Troubles of running a backpack company: Sourcing in Mexico and more!

Transcript:

JARED WARD: Hey guys, Jared here, CEO and founder of Luminous. This is the Ops Unfiltered podcast. I started Ops Unfiltered because I know what it feels like to be in operations in e-commerce. You're handling every single part of the business. It's easy to feel siloed in. It's easy to feel like you have to find a solution for everything. I hope that by bringing raw conversations from other operators in e-commerce, That you can extract some value and not feel alone. Many of the operations leaders in e-commerce are running into the same problems that you're running into. So I hope that maybe their solutions can be your solutions. Maybe you can feel not so alone in the warehouse, in purchasing in your supply chain. So that's my hope. I hope this can be valuable for all of you. Let's dive in to have some raw conversations. 

EMERSON HAMMER: US operators are a unique breed for sure. There's a sense of pride in your work. I think being in operations we're like, you are a creative person. You want to find a solution. What kept your head down when you were at Nomadic, the control issue is huge and trust, like I am the most trusting, untrusting person at the same time.

JARED WARD: The evolution of Nomadic with Emerson at the helm, where you're keeping everything in house. It's gotta be 10 times more complicated. 

EMERSON HAMMER: It's complicated. I hear on LinkedIn. Someone talked about that day about being an entrepreneur. I'm very entrepreneurial. So I think part of it too is, I'll throw them under the bus too, we had Black Friday launched three weeks early one year and they didn't tell me until the day of the day before day up.

JARED WARD: If you could go back in time, would you do anything different? 

EMERSON HAMMER: The issue that I would have had is…

JARED WARD: I have Emerson Hammer. I'm excited to be here, it's gonna be fun, woo! It's gonna be messy. 

EMERSON HAMMER: What's up man? 

JARED WARD: Let's take off the filter. Let's get a little bit messy. so I'll just do a super quick intro. Let me know if I missed anything. So Emerson, his background, he was the director of supply chain at Nomadic, which is a really big, well known brand here in Utah. We're going to dive into a lot of operations there. And currently he is the director of partnerships at Corso. So, let me know if I'm missing any more qualifications or context, but honestly, being the supply chain director of Nomadic from the early days all the way until July of 2022, that's awesome. Bye. Bye. That's you saw it all i'm sure so 

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, it's fun. It's messy. It's diverse for sure. So yeah, I'd love to dive into that and talk about the growing pains and everything goes in from kickstarters to launch to shopify to the whole kitten caboodle 

JARED WARD: Exactly. So, what I'm most interested in, but before we dive into your experience at nomadic and the evolution of the business and the issues you ran into, I wanted to first discuss just to open things up. You and I both currently we're in similar spaces. Like we're trying to sell to the same audience. and I think we have a shared belief, which is e-commerce ops leaders, they're too busy to consume content like marketers or basically other people within the organization. And therefore they're harder to reach, it's harder to get a message that resonates with ops people because they're in a spreadsheet or they're in the warehouse or they're so damn busy. Like they're actually doing shit all day. Whereas marketers or people who control spin for other parts of the organization,

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, I don't know, you said it best. They're high level strategists who spend their time researching other tools and defenders.

JARED WARD:  What are your thoughts on that? Like, why do you think people are lurking in the shadows for ops? 

EMERSON HAMMER: I think US operators are a unique breed for sure. Being in two sides of the business, like being an operator in it, there's a sense of pride in your work. I think being in operations where you are a creative person, you want to find a solution. And usually you have some type of creativity where you have a unique solution that you want to develop that solution for it. You try to create it in house internally, but you may not understand there's already a solution out there. So I think a lot of times we try to reinvent the wheel for our unique situation in quotes. When most of the other brand have experienced it, but in operations, we are very heads down, very, we think Excel can fix everything. So if I just create an amazing Excel sheet, it will fix it. but tech has evolutionized so much in the past 5-10 years that there probably is a solution out there. But a lot of brands either are on legacy softwares, and they're used to legacy software saying you can't do that. Or that's not how we operate. And so they try to create their own solution within a legacy software. So I think that's part of it. The other thing too, is you are putting up fires the whole time and you're tired of sales guys talking to you. Every sales guy says, Hey, I can get you better rates. Hey, my system will improve your process. If you've done an ERP process in Europe, you should fix everything. If you customize it to your way. so whatever that solution is, usually there's some constraint. And so I've been sold so much junk, I guess on the sales side, you don't trust the sales process in general. And so you try to do it yourself. and as I've been able to have my head up the past, like a year or so, changing roles and being actually like identifying, like you said, now I'm at the course of director of partnerships. And I understand there's so much value through partnering, not just on a business to business transaction, you think of like lead sales generation, whatever, actually partnering with softwares or with other agencies to help your supply chain definitely is possible. And usually on ops, we're looking for cost reduction on stuff. But when you bring in a new sales platform, it's going to cost you a couple of hundred bucks, a thousand bucks a month to implement this. But you don't look at the cost for me to spend hundreds of hours to develop a new spreadsheet or whatever it is. Whatever the process is customized that opportunity cost versus the cost of an existing software that could solve that problem so maybe probably go down rabbit holes in each different type of situation But i've been so impressed actually of where the market is with supply chain technology that I didn't realize before But now that I have my head up and see a little bit more like oh, there are some solutions out there that really make sense I just said I don't know about because your head's down as an operator or you're, I don't want to say too prideful cause you want to solve the solution, but I think that happens a lot in the industry. 

JARED WARD:  Yeah. Okay. So you, hit on some major things that I want to dive into. So there's a couple of themes of what you just talked about operators. And I, you, first off, you and I both have background as operators of direct to consumer companies. So like everything you're saying is hitting, I've been there. So a couple of things, keeping control. Keeping your head down, mistrust of salespeople, and then like an intersection between technology and processes. So let's dive into one of these first. Why do you think as operators we keep our heads down? I personally think it's because of control. Like you, you want to be the one to control. Like you want to be the one to have, I solve this problem instead of you said, getting your head up and being like, but wait, this company could handle this whole part of the supply chain, or maybe we could do a three pill or maybe what keeps your head down? What kept your head down when you were at Nomadic?

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah. I think it's part of an innate, just like a feature of us and ops, honestly, of the control issue is huge. and trust, like I am the most trusting, untrusting person at the same time. and stuff, because I think if you work with it, if in the supply chain, nothing is stable, like as much as you want to believe that way, as a process oriented person, you think everything is robotic and so it's I'm going to get an order off of my marketplace. It's going to go down into my OMS. It's going to go into the WMS. They're going to pick, pack and ship. It's going to go out in two hours. And you think that's how it's going to happen, but that API doesn't work there. This doesn't happen here. Whatever isn't connecting. And that process, not that worse than that for two weeks. And you're like, Matt, the warehouse, Hey, why isn't that ship? Oh, we thought we shipped it. We did it, whatever. And then you get misplaced trust, throughout that process. So I think in general, it's based on previous experiences. Hey, this is how something's supposed to work, but something out of my control broke that system. So if I haven't designed that process, if I build something, I can fix it. Cause I built it. But when there's someone else I have to trust and they break it and I don't get that right, or like using a freight forwarder and Hey, this is going to get picked up here, it's going to get delivered to this date. And then COVID happens or whatever, your container gets rolled. You don't trust that aspect. And I mean, I think in every aspect in my career in supply chain, I've always maybe either tried to work with a partner to resolve it and feel like I got hit a hill, a wall at some point, or I get promised by another vendor, Hey, I can fix that issue for you. I go to them and then maybe it's just fighting a different battle now, a different aspect that my previous vendor didn't have that issue. And so I was just like, Hey, if I can bring as much in house as possible, that's more control for me, but that is more overhead. There's more experience you have to have. You can't do as much. So you become a generalist instead of a specialist in that area. 

