking at the right information. And then we took that same concept and we said, let's build a better Miro. Let's build a better collaborative whiteboard where design concepts, trend products, carryovers, visual line planning can occur. And anywhere we see a product here, we're going to be looking at the same product information that's back in that sheet. This, it's all connected. Let's build something like PowerPoint, right, for doing rich narrative-based presentations. But it will also be connected to my product so that if I change anything anywhere, all of these different documents update automatically. Imagine you had 100 presentations and they all had the same pair of shoes in it, and then a merchant changed the intro date on a spreadsheet, and then all 100 of those presentations updated automatically. That's what VibeIQ does. So we create real-time collaboration. Teams can come in and everyone's like jamming on ideas together in a highly visual way. Everything's connected back to a single definition of the product, and that's the data— style number, colors, pricing, intro dates, forecasts. As well as the digital assets to your sketch, colored sketch, 3D renders, whatever you have is always available and up to date and refreshed across everything as it, as it changes. And then what we also do is that we bring in your goals from your financial planning process. We house them in the system. So as you're visually collaborating, building a line, you can track your progress towards those goals and objectives so we can quantify and slice and dice the product set that you're working on. As changes occur, you can track them, right? Imagine opening a PowerPoint on Tuesday that you last opened last week, and the PowerPoint tells you that Bobby changed the retail price on Monday and now it's $55 instead of $45. That's what 5iQ can do for you. This product got dropped. It's no longer available to adopt into your region. We can pull together creative assets. So we have design teams, concept teams working in the same toolset, bringing together color comp products, photography from, photography from the internet, briefing data, color and trend. It's all in the same place. We can manage placeholders. Boxed line plans, slots coming down from your MFP or assortment planning tool if you have one. We have relationships with those systems and then you can collaboratively build out the line, fill your slots, see how you're tracking, bring in last year products, build this next assortment. And as you're doing that, we can bring in your final— like I said before, you can bring in your financial targets, your CC counts, your unit targets, whatever you're managing at your different different levels of your merch hierarchy or, you know, however you're defining your plan, you can see how you're tracking. You can just flip it. So you go from the visual view into a pivot view and I can see, oh, I'm short on, I'm short on CCs for this category. Let's set up some new slots. I'll get this design team working on that. The design team is going to work in something that feels like Adobe, right? You want designers in a system, it's got to feel like Adobe. You guys agree with that? It's a fact. So we've modeled our user experience after Adobe products, hotkeys, guidelines. We have features in the system that you can actually do some lightweight design right in the system. We're not a drawing tool, but you can do color fills, you can, you can, you can bring in SVGs and like combine them into different graphics for like graphics placements. We have companies that are like doing t-shirt designs right in the system by combining graphics and CAD together. And then when you have concepts that you like and you've set up your slots to match up against your financial plan, you can just drag your designs right into those slots and you can marry the digital asset with the attributed merchandising representation. And as you do that, that image is then going to show up back on your sheet and it's going to show up in all the documents that you've ever built and put that slot into. So we call this design assignment. This is like a real magical point because a lot of companies don't have anything close to this where design and merchandising can kind of come together. And because of that, it doesn't connect until way down the line. So you got merchants having no way of understanding what the line looks like until way later in the calendar. I'll give you a case study on that later. So we've iterated, we've got a line we like. We've been working in concept mode. I don't have style numbers yet, and now I'm ready to go sample. I'm ready to go to development. I know these are the things that I want to spend that money on. We had a publish button on our system and it pushes it down into your PLM tool, sets up a style number, initiates an RFQ, whatever it is you guys do next. Right. Nice thing here is you're not burning style numbers on products that you're never going to sample or develop. Right. It's a concept management system that's aligned with your merchandising system. And at any point in time, one of the real powers of the system is that I might have an assortment with 2,000 things in it across all sorts of different color families, intro dates, you know, all sorts of attribution. We have this solution where you can pull up a quick wizard and say, I want to group by this, filter by that, order by this, hit a button, it creates an entire presentation for you. It's like an auto Miro. Auto Miro. Get that? So like it takes you weeks maybe to create one Miro design board. Now you can create hundreds of them in like minutes. So if you sit down with your VP and they want to see by intro date, no problem. You want to sit down with your design lead, they want to see by color, no problem. You can see all angles of the elephant, if you will, and truly understand your your product line. This gets even more powerful when we start pulling in more information from other systems like sales history. So you're doing a visual plan for fall '27, you can pull in the sales and orders from fall '26 if they're available and plunk them right onto the same board. And you can see that information baked