Our group spent the past four months meeting with Wild Rye, interviewing industry professionals, diving deep into the apparel production process, visiting a fashion design and apparel development company in Guangzhou, China and analyzing previous sales records. The greatest areas of opportunity for the company are in refining Wild Rye’s ability to forecast in two functions: 1) forecasting trends (to speed up the production process and deliver more predictable launches) and 2) forecasting their sales, which are currently based on rough estimates of 100% growth year-over-year across all categories. To develop solutions for trend forecasting, we analyzed their end-to-end product lifecycle, mapping out the entire process and finding areas of opportunity. After meeting with apparel manufacturer Ecico in China, we discovered multiple tools for improving Wild Rye’s PLM: right-sizing their supplier, ensuring contracts include discounting, and using trend forecasting software tools. Discussions and interviews with i…
As a digital retail display company, June20 combines tactile gratification of in-store shopping with a content-rich online experience. They are merging software and hardware to transform the brick-and-mortar retail space by giving retail customers what they want without leaving the store or using their phone, and providing retailers with robust and unique consumer data. After roughly one year of tradeshows and business development, the nascent company seeks to optimize its operations to facilitate scaling. June20’s VP of Operations, partnered with our team to create: One Year Cost-Benefit Analysis A summary of the fixed and variable costs for June20 compared to the benefits incurred from the retailer. Retail Product Selection Analysis A comparison of the feasibility of June20 displays for retailers, based off the products sold off the display. Multi-Year ROI & Margin Analysis An outline of how, based on supplier discounts, June20 determines the margin for each option and ultimately the return on investmen…
Simple Systems represents the future of design and foresight consultancy, by showcasing how design is shifting towards a holistic understanding and foresight is helping us see the future. Simple Systems is bringing together a balanced group of progressive, systems and design thinking practitioners who apply their knowledge through valuable methodologies. It’s a marriage between design thinking, strategic foresight and operational strategy. Our team worked with CEO David Knight to explore possible operational initiatives through a rigorous design process. David Knight was open to new ideas but made clear there were important constraints to consider. We discovered through our participatory design process, with CEO David Knight, that he was more interested in developing new metrics around participation and building community, rather than simply increasing profit. Getting to this insight was challenging and an important pivot moment for our team to reach our current operational objectives. The Operations Plan…
Black Sands is a successful 17 month old brewpub located in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. At this stage, they are eager to grow their business through high-volume beer production and distribution. The brewpub alone currently pulls in 80% of their revenue from food, while the remaining 20% of their revenue is from the sale of beer. Black Sands directors, Robert Patterson and Cole Emde, hope to invert these metrics through substantially increasing their beer production, through contract brewing and potentially a new facility, and distributing their beer to new wholesale accounts. Black Sands has differentiated itself in the saturated Bay Area craft beer market by specializing in brewing SMASH beer, which is single malt single hops. This gives them a competitive advantage both because SMASH is a unique approach, and because there is much more leeway in the brewing of SMASH. Cole, the master brewer, is able to be flexible and use whatever is on hand. In addition, Robert Patterson has many establis…
Love A Bee exists to fulfill an important mission: to mitigate colony collapse disorder by increasing demand for local, diversely-foraged honey, “securing our food supply one jar at a time.” What does this mean? Louise, founder and sole proprietor of the two-year-old business, aims to continue to increase the volume of honey she sources from local beekeepers (and secondarily, by convincing her customers and those she meets to “buy local” in the future), and in doing so incentivize them to expand their own healthy beekeeping operations. To her credit, she has grown her sales and revenue twofold each year of operations, so far, and shows strong signs of continuing to grow. Unfortunately, this demand — four large barrels of honey a year, she estimates — will hardly sway the staggering bee population of the west coast, let alone the world. As a mission-driven organization, our primary objective in establishing an operational initiative was to support Love A Bee in expanding its ability to meet its important m…
CORE Foods wants to make a meaningful impact on the food industry and America’s eating habits. Their vision is grand, but their team is small. CORE Foods consists of two identities: CORE Grocery and CORE Kitchen. In the future, they plan on opening CORE Farm, which will provide the majority of produce for their entire operation. As a team, Thomas Bendon, Lexy Guo, Gregory Stock and Kathleen Watson have three recommendations focusing on human resources, communications strategy and internal operations. We discovered that CORE does not really know their customer. This led us to do a deep dive in research with a survey, 1-1 interviews, and discovering partnership opportunities. We have now become experts with this highly competitive, highly innovative industry of fresh food and fast delivery, which is where we believe CORE Kitchen desires to make a positive an impact. Our first initiative was to evaluate the opening logistics of CORE Kitchen. This included construction, soft opening, hiring staff, growth of COR…