JARED WARD: Yeah. 

EMERSON HAMMER: So it really is either hiring the right people, but also hiring the right people. You hire people and you're like, Hey, can you do this job? And you think they're going to do X, Y, and Z. Maybe I'm just, in my experience, bad at hiring. And I'm like, they need more training than I expected. Or that's not your right fit. You have the right culture fit or whatever it is. So it's really hard to trust in people when maybe you have such a grand vision of what a supply chain should be. I remember getting into the supply chain. I was like, dude, we're just going to, we're shipping. Like when I started Nomadic, we started with wallets, like the smallest product possible. I mean, it was the best, I wish Nomadic state of wallet as far as operations, cause it's so small, so lightweight, easy to ship, low cost. You can do anything with it, it's a great product to start off with, honestly. Cause it's so, so easy with minimal SKUs. I love that phase of the business. but as you scale and things change, you gotta diversify. You have to, it gets a bit more complex. But I remember this thing, like a wallet, like how hard is it? You just put a label on a wallet on a package and you ship it and it gets there, right? Every time. And it doesn't, we're using the wrong carrier on this. Oh, this carrier doesn't have tracking on it. Whatever the solution is. So it's like even shipping a simple wallet and when you're doing it from your home, shipping maybe 10, 20 wallets a day. Cool. Great. We ship it a hundred, you're shipping a thousand a day. It's oh, those small issues that maybe weren't an issue at small scale now augmented to being 1 percent of a thousand orders a day. You have a hundred orders going wrong. Something's wrong with that. You know, or 10 words, whatever it is like you have, issues that augment and as you scale up through that process, you know, 

JARED WARD:  Oh yeah. No, we're definitely going to dive into that. Like as, things change in the business, as things grow and like when software breaks from processes break, but there's something I want to dive into is I, something I find fascinating is cause I just had Mitch, from Thread and it's so interesting. There's, it seems like Nomadic and Thread went like two separate paths and two companies that came up like very different points. And I think you can, we can learn from this. so Emerson took it from what I know you took the route of okay, I want to keep everything as much as possible in house. I want to control as much of these variables as possible. Mitch from the beginning was just like shift for, For all of my supply chain and you're just basically giving POs to them and like immediately they outsource to a 3PL and what's the difference between a thread wallets who they, gave all of that control of their supply chain and purchasing and on the 3PL and fulfillment and the evolution of Nomadic with Emerson at the helm where you're keeping everything in house, like it's gotta be 10 times more complicated.

EMERSON HAMMER: It's complicated. I think I can't remember on LinkedIn. Someone talked about that day about being an intrapreneur, I'm very entrepreneurial based in general. so I think part of it too is that creative solution. And for me, I felt like I had unique solutions to offer. And a lot of the stuff we did, I think kind of going back to is we've had some very innovative solutions I was able to try out. So I think part of it too, is like the founding team at Nomadic, John and Jacob, are amazing. And they were very trusting with me. And a lot of the aspect of beginning of those Nomadic days was, can we spin up a lot of businesses based on pain points that we're growing this business? So at one point they want to start our own 3PL. So I was like, cool, if I can dive into that, we want to be our own 3PL. Alpha Nomadic spurred off of a marketing company. We were working on something like an Amazon company. So at the beginning of. The culture at nomadic, I think it was very entrepreneurial and seeing like from one business, how many businesses can we start off of? So I think that kind of let me diversify and dive into it. And John Jacob Foster, very much an entrepreneur of spirit within Nomadic. A lot of people at Nomadic had a lot of side gigs, have their own businesses, their own agencies. And I think maybe how that also operates. Of the control aspect at Nomadic. We had issues of being burned a lot. I feel like as of this we weren't betting properly at the beginning phase of it. I joined pneumatic when I was still in college so this is my first job out of school. I was trying to learn so much. I had plenty of mistakes I've made. In my career, I think every operations guy is oh We save money. We also waste a lot of money and we're shenanigans. We're trying to save money, I think. but, yeah, there were some from suppliers where I was like, I can't trust a third party doing QC. I can't trust a third party doing certain aspects. And for us, it's like we had shipments getting lost. Our first Kickstarter campaign was shipped directly from China using China post, and I think it was like 30, 40 percent of the wallets got lost in transit. And we're like, Oh frick. We didn't have enough touch points on that. and then we had issues. So we went to another 3PL on the 2PL one bankrupt in the middle of us being with them. I'm like, okay, this is like getting out of hand. Like all of our experiences about sourcing aren't going so well. And so it's like, how can we control that? So the more control we have, can we do it? And we scaled pretty fast at Nomadic where it was like, okay, what's the cost for us to bring the operation in house and customize it for us? That it pays for itself. I mean, we outsource where we, where it makes sense for sure. But a lot of the time I was like, how can we get more control? Because of various reasons, of trust or just nuances. When part of that too, could be partnering with the right facility for your brand. I'm talking about my 3PLS. There's more supply. I was about a 3PL, but as far as warehousing, but, as a specific user, part of that. As specific as they can be in your niche. What I mean by that is like Using a warehouse that maybe focuses just on apparel if you're an apparel brand focus on 3PL that does maybe larger products for shipping larger product, products, but probably a better fit for you using freight forwarders that are custom to shipping your type of textile so they can do the hs classifications and whatnot on your, product, usually, I mean, most businesses will say they can do whatever they can to get your business. We use some factories. I like, yeah, there's seamstresses, but the type of material we're using, maybe they weren't the best suited for manufacturing products at that time, you know? so stuff like that, that you kind of want to be able to keep in check and align with, but in general, it's like, Hey, you feel you get screwed over a couple of times. Hey. Can't trust it. I gotta bring it in house and see what I can do. 

JARED WARD:  There's so many operations and to your point before it's like why would somebody build a custom in house solution? Like I know so many brands who tried to build their own systems or they built their own oms or like They don't understand the complexity that they're introducing, like you're all of a sudden becoming a product manager now and you don't understand the cost. But it comes from this idea that I think you're hitting on, which is salespeople of supply chain tools and supply chain vendors. or supply service providers, they act like they can control the outcome and you're sold on the ability to control the outcome. But as you and I know, you can't, which leads to, this innate mistrust of anything you're buying into, even to the level of, ERPs. It's like an ERP is supposed to solve all of your issues, but no, it doesn't, and it's actually, there's what's really interesting is there's an intersection between. Software and processes and, you know, proper sourcing of service providers, that's with an understanding that you can't control your outcomes and supply chain. I think that's, that would be like the advice that I would have. What advice would you give to Emerson or to operators who are, you know, first year at nomadic, like that scrappy phase, you're about to explode, or maybe they're exploding. What's the advice that you would give them?