in here while you're figuring out what to carry over as an example. Another really powerful use case, what I just described there might have been like visual line planning at like a global level, like a master assortment. As you go from like a global or mass assortment down to region or channel, there's a handoff typically, at least in bigger companies, as you shift from one merchant to another. It's a qualitative and quantitative handoff. You want the visuals and the data. The use case that works really well inside of VibeIQ, a lot of customers do this to do adoption and we have like roll-ups so you can see, you know, like adoption and forecasting. One of our customers use this to like move the needle on tracking on MLQ. They can see earlier what's getting the right pickup so they know if they can drop stuff or which things they want to double down on. And through a set, like a structure of what we call assortments, you can have category teams working in their own space I'm in charge of tops. That's me there. And then Kwok's in charge of bottoms. We have our own world, we have our own sheets, we're in our space. But as we do our work, our stuff rolls up into one global assortment and then channel teams can pull from that and it stays on top of change. So if I pull that too expensive ugly sweater, then Terry Crews is going to know it got dropped so it doesn't mess up with— mess up his APAC plan, right? This is all, these are some of the features that happen when you take, it's kind of a document idea, but things are linked together, right? You can stay on top of this kind of change. So a future state could look something like this. We've gotten rid of all those disconnected documents. Now we have documents that are connected to each other, and they're also connected to my enterprise system so that they're no longer out of date, no longer error-prone. Is this making sense at a high level? Okay, so you might be like, whatever, you can't do that. Can't get designers out of Adobe. We've got designers out of Adobe. We have multiple customers now who are using Figma or Adobe XD or Miro, and they were skeptical. They're like, no, you can't get my designers out of those tools. And we've completely replaced those tools and put them into Buy by Q. The nice thing is the designers are happy and they don't even see the difference, but the merchants see the difference because now everything is connected. And they got data and they got visuals and they can understand the product line. Right. Big, big difference for them. New Balance, one of our earliest customers. I mean, they're growing like gangbusters. They went through transformation and they've achieved many, many things with VibeIQ. But I think one of the most interesting things that they referenced was that in their product calendar, we didn't actually shorten their product calendar in the first season we went live. They stuck with their current product calendar because they didn't know where they could cut dates out until they rolled out the tech. But they said, hey, after the first season that we turned on, we got to see the product line, footwear and apparel, however we wanted it, 12 weeks earlier than we've ever seen it before. Obviously, individual teams could see it because they were working in their little, you know, their own little space and they could work on their category. But they could see the whole thing 12 weeks earlier. Like, just think about how valuable that data is and the derivative, you know, improvements. So like you can see we've got too much of this or got not enough of that. That impacts development and sampling. Earlier attribution here is gold that can be passed on to downstream teams like demand planning. There's attributed CAD, there's actually an attributed product line 12 weeks earlier in the calendar. You can build on top of that. They're still discovering the benefits of just that one change. Vera Bradley, much more tactically, turned on the system. They had no boards. All they had was spreadsheets and PowerPoints. I turned this thing on and suddenly they had auto-mirror. You guys know what I mean by that, auto mural. And they immediately saw, 'cause they do a lot of prints, you guys know Vera Bradley, like lots and lots of prints. They're like, holy cow, we got that print on 15 things. We only need it on 10 things. They got rid of 5 products that never went to sample, just like that. That would've gone to sample before, right? So just another example, very tangible benefit. But I think there, you could enumerate forever the number of benefits that come from understanding your product line at all steps along the way as it evolves and comes to life. Okay, so I said my piece for the most part. I think, remember, our objective here was for you to understand the opportunity, right? The opportunity is like, what would happen if my teams all could be in lockstep? Could we make decisions faster? Could we cut time out of our calendar? Could we improve our sample costs? Can we reduce that? Can we put a better product into inventory? Could we put a better product on the shelves? Starts with understanding it and having an opportunity to react and make decisions and move quicker. The digital product workspace for a solution like VibeIQ can help get you there. It complements planning systems, the investments you're making into MFP, assortment, demand. Great complements to this kind of solution. and it complements your PLM systems if you have one. It feeds them, it reads from them, it exposes and makes PLM information available to people to take advantage of it. It's also ready for everything that's around the corner with regards to AI. Probably my next presentation, next time I do a presentation, we'll dig in on some of that. But I like to say that this way of working, creating a place where teams can be in one spot and have access to information, is also a great place to put automations and insights that might be coming from artificial intelligence tools, design generation tools, and other AI buzzwords. I'll save that for the next presentation. I'll stop there. I think I got a few minutes left. If you haven't come by our booth, come around. Love to talk to you.