NEW YORK — Ask vendor and retailer alike about their biggest challenge, and the answer likely will be the same: how to shorten speed-to-market time.
More than 50 executives met Tuesday at the Princeton Club here to talk about streamlining the supply chain. The panel discussion, organized by Emanuel Weintraub Associates, included experts from Polo Ralph Lauren, VF Corp. and Federated Department Stores.
Speakers said their companies began reevaluating the supply chain and speed to market around 2000 and questioned why production cycles are so long when it only takes an average of 18 minutes to make a shirt.
“How do we go from mere minutes to months?” asked Robert Zane, chairman of the U.S. Association of Importers of Textile & Apparel.
Zane, who recently retired from Liz Claiborne Inc. where he was in charge of sourcing, emphasized that every area of a company — not just the sourcing department — should be held accountable for speed to market.
“Willingly or unwilling, we happily trade time for comfort,” Zane said. “The most expensive elements of a slow time to market does not even appear on the cost sheets: the costs of markdowns.”
To find inefficiencies, Hamilton McDermott, vice president of Emanuel Weintraub Associates, recommended that companies map out their entire supply chain, upgrade outdated processes and eliminate duplicate steps.
A company can cut one or two weeks by shipping from Asia to the West Coast instead of the East Coast, McDermott said. One-third of Polo Ralph Lauren’s products are distributed through the West Coast, said Howard Smith, senior vice president of supply-chain operations for Polo Ralph Lauren.
Heightened consumer awareness and industry consolidation make speed to market more important than ever, executives said.
In the face of this challenging environment, Boyd Rogers, president of the global supply chain at VF, said the company has succeeded by adopting a consumer-centric approach that involves researching and segmenting its ultimate consumer base. On the retail side, VF aims to be “the most relevant supplier to strategic partners” by targeting brands to specific consumers and channels, as well as developing its own stores to showcase the brands and develop brand equity that carries over to the wholesale sales.
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VF now does more than half of its business with its 20 top retail partners, Rogers said.
Federated Department Stores, capturing 10 percent of the apparel dollars spent in the U.S., according to one presentation, epitomizes the consolidated retailer. Thomas Cole, vice chairman of Federated, gave vendors a piece of advice: “Speed wins.”
“Why aren’t we all better than this?” Cole asked. “Consolidation will only make the need for speed greater. Those who can keep up will survive.”
Cole called slow speed-to-market time “one of the great tragedies of our business.”
Federated, which supplies 20 percent of its own business through private labels, is the worst culprit of long lag times, but its goal is to shrink private label speed to market so that buyers can see vendor’s offerings before making its own orders, he said.