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, I think part of it too is, everything is going to have, when you get, when you work with a partner, there's still work to be had on your part. I think a lot of times it was like, Hey, we are going to do this outcome. And I expect that to happen. But I thought I was like, Hey, I'm relieving this whole aspect of the business, but didn't realize I still had to manage that. So even if you're using like a freight forwarder or you're using this SAS provider to do X, Y, and this OMS to do something, I saw, I'm still responsible for getting accurate data into here. And if I have a unique process, that's going to filter into this OMS or whatever the software is. I need to make sure that data is clean coming into it. Instead of it's Hey, they said they can do it. Let me just plug and play it. But I don't know how to troubleshoot it or communicate that. And I am also in a scrappy mode, we're trying to cut costs. To be honest, maybe I was a bit aggressive about it. I pride myself on being able to hustle the sale of getting like the best deal. Like I'm definitely like a bargain shopper. And so if there ever was something wrong, I'm like, Hey, I need an X amount discount or I needed something like cost was my number one attribute. My KPI was always cost based instead of like resolution. So I'm like, Hey, this may not have all the features, but it's 10 percent cheaper than this other software. I'm gonna go with the cheaper one because it is easier to pitch the team. I'm saying like this one is a thousand dollars a month. This one's 500. Let's go with the 500 one, but it didn't actually solve the full pain point. It may be something. So I think to myself, being scrappy and being budget aware, maybe, or oversensitive maybe to it of being like, Hey, this guy gave me the most wiggle room on it, or I feel like I got a good deal on it. And so maybe that was just more of my mentality on it, which. helped in some areas and hurt us in other areas. 

JARED WARD:  So there's two things that I'm hearing from you. Like it's number one has been like, in hindsight, you would keep your head up. Like there, there's people out there solving your issues. That's it. There's solutions to your problems that you're running into if you poke your head out for a little bit, and then maybe a second one is, don't be so budget conscious, like it's, okay. 

EMERSON HAMMER: It's okay. If something costs like 500 more a month, if it's going to, if it's going to solve your problems, like pencils out for sure.

JARED WARD:  Okay, let's start diving in a little bit to the evolution of Nomadic. So something at Luminous that we're really curious about is the actual evolution of an e-commerce company and specifically a multi-channel e-commerce company. So the way I digest the evolution of a brand is there's certain complexity markers, right? And with each complexity marker, it adds a new layer of processes or software underneath it that needs to be filled. So with nomadic, what I know about nomadic, it's, it sounds like you guys started out really basic. you were just, you're just selling wallets. Everything was good, sure. There are probably some issues here and there. What was the first complexity marker that introduced massive issues? Was it when you guys tried to order out or like when you like let's get west coast and east coast coverage or was it your decision to go to your first 3PL like what was the first thing where something broke?

EMERSON HAMMER: First thing that was kind of interesting was So yeah, we start off with the wallet That was one thing and it honestly was product size that kind of introduced a new variable to us So we went from a wallet and then shortly after we went to a notebook And then we went to a bag so then we have a backpack slash luggage So as our products got bigger the complexity of shipping changed significantly for us and what products What they were doing how they're manufactured and whatnot. So I think the first thing was size and then scalability like We start on kickstarter. So we have pretty high volume from the get go of where I think our first campaign on wallets was something around like 10 to 20, 000 wallets, something like that we had. And then our next campaign was like 20, 000 on our notebooks. And then we had like thousands of our bags. So we had a high volume. 

JARED WARD: At that time, walk us through what was, what were the ops like? Did you guys have a warehouse, just one warehouse in Utah? How many warehouse employees did you have? Were you just chilling in the warehouse all day fulfilling or what was going on during that time?

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah. So first one we had, what wallet was, we had a China post from China direct. And we were like, Hey, this isn't going to work. Then we went to a 3PL. After six months being with them, they went bankrupt and closed. So we had to find a new warehouse quickly and found another 3PL local in Salt Lake, and tried to work with them. So we went to that 3PL, which was down the road. So I was there occasionally, probably doing monthly check-ins with the warehouse. at that time, and probably when we were at the between the notebook to the backpack phase, I was probably around, to be honest, at that point, I was like, 50 percent ops, 50 percent doing other shenanigans, honestly, at that time, we were trying to start some stuff with Amazon and do some more discovery, and I was trying to promote our retail business at the same time. We were probably doing, I don't think we were doing a million dollars in business that year, at that point in time. and so we were still relatively small. When we were at the notebook phase, we're probably under a million dollars a year in revenue and it was the two founders, co-founders, John Jacob, me and another college buddy, that ended up working there as well, where the main employees there, four people total in the company. and yeah, so we're really, I was really focused on cutting costs. We were trying to streamline processes. I was mainly overseeing production PO placements. And then the operation. But that's my very, I was very trusting at that point though. I was like, this is a 3PL. If something happened to 3PL, it's on them. It's not on me. I didn't really take that ownership at that point. I'd say my career where I was like, Hey, you guys, you botched it, fixed it. I just sent a customer service email. And if I wasn't really trying to be as involved with it, I also was overseeing customer service. I was customer service at the time too. So again, multiple hats of everything. So it was more like keeping things moving. It wasn't as process oriented or trying to fix things as much as it. Emails are coming in. I need to fix the problem just to get this one customer order out. Once we got to like the level of having our bags come out, we were bigger products, a higher AOV. I mean, this is a 20 product. Our bags at that time were around 200 bucks. I think they're a little under 200 bucks that time. So I was like, Hey, that's a huge price point. Different. There's a different customer service. Experience to that, at that price point. and how I handle those customer interactions. I have to be more proactive than just saying these shipments aren't going out on time. Oh, we're paying a lot for shipping. How do I, didn't even realize you can negotiate shipping rates. I didn't know I could really negotiate warehouse rates. You know, they said they just went out. Basically, when we vetted warehouses, I didn't negotiate at all. I was just like, what's your price? Okay, cool. That's too high next. And just went over like their standard pricing. I didn't really dive into it. Okay, this is our product. This is our complexity. This is what we can have them skew count. I didn't really dive into all the complexities at that point. Probably once we got to like the 5 million in revenue. 

JARED WARD: Do you just chalk that up to an experience at that time? 

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah. Just I didn't know what I didn't know. Also it was really funny because in college I studied supply chain like in college and all my spreadsheets, like you got great on how accurate your forecast were and in the business core. And I'm like, Oh my, my forecast is 99 percent accurate. And then I get in the real world and I'm like, my forecast is 99 percent accurate. Like significantly, there's so many in a closed environment, you know, there's no external factors. It's Hey, you spend 10, you're going to get 50 bucks. There's none of that in college forecasting skills. And the KPIs that we did in college were way different. So I thought I knew everything on that side, but on the small startup e com business, there's more, so many things to look at. I said, no, what I didn't know at the time. 

JARED WARD:Yeah. Okay. So at that time, let's say 3PL went out of business. It closed down. and did you guys find a new one or did you take everything else? 

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, we found another one. So we've been primarily 3PL leveraged. Mostly, we always have a 3PL. it's got it.

JARED WARD: Okay. So walk me through your tech stack at this time. So we have a good idea. Two founders. You may be another guy. You're scrappy. It's two million in revenue. you're just, you're inexperienced. You're not negotiating shit, but like it's, but you're keeping things together. Like you're the guy being reactive to everything in the beginning. So what was your tech stack at that time? Like, how are you organizing everything? Yeah. So what was your order management system? Like, how did you get data from the 3PL? How are you guys doing purchasing? How were you running the forecast?

