Sourcing Journal Radio

While there are numerous new tech platforms to help retailers improve efficiencies on their sales floor, a system is only as good as the frontline workers who use it. Brick-and-mortar retailing has already suffered greatly—with consumers migrating to e-commerce faster than you can say “free shipping”—and the frontline work force now is being tasked with more complex jobs. This leads to sub-optimal job performance, outright mistakes and high turnover.

“Before, employees just had to put the stock out, work with the customer and ring up the register,” said Michael Appel, president of retail consultancy Appel Associates and the former CEO of retail chain Rue 21. “Now, we've added all these software solutions, payment solutions, buy online, pick up in store [BOPIS], ship from store, and more. Things that didn't even exist before now make an employee’s job much more complex. And it’s tougher for them to feel mastery.”

It’s all about data, which the Axonify platform gathers via AI. Via the daily learning tasks, the system can see who knows what, and who needs more work in certain areas for optimal learning.

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Customer demand is becoming more unpredictable by the minute, putting retailers on the defensive as they try to understand how to optimize their product merchandise offering, services and experiences. In today’s world, to get the supply and demand equation right, retailers must generate as much data as possible from product testing.

“They need to rely on data to anticipate as opposed to react,” said Greg Petro, CEO and founder of First Insight. “The winners will anticipate. And the anticipation is the challenge. You can’t rest on a historical data point at this stage or leverage intuition to a large degree. It does not make sense economically any further.”

Listen to this chat between Petro and Edward Hertzman, founder and president of Sourcing Journal, to hear about First Insight's Next-Gen XM Platform.

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The mass cancellation of apparel orders throughout the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in an excess supply of raw materials that manufacturers and suppliers quickly pivoted into the products that survived the chopping block. That left a dearth of inputs once new orders began to flow again. This chain of events put supply chains under unprecedented pressure, and created questions around the quality and integrity of the resulting finished goods.

In the case of raw materials, the biggest concern would be swapping out fibers from nominated suppliers for whatever’s on hand, according to Wayne Buchen, vice president at molecular-based supply chain security company Applied DNA Sciences. And retailers that don’t have a full grasp of their supply chain might not even be able to tell the difference between a high-quality or low-quality fiber.

The Applied DNA Sciences team built the CertainT® platform specifically to enable brands to handle their own internal materials tagging and testing, whether at the yarn level or when the finished product arrives at the company warehouse.

Listen to this chat to hear Buchen discuss this “tag, test and track” method.

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More than ever, apparel brands are tasked with adapting to a global environment that they have no control over. With higher sustainability standards among consumers and growing ethical concerns about textile origins, brands can no longer remain ignorant to the nature of the raw materials they are sourcing.

Raw material provenance, in particular, became a flashpoint when U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a Withhold Release Order (WRO) on all cotton merchandise and tomatoes originating in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where it is widely believed that the goods are being produced with forced labor.

As a result, importers are being held responsible for ensuring the products they plan to import do not exploit any forced labor, or face financial consequences. This puts them at major risk, but brings to light the need to invest in supply chain authentication capabilities, said Wayne Buchen, vice president of strategic sales at molecular-based supply chain security company Applied DNA Sciences.

Listen to Buchen discuss Applied DNA Sciences' work with agricultural commodities merchants to tag cotton in the U.S., aiming to help more brands build a more secure supply chain while they wean off Xinjiang-based cotton.

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Today’s apparel supply chain is in dire need of an accountability check. As brands today deliver bold promises such as “ethically made” jeans or “sustainably sourced” jackets, more consumers are demanding the proof behind these statements.

But while there are many actors throughout the supply chain, it is ultimately the brand that is still responsible for the authenticity and traceability of the apparel it sells, according to Wayne Buchen, vice president of strategic sales at Applied DNA Sciences, a provider of supply chain security, anti-counterfeiting and anti-theft technologies.

“The brands are the people who took the responsibility to ship that order with a tag that said ‘organic cotton,’” he said.

In a recent chat with Sourcing Journal founder and president Edward Hertzman, Buchen said apparel retailers and brands are often still too reliant on traditional supply chain authentication methods. And the issue is becoming more challenging as fashion firms are continuing to move production closer to the end consumer

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Robert McMillan of Dearborn Denim discusses the appeal of Made in America denim, and how it makes for a more sustainable product.

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Blackhorse Lane Ateliers founder Han Ates discussed the ways in which his brand is practicing social sustainability and creating a London aesthetic.

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Kings of Indigo’s Tony Tonnaer discusses how his sustainable foundation helped him navigate the pandemic, and what he has in store for 2021.

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Jeanologia’s CEO Enrique Silla discusses the company’s contributions during Covid-19 and what it learned from the pandemic.

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Rudolf Group’s Alberto de Conti discussed Hub 1922’s latest innovations launched during Covid-19 that will have a lasting impact on the denim industry.

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