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, we did so Shopify to our warehouse 3PL. So we only had one 3PL out of Salt Lake. Everything went out of there. so we just use their, just their connection through their OMS to their, our 3PL there. and what do they use as an OMS? I can't remember what it's called at the time. What was that called at the time? Let me figure it out. Yeah, I can't remember the name of it. but it was legacy. It was, it was super old. Yeah. so we use that. And then we used, we didn't have ShipStation at the time because we use a 3PL for everything, so I did have to go either. We had a couple, we had some stuff and where, and like a small back office in our office that we had a couple of things, inventory. So whenever I was emailing the warehouse saying Hey, I need to use this to ship out or whatever. I would just go to our little storage bin and ship a customer, a product that prints a label off of Shopify. And then other tech stack we had at that point, our freight provider doesn't even have a TMS. So this email coordinated for freight and inbound shipments, PO placement was done through QuickBooks. And then forecasting was all in Excel. and that was our full and then our customer service was help scout was our whole tech stack 

JARED WARD: Yeah, sounds like a pretty standard e-commerce tech stack. So what I say about e-commerce companies early on and operators early on is you do not introduce any friction. And even in brands that do fulfillment like a lot of times. It's what breaks their fulfillment process when they go omni channel like so they're just zero friction. It's like order comes in through Shopify. I print off a label, slap it on a box, take it from my like put Pull from a shelf slap in the box up on the label and ship it out. Like frictionless. same with forecasting that you're describing. Now, at some point, you have to start introducing a little bit of friction, like some processes like when you talked before about when you're exploring, you're an ex, you're exploring, you're in an exploration mode with Amazon and then also retail. So explain how that works. Sort of grew your complexity and your first milestone where you're like, Oh, shoot, we get, we got to change some processes or we, we need some software to manage this. What broke that? 

EMERSON HAMMER:  I think part of it was we got caught up and I post a lot on LinkedIn about brands wanting to do multi fulfillment, multi location fulfillment. So for us from going from, I mean, shipping a notebook, it's like at that time we were paying, I don't know, we were using USPS prior or whatever. And I was like, Four bucks to ship it almost anywhere in the u. s. Like it was dirt cheap and we do some ship methods and we were just going for as low a cost as we could on stuff. And that was fine. Once we started shipping our bags and our bags, like they're a bigger product. I mean, these things are like 15 to 20 bucks to ship somewhere. And I was like, Hey, I got to get this closer to our customers. We want to get to them faster, I need to get to them cheaper. So we then transitioned away from our Salt Lake facility and went to Ingram micro and they have warehouses all over the place. And that was kind of the sexy point in that, or it's you know, all these warehouses get access to them. All this stuff is going to reduce your customer, like leap, your lead time to get the customer to ship times, reduce costs because you're closer to them. But I didn't take any consideration. You open more warehouses, there's more inventory you have to have, especially when you have more SKUs. So if you're doing multi fulfillment, multi location fulfillment, it's great for low SKU count. And at the time nomadic still had a low SKU count. We probably had 10, 15. 

JARED WARD: And you guys didn't have an inventory management system at that time. And you didn't even have an OMS. So it's like this concept of Oh, I have to actually keep track of inventory for two locations. And there's a concept of replenishment now that was introduced to the business that you probably weren't even thinking of and now order routing. 

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah. Which was interesting at a time because. In our mind, the data our warehouse gave us was accurate. So I never, at that point in my career, I didn't question what the PO I placed with the factory, I'm like, they're not going to mess it up. They're always going to send the right amounts when the warehouse receives that they're always going to receive what my PO was. And then once it's in the warehouse, the inventory that my warehouse always reports is always going to be accurate. And so I never like fact checking. And so once I was Oh, I, it got to a point though, where things started getting more complicated when I was like, I'm pretty sure I ordered like 5, 000 units of that, but it says, and I'm like, until I started okay, I got to build these spreadsheets. And so then it became. Dude, it was nuts. We had a full on almost a whole ERP built on sheets at one point It was like it's so common It was like we had sheets inside sheets Linking in doing import forms like everything to keep track of this is the data. We're putting in 

JARED WARD: Why google sheets? Why do you think operators use sheets in excel so much? Like it's actually a question that we're really curious for the Luminous 

EMERSON HAMMER:  Because you can control it. Like I think most operators know Excel. It's shareable. It's pretty easy to interact with for us in particular. Yeah, exactly. This process isn't working. Let me quickly change it. Instead of rewrite a whole code base or feature base or wait for a developer to do something. it's really nice, but it gets clunky once it gets so big for sure. But I mean, we were a database and everything in there from all the skews, the serial numbers to UPCs, to a whole product catalog, read everything in it, but also it was really interesting how our vendors worked was they worked off of basically POs through Google sheets. And so it was kind of interesting just how, when we purchased from our manufacturer, they tracked everything in Google sheets so we could track everything from that point. And we tried to get them on different systems and processes. They are sheets. That's all they did. That's all that works. I was like, Hey, we can base stuff off of that and build it across. But once I kind of, at that point, as far as the trust issue of things, once that kind of popped in, I was like, our inventory looks way off, either we have too much or too little and didn't realize, even though we use a 3PL who had an old mess and a WMS. To be honest, until a few years ago, honestly, probably three or four years ago, I didn't realize an OMS and WMS were different. I thought like ship station was almost like a WMS like, Oh, ship station is a WMS. Definitely not. and so when I saw the OMS side of our 3PL, I was like, what I see here is what is their scene, but they're like, Oh, our data between our WMS actually isn't the same in our OMS. They're like, they knew there was a break between there. So I saw 500 units, they saw 50 units in stock. So I'm seeing on my side, Hey, I have inventory ship it. They're saying you're out of stock. And I'm like over here, it says Oh, well that's wrong. I'm like, well, you're telling me there's 500 and you're saying I'm out of stock. Because the OMS and the WMS inventory weren't lined up. 

JARED WARD: Isn't that so fascinating right there though? you were experienced ops at this point. Nomadic was made, what, maybe like 3 to 5 million in revenue or something. You'd been shopping for a long time. You have launched SKUs. And you didn't even know the difference between WMS and OMS. Like that. That's common, and it's, again, it's because ops people have their head in the sand. And I  think that's so interesting because even for me, it's why so many ops people don't. They're unable to find solutions to their problems because they won't put their head out of the sand long enough to even understand the technology market and like what things are called like, oh, this is an IMS and an OMS and an ERP and like what. What problems am I running into right now? And what are even the solutions I can look for? And it's also a reason why I feel like it. People end up taking on an ERP like they go from Google Sheets to NetSuite or Google Sheets to like Acumatica, it's again a symptom of this. It's really interesting.

EMERSON HAMMER:  No, what's crazy about it? I mean, there's obviously so during kind of a fast for a little bit more. It's always been interesting to Network with other operations people when they will come out of their shell. I'd say operations in general I started a couple years ago when I was in utah a supply chain networking group and it was super fun, super awesome, and it became like event sesh during covet where I said a bunch of dudes come together of supply chain ops And we just talked what the pain points we were going through and it was good. It was honestly I got a lot because it's more like a therapy group where i'm like, dude, this container is not moving This vendor screw me over What are you guys doing to get stuff out of vietnam right now during covid and the pandemics there or whatever it was like I think probably 2019. I started a group meeting on a monthly basis And it was super helpful. But at the same time, it was really hard to get ops guys even into an event like that. It was like, it's not sponsored. It was when I was at Nomadic, it was like only brands talking about their supply chain issues. But it's still as hard to get ops guys there, which to me, it felt very value driven, to get them out of the warehouse, get them out of their spreadsheets, to get them out from behind the desk. Cause it's not very common. I think we're marketing in other industries. It's very much relationship based. It's very much. very networking and stuff like that and operations. It's very much like a badge of courage of how long you're working, how hard you're working and stuff like that. I feel where it's dude, we're solving problems left and right. I don't have time to socialize or do this other stuff. Like I have to fix this problem. I'm the only one that can do it. I think it's semi a badge of courage, like a badge of honor if I'm the only one who can do this. So I have to stay behind. I have to sacrifice at least how I felt a lot, honestly. because it's hard for me at the same point to like a delegate where it's a blessing and a curse. I remember multiple times, like I was out, I took a day off and I felt so, I, it almost sucked to take a day off of work because I knew there'd be more work for me to do. It's not Oh, Emerson's out of the office, someone else will take care of it. And a small startup team, there's not some, you don't have a back, like someone behind you can't automate a lot of. The stuff I did not do to a degree. so I feel you know, I remember I went skiing one day and I had to miss half my ski day. Cause something happened, I can't remember what software was, but we couldn't get orders out. And so I was like in the lodge on my phone, trying to fix it. When I'm like, dude, I'm on vacation right now. This sucks. That's just, I think that's what ops guys are like you stop whatever you're doing in your personal life and your professional life to put the fire out and that's what ops do.

JARED WARD: So even in that environment where it's specifically e-commerce, because e-commerce is so reactive. It's like the Shopify order kit, like the expectation, you're always competing with the expectation of Amazon. And if you're running a brand like nomadic. It's dude, if you're Shopify API to the OMS, if your 3PL is broken, you're kind of like the only guy that's going to dive in and fix it and you're going to have hundreds of angry customers.

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, it's interesting. The other thing too, is yeah, seeing the customer reaction time and what they're expecting. And so for that as well, we want to be able to portray accurate delivery times, but also when carriers aren't delivering on time. I can only do so much when FedEx is not delivering. And also at the same time we had issues as well. I was like, I don't understand it took me a while to realize our warehouse is shipping orders out on time. They're creating labels on time. They're not actually shipping it out. And so we had issues with even those, they might understand this is a KPI you can track. So once they realized I was tracking, like our orders are going out late, we had one of our warehouses just print the labels in time, but it would still take a day or two to actually ship them out. And so we're marketing like, Hey, this package we deliver by Friday and it's getting there Tuesday or Wednesday. And I'm like, dude, we printed a label on time. Is FedEx taking forever to deliver to UPS or whatever? And it's no, that was in the warehouse for three days. And then we had a lot of miss shipments because part of it too, is just like partners scaling up or doing whatever we're supposed to do, whatever wasn't happening, then they would batch print the labels, but then they weren't picking the orders with it. So then labels get crossed. So customer A would get customer B's order because of that one thing goes onto another, blah, blah, whatever it is. and it's a chain effect. So I, you, I, if things are quiet and ops, I was more concerned. I was like, something's happening. If someone's not, if someone's not breaking right now, almost, it's like too good to be true. I'm like, let's figure out what's going on. 

JARED WARD: So going back to your, the group of operators. Was that a changing point in your operations career? Did that help get your head out of the sand a little bit where you're like, wow, like there's other people. Wow. Oh, he's doing it this way. Or like this person does in house film and they use this software. Did it lead to that? Or was it just more of a therapy session? 

EMERSON HAMMER:  It was really therapeutic more than anything. As far as I felt validated that I wasn't the only one going through this. Cause at the same time, I mean. Again, no Mac, John Jacob are awesome. Like they were so good to me as far as letting me do shenanigans. Like we tried a lot of unique processes there that I love. Some of them worked really well and some of them did not work very well. but it was great to feed my creativity of finding unique solutions. And at the same time, it was great to go to these other operators. And at the same time, I kind of wanted to be able to go back to the board and say Hey, team, we're not the only ones experiencing this. We're like, Emerson, why can't we get these delivered on time? And I'm like, I'm trying my best. I don't know why. And I'm like, Oh, this other brand is doing the same thing. They can't get it out. at the same, rate or this other warehouse, our 3PL is doing the same process. We're not alone in these pain points, at least. So that was helpful. I mean, it got crazy at some point during COVID, we all looked into should we charter a full on 747 and share the cost to fly from Vietnam to Salt Lake? And we're like, we're with competitors, dude, the team over at WANDRD, love those guys. They are awesome. they're competitive, like we both make bags, right? We're both in similar spaces. And we, they were part of me, they're part of my networking group. Routinely talk about supply chain issues and be like, Hey dude, like this is causing an issue. I'm like, should we share a flight together? Do you think we could save money? So you looked so cool. So that was cool. I became a huge component over, collaboration over competition and just saying Hey, like we can collab with other brands, see what they're doing, see what we can network with to get better rates, work better angles and stuff like that. One of the things we did pretty decent on is, shared, shipping rates and stuff like that. Like we basically partnered brands fulfilling from the same location. And we're able to compile data of this is the, this is the volume we're pushing out that gives us better rates because we are. Like a shared ship account almost. so we're able to like collab in areas like that to get us better rates, looking better on different stuff like that. So we were able to do some unique strategies because of that. I mean, that's some of the great creativity. We were able to kind of employ at Nomadic of, leveraging the Utah community, the supply chain community.

When I was able to network with them, it's hard to connect with them 

JARED WARD: We, dude, we need to seriously, we need to build a supply chain community that gets ops people outta their shells. yeah, I feel like we could do it. And it's, there's so much value in it. Especially like, nobody's selling you anything like, like that. There has to be a safe space for that. Yeah, nobody's gonna try to sell you anything. even though it's sponsored by some, like just. Come here talk vent get your shit out Like we can help you we can help you get your head like we've been there You can get your head out of the sand and there are solutions From operators who are not trying to sell you like oh, dude. Have you tried this or have you tried? This automation on chip stage, or did you know that you could pull in your data here? okay. So something that I really want to get into in this podcast is, so, okay, back to the evolution of Nomadic, you know, million dollars in revenue. you guys just start out with wallets. You start expanding SKUs. You got, 3PL goes out of business. You, you get another 3PL, you start expanding to Amazon and to retail sales. You're at 5 million. Things start breaking in COVID. So up until. Up until, it's probably like 2020, 2021, you never really looked at software for the solutions of your problems. Everything was like on Google sheets, OMS, like really basic software, but it was mainly like, I, I'm the solution to these problems I've been burned in the past now. Walk me through the jump to an ERP. You guys jumped to an ERP in 2020. This is very common. What, what was going on? What caused this? There's so much talk about first off, what was going on in the business, what caused you to think Man, we need an ERP. And then also let's start diving into the research process. How did you even start researching? 

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, we kind of heard, we had, some other brands that jumped to an ERP. I think Wander jumped to an ERP when they're relatively small. on stuff. So I heard Hey, they're using that suite. It seems like it's going well. They had some issues, but it seems like they jumped early and it seems like the evolution of a brand is you do go to an ERP and if you can do it sooner, you can build your processes around that. So in 2020, we started looking at your piece and I just couldn't justify the cost of it. So I legit, like me and my ops team at that point, we had probably two or three guys in ops with me who had like a freight manager, like a freight coordinator, and then another like inventory manager, and then me on my team. And then we had our outsourced 3PL and stuff like that. So at that point, Russell and I were my inventory manager at the time. We're on calls with NetSuite, Sage, Bright Pearl, all these ERPs. And they'd be like, it was like a six week sales cycle of doing three or four hour calls. Multiple times. So we bring popcorn to the office and just Hey, what's going on? You're so bored, dude. Those are the worst calls ever. There's so long. So, so much discovery. 

JARED WARD: This is so interesting. first off, why the need to jump straight to an ERP? Like the evolution of some brands, it's very natural. And you know, like they build from an OMS to an IMS. To you know, slow, they slowly get there kind of like Thread. Also, I interviewed Mitch last week. what about Nomadic? what made you feel like, okay, we need to make this jump. Yeah. Was it just simply because Wander was a one 

EMERSON HAMMER: Oh, Wander's using that suite, seems to be good or no specific thing 

is breaking. Yeah, stuff was breaking for sure. So before we went, we didn't go to an ERP until 2020. So in 2020, we started to surge. And what we did first was we had, again, we started going to AmiChannel. So we had an Amazon FBA. We did FBM for a little bit. We were having a hard time keeping inventory in stock on FBA due to size requirements. So we have big bulky products, like bags and luggage, and we can only keep five or 10 units in stock, but we're selling like five, 10 units a day almost at times, on those SKUs. And so it was like, we had to do FBM and FBA at the same time. We had to get inventory out to our, three from our 3PL out and whatnot. We had a very unique supply chain. So again, one of the blessings and curses of being a Nomadic, they gave me a lot of creativity. So kind of backtracking a little bit before we did our whole search. When we were at Ingram Micro, they had a great OMS and their OMS is beautiful. I like that, that if it's great, I wish it worked a hundred percent the way it was supposed to. Again, like we had issues like inventory matching up and some other things like not always collaborating correctly in that platform. but we moved away from them to take advantage of it. call it three twin de minimis programs, which lets you import orders from outside the U S into the U S under 800 or less come in duty free. So what Nomadic started doing, which was a fun project, we started with a warehouse down in Mexico that we switched through PLS because. Products from Vietnam in our industry have a 17 up to a 20% tariff on tariff. And so we need to reduce that on the bags we're making. Those are, that's a couple of dollars on, just import fees. And hey, if we can eliminate that by warehousing in Mexico and, it's called a free trade zone. We partnered with a free deal down there and moved inventory. So we left Ingram micro. We had two warehouses. We were out, 

JARED WARD: How did you figure out about that, by the way? 

EMERSON HAMMER:  Honestly, we got an inbound email from them. So they cycled in and again, my ears perked when I like, save money in a unique way. I'm like, I haven't pitched that before. Like I've been pitched, like I'll cut your rates by 10 percent or whatever. right. Yeah. At least y'all will save you money because we're efficient or whatever. Like I hear that pitch all the time, but that was interesting to me. So I talked to him, flew down to Mexico. It was amazing. and it worked, right? Yeah. It's legal. It works. It's amazing. Cause what you're doing is you're warehousing a free trade zone. And so you have a truckload, let's use round numbers. say you have a thousand orders a day that are going out. The warehouse in Mexico is a free trade. I'm using the right, it's a macro, but I'm gonna call it a free trade zone, an FTZ where you don't pay duties and taxes to Mexico. They cross the border. You get a thousand orders. They put a thousand labels on those thousand orders and it crosses the border. And when they manifest gets to customs, they say, Oh, there's a thousand orders under 800 because they're going to a thousand different people. Instead of being consigned to Nomadic, it's going to John Smith, Debbie, Eric, whatever. In the US, we see that manifest of a thousand people instead of one consignee of Nomadic. And so that comes in duty free. So we were importing, saving thousands of dollars a day by doing it that way, instead of clearing a container load, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in duties on it. We're now not doing that. Just how the way we import and taking advantage of trade agreements. So we warehouse in Mexico did that the issue happened there is we were now we went back to one location, which was great The issue is the warehouse sold us on that solution within six months to a year being in that warehouse They said your volume is not they grew so fast because it's a very niche business. Yes It's amazing. They said your volume is too small. We're kicking you out. I'm like, dude, we just barely got inventory here. We're loving these savings And so then I had to go and I set up with a partner and other, I found a free trades on that wasn't doing this at the time and set up our own fulfillment in their bonded warehouse. And then we realized it was not so scrappy. 

JARED WARD: Man, that's awesome. 

EMERSON HAMMER: And then we realized the big products, the other issue too, is we now, this is now COVID is happening. Bless I was, this was internal debate and whatnot. We could have gotten away with this and not, we started making stuff in China in the middle of three or one tariffs. And we made luggage there and that product had a 35 percent tariff on it. And that was our most expensive product, over a hundred dollars cogs. So we're paying 45 to import just this one product, one, one luggage piece. And we're like, you can't fulfill that in the U S and not that if you 35 in cost is going to be like 120 retail, you can make up for your margin on it. So it's like. We can't sell this bag. The bag become became unsellable if we had hit with those tariffs So we had to warehouse in canada and mexico to keep it at a semi affordable price point and so I then was like, but that bag's too big to ship from mexico from california to new york. That's expensive 

JARED WARD: How big is it?

EMERSON HAMMER: It was like, something like it was a big it was like 36 by 24 by it was a big box So I then set up another warehouse over in ontario canada in a free trade zone there, which was a crosstalk facility that we could do the same thing So we had east coast west coast fulfillment now doing three to one not paying duties and taxes or working around them or whatever, at that point of taking advantage of 321 program That's when things got complex for sure at that point. That's when I realized oms and wms are different. I needed to order routing involved in it. We tried doing it through the ship station for a while. It didn't work really well in the ship station. and so we're looking for an ERP at the time. I still couldn't justify the cost of, I got 80 to a hundred thousand dollars for that suite at the time or whatever they're charging. I was like, that's ridiculous. So we used order hive as an OMS and order hive at the time. It's since been acquired by sin seven. the demo went great. I was like this solves our need of order routing. We can keep track of our po placement in it. We can do all this stuff. We implemented it and within six months we outgrew it like the servers were too slow And it was just like, dude, I'll sit there and wait for 15, 20 seconds to buffer and order information. I'm like, dude, this is taking too long. I can't operate out of it. The automation rules that we were sold on it didn't really work that well. So it still took manual intervention to make sure the order routing, it wasn't that complex of order route is pretty generic. 

JARED WARD: So I have a question here,  cause I mean, this is like complex evolution. Yeah, it got tricky quick. if you could go back in time, would you make the decision of we're just doing in house fulfillment, man. Or we're just sticking with 3PL. Or would you do anything different? Would you still go the Mexico route? Or would you like… 

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, I don't necessarily regret the Mexico route. There's significant savings. It's saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. that program. So it definitely costs savings. The issue that I would have had is when I left, my transition out, we were working towards a model that was different from not having warehouse employees, but having nomadic employees in that bonded facility doing the labor. You guys got to the point where it was a bit more tricky to scale it. And the warehouse that we were working, the warehouses we were working with, they weren't built for fulfillment. They were. One was like a value add service in Mexico where they were like, Hey, they're like more of a return center. And they just had their license to bring stuff into their warehouse, free trade zone, cheap labor, and then get it back out. And they wanted to get the fulfillment game. And I had to teach them a lot of that aspect, but they didn't have the software really. There's software. They had a homegrown WMS, but it was meant for value added services, not for picky necessarily. It had, yeah, it had capabilities to do pick and pack, but it wasn't built for that. And so we had complexities there. And the same thing with our facility in Canada was it was a cross doc facility. the thing is we were kind of in a desperate pinch for it where we're like, we have this product launching. It's not going to, we won't make any money on this if it's not in a free trade zone. And our design and manufacturing team was like, it has to be made in this factory. This factor is a factory. That's like the quality in China. We have to do that. So that's where we're stuck. so I think it was the wrong move. I wish I got to a hybrid model sooner where it was specific nomadic employees in your warehouse working only on nomadic stuff. Cause there are some complexities, unfortunately. Even with the QC we do overseas stuff came in and was like, Hey, all these bags are missing a key chain holder or a sunglass case. Or we had tweaked something to it. Or we would have certain campaigns where Hey, this new things, can we have to work the inventory a little bit for whatever reason? I was like, we have some specific needs that are brand needed that weren't in their typical wheelhouse. So it took a while to, fix, you know, or figure out with our 3PL versus. We want the same people working on our account every day. We need three people on our account and pay whatever that cost is there. Each doing it, dealing with international businesses was complex. Mexico has certain labor laws of how long you're going to hire employees. Short term wasn't necessarily an option as it is in the U S of like temp labor and so there's different complexities there. Same with Canada. There's the, working environments different that it would be nice to say, these are our client. These are our people. Every time this is our tech stack, this is what's going on. so I wish we got to a hybrid model sooner. 

JARED WARD: Got it. Okay. Now, jumping forward just to, cause I know we're running low on time right now. right. Pearl, you guys ended up choosing bright pearl as your ERP. You made the jump dove in. What did you learn from that process? 

EMERSON HAMMER:  I realized luminous has to market me like two years ago, dude. That was the main thing so You guys got in the business a bit too late, because I needed you guys, But yeah, that was a thing a big part was cost On it is everyone with bright pearl.

JARED WARD: why did you choose bright pearl over NetSuite? For example, NetSuite seems to be like the 

EMERSON HAMMER:  NetSuite is the sexy one for sure. 

JARED WARD: Yeah. the sexy one. 

EMERSON HAMMER: That was hard. The Ferrari. Yeah. It was the hard sell internally because everyone's I just heard NetSuite. They just have that brand recognition and stuff. And I was like, right. Pearl, honestly, is like a, is a newer ERP. and they're barely an ERP at, at the time they're, they may have changed things. Now we're like an OMS that became an ERP and they had some bolt ons to it. Like the accounting part, I was like a bolt on to it. a thing was like bright pearls, which like a third of the cost of NetSuite. When we got to it, the other thing too, is NetSuite was like, Hey, we can do anything, but we have to build it. And so I was like, you're not really like the, so it's not that I wanted a solution pre made for me, but it's I don't know what I don't know at the same time. I'm not against having guidance. And I think a lot of people in ops make things more complicated because they don't know You can streamline it in their mind. this is the way my mind's going this path I'm so focused on it, but actually I could do it this way a lot easier It's already pre built bright pearl had I felt like a good e com Structure around it that hit most of it and they could add on top of that with net suite. It was like Here's a cloud space, build what we want in it. Brightpearl was like, here's a framework. You can operate here, but we can customize and bolt onto it. But here is this infrastructure. and so that was, huge for me. It was like, hey, you, I can see, I can visualize it. This is what I need. I'm not, I, felt like I was building a whole new software with NetSuite instead of Brightpearl. I was like, here's the bones of it at least. 

JARED WARD:With Thread, they, this is what they said. We feel like we were in a Corolla. So at the time they were using finale inventory and then maybe just a couple of other tools. nothing crazy. It's like we were in a Corolla. It's really reliable. And then we went from a Corolla up to a Ferrari and they were just like, I just wished there was like, A Tesla, like a model three Tesla, like somebody that was a little bit more updated that understood e-commerce. And he said the same thing. He was like, man, I wish that Luminous was around back then. what, would you, would he probably wouldn't do anything differently? Like what was your experience implementing bright pearl? 

EMERSON HAMMER: Well, it's very collaborative. And so it's hard about it is. Ops, I feel like typically gets siloed a lot of the company makes a decision and then says, ops, figure it out. And so this is the first time in ops where I was like, this isn't, they get pissed if they don't figure it out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, go ahead. I'll throw them under the bus. Dude, we had black Friday launch. Three weeks early one year and they didn't tell me until the day of the day before day up like we were In november like the typical black friday and they launched like november 7th or something like that And like i'm like where are these orders coming from? Like oh, we just put out our black friday campaign now and i'm like those orders aren't going out, dude we just have like we typically do 500 orders a day or whatever and we have like thousands and i'm like I don't have a warehouse team to fulfill that. Like, how are we doing this? And I was like, that's the comedy in ops. I think where it's this is what we're doing. So that was one of the more big, like a bigger initiative to be like, this is an ops decision, and it was very stressful for me to make that decision. Cause I'm like, this decision is me now inflicting that on other departments. And I know that ops is like the ugly stepchild already. So it's just I'm like, Hey guys. Accounting you need to buy in and you're using this software. And so it took like a whole company kind of thing into it I'm like, hey design when we place pos. This is how it's going. This is how it's gonna work And like marketing adoption was really difficult. 

JARED WARD: Yeah So at that point you had to be like, hey guys, you're using this now Like why do you think it's so difficult for e-commerce companies to adopt it?

EMERSON HAMMER: I think it's the company as a whole and every department is fragmented and so until you can get everything together to work together on something and it took us a while. I want to say that's the first time I ever liked that we gradually got to that point as we grew like we have a wholesale team and the commercial side now like doing retail Once we saw the complexities of that coming in and then marketing doing their own thing. Everything was so fragmented I'll say probably in 2020 2021 we started having better groups like everyone was in the same room like a weekly meeting at least before it was like What are you guys doing in ops? Okay, I'm working on this. Okay, cool. And like we would just report to John or Jacob saying this is what I'm working on and then that was their job to communicate to people But that wasn't as a kind of a broken chain Like we all had to be in the same room on our weekly meeting and say this is what we're all working on But anyways, well, I think that the implementation of it was hard is because it's a disruptor of current processes And we've all seen in it adds friction And also it's like how long is this going to last we implement an order hive? I knew order high was not the end all. I thought this is a two year software. Two to three year software that will get us before we go to an erp And that was the goal of it. It was like, Hey, I can learn on this software. What an ERP should do. Cause it was like, it's a smaller ERP. It has similar functionality. I could learn on that before I got this. That was the goal of it is way clunkier than I ever thought it was going to be. so that was the goal though. And then I think they saw like order hive isn't doing what we thought it was going to do. And then is this software going to do what we think it's going to do? Or is this going to be something that's temporary? How long do we buy into it? What's the lifespan of it? Cause I think in general, most people, it's once you stuck to an ERP. That's your process. And that either it helps you or it hinders you for a long time. And it's not like where you might see cool, you're moving from like a Zendesk to a gorgeous or whatever. That's a little bit of friction, but it's doable. It's not as big of an issue. It affects a few people's jobs. This affects the whole organization. Everyone's in on it. And if we're going to move to another software again in the future, that's going to be painful again. So they're like, Hey, if we do an ERP, we're doing it once installed. That's it. That's what happens. There's so many scary stories about our ERP of they couldn't fulfill orders for a couple of days, systems were down, accounting's off, whatever. And there were some issues once we implemented on bright pearls as well. I believe some of those, I read duplicate like PO entries. So like we thought we had 10, 000 units coming in and we had 5, 000, coming in just to how we migrated that data over. But again, it's like important to have clean data in, clean data out, dirty data in, dirty out. So, yeah, I see. I, have this theory then. 

JARED WARD:Even, like the bright pearls of the world, they were built to service and antiquated supply chain. A lot of these issues that you're talking about. and this is kind of the inception of luminous and like, why it exists is the evolution of e-commerce companies, particularly Nomadic. Like it's, relatively predictable where they break. It's like when you introduce wholesale, when you have multi, When you have multifaceted distribution and fulfillment, like you need order routing, like there's, predictable places where software breaks and where you need to add friction, where you need to add processes. My experience with Brightpearl Acumatica is. Yes, they have everything, but it was built to serve as something really antiquated. So a lot of times, you're having to switch the ways you're doing things unnecessarily, just because somebody new hasn't come out yet. Yeah. And they're very important because of that. 

EMERSON HAMMER: Yeah, and it's a very broad situation in general, where do you want to make it? I'm not saying you know, that sounds like this is your specific niche in general, but it's like, there's so much you can do in it. You don't know what to do with it. I feel at times. and so something that is more like other e com centric and stuff like, I mean, that's what you can use for, I don't know, like a lawyer's office probably to an e commerce business, to a cement trucking business, which is great, but it's like those features capabilities might actually messing up some of your business a little bit. due to a different industry operating a certain way. 

JARED WARD: And the thing is about e-commerce operators is what can we count on them to do to implement the software that introduces the least amount of friction. That's the problem with NetSuite and Bright Pearl is yes, you can do work order management. So you could manage the manufacturing of a freaking thread of, or the raw materials to a backpack, but That introduces like 17 steps when we know about e-commerce companies. It is like they want to be able to manage that, but with maybe 1 or 2 steps. So that's how Luminous is building. It's like, how can we have the service of a wide gamut of supply chain, but understand that operators. It's one scrappy guy doing it. And instead of 16 steps that service, like freaking, like a massive food company, you know, it's nomadic, like it's Emerson and nomadic, like he, he just wants to see his inventory numbers in two spots, or he, just wants the order routing to actually work. I think that's the gap that we're trying to fill. And it's good to hear that. 

EMERSON HAMMER: The gap is there. There's a huge gap there. I mean, Next week definitely is for like corporate, like big corporate types of processes. I'm sure it is great there. and most of those ERPs are probably for that, but like in the e com world, unless you're doing a full supply chain, full loop supply chain, a full loop, a sourcing where you're like, I'm sourcing each material. And then I have my recycling program off so that I have all these other things that aren't really needed. It's like you need a high level data access to the high level data and a lot of stuff in general. I don't think most softwares in general show you which data you should be looking at. So that's been interesting on this side of the business is understanding what businesses highlight certain KPIs in their product. And it's something that benefits, how to say this. A brand needs to know that KPIs actually matter and dive into it. I think sometimes businesses in general may not be highlighting those key aspects. For example, your warehouse is never, I would be very shocked to see how many 3PLs highlight their on time shipment dispatch orders on an easy to see dashboard. Most of the time, they're not going to do that. That's going to be problematic for them. If they're highlighting, we're not meeting our SLAs. They usually don't highlight that unless they're actually attaining it. So if you have something, which is great. So I'm not saying every three pills, not doing that. I'm saying if you're 3PL not hitting the SLA, they're not highlighting it most likely, unless they're actively trying to track it. And especially if you have some type of metric of charge back, if you're saying like our SLAs require 99 percent on time to like dispatch or else X penalty happens, they're not going to highlight that at all. And so I think the way I'm going on this is. A brand needs to understand what your KPIs are. And I'm just rambling at this point, honestly, I just made more impassioned of things, of the analytics that most supply chain operators don't know what they should be measuring. Cause it's not easily in front of them.

Like my OMS may not tell me all the information I need because they might be incentive or be looking at different area that needs an operator need to see. and so I think that's probably, it's pretty common across the board on, things. I think as, operators understand their metrics and know what to look at, they can actually find those leaky holes.

JARED WARD: Yeah, and I'm happy to hear that Nomadic did have a happy ending. you guys did eventually implement Brightpearl. There were issues, like there is still a gap in the market, but ultimately, you know, you can adopt a system. You can adopt it. You can adopt NetSuite. It's not like you can't. Yeah. So that's, I'm glad to hear that. And I appreciate your time today. We had some fun stories. We gotta build some networking groups within ops and supply chain. Yeah, no, it's, we've got some work to do, man. 

EMERSON HAMMER: I'm trying to find them, honestly, I'm like, they're not on LinkedIn. We're not on, I don't know, maybe we're on Facebook. I don't know. But I'm not on social media in general myself. It's not follow me on Instagram or whatever. I'm not on there so I'm like, I feel like ops are the hardest guys too. Market to in general as I'm like, I don't know where we're just in our heads man. We're There's like an excel advertising platform 

JARED WARD: It's got to be this the solution that's I mean going back to the Mexico situation like it was a solution to a problem and it was new it wasn't like I've heard this 27 000 different ways like 

EMERSON HAMMER: no slogan. I know I say myself to myself that like The typical sales process doesn't work for me I'm sure it does. I just tell myself on my bed, typical sales, what the sales gurus are saying. I'm like, I can see through the BS, but I mean, I'm sure fall for it every now and then, but it's definitely like the way I work at Corsa now is solutions over sales. Like the solution to sell itself. It's not like. Everything else is very sales oriented. Hey, here's a solution. If it's a pain point, let's resolve it. but I think the solutions should sell themselves. In general, that's the best, those are the businesses that succeed because they do have solutions to actually work. Cause if not the same thing, like we've experienced in the past, as you jump providers with tech, the way it is in some sense, I mean, Europeans are different, but most other providers like, cool, you want to change to a different SAS. SAS is always coming out. We want to change and their whole value proposition is SAS business is meant to acquire new customers. With as least barrier as possible. So I think it's easier to change SAS, easier than it was in the past. but you have a good solution, then you're not jumping. that's what you retain a customer for, solutions, retain customers more than anything. So that's my, yeah, 

JARED WARD:absolutely. Yeah. Well. I appreciate it man. thanks for the op stories and I think we gave the listeners a lot of value. I think there's a lot of value in your story I hope the ops listeners Listen to your stories understand. They were able to pull out some lessons. from your experiences and I think they definitely will be able to so 

EMERSON HAMMER: Appreciate it, man. It's fun. I love doing this stuff. So yeah, I appreciate having on every side to see how your stuff grows It's fun