This is the transcript of a session recorded at PI Apparel LA 2023. To view the video of the talk, go here.
I am Brian Lindauer and I'm from Vibe IQ and today I'd like to talk to you about how companies are struggling to transform digitally and in particular how they're missing out on value as they go from physical to digital. I'm going to dig in on that a little bit and talk about what digital is, some of the barriers that you're feeling, maybe blocking you from getting to value and then maybe how we can solve that and a little bit of Vibe IQ pitch at the end. All right, so let's start by talking about shifting towards digital.
What is digital? I think most people here know what digital is or have an idea of digital product creation. I'm not going to redefine that. I think everyone has a good sense for what that is. I think this event has done a lot of service to that topic for quite some time and there's a huge value proposition around developing digital product. We're not going to rehash all that, but I'd like you to think a bit broader about what digital actually is.
It's not just about authoring 3D products. As an example, how do you think about digitizing an entire product line? That's a lot different than modeling one jacket or shirt or shoe. If you're going to work digitally, you need to solve this problem as well because I've walked through the halls of some of your companies and there's shoe racks and there's clothing on fixtures, physical manifestation of product lines. How are you digitizing the entire line? You're doing it already. I'll just ask a quick audience poll. Raise your hand. Who here is using some sort of board, cloud, whiteboarding tool to put imagery of their products where everyone can see them digitally?
If you didn't raise your hand, you're lying.
I've probably talked to 60 companies in the past two and a half years since we started Vibe IQ. I think every single one of you is using one of these products, Mural, Muro, Concept Board, something like it. It's one of the fastest adopted products I've ever seen as a technology guy.
I'm ultimately impressed by how quickly those have taken off virally inside of companies. We're still lagging behind the number one line visualization tool ever created, which is PowerPoint. It's the king. Maybe it loses its throne at some point, but if you were to ask the question, where's my digital product data, predominantly in a pie chart, I bet you PowerPoint is the number one thing in your company. Maybe by leaps and bounds.
What does it mean to digitize your line? Part of digitizing your line is seeing the whole thing in some sort of non-physical format. It's not just about one product in 3D. The other thing I think about digital, we have to think even bigger. How do you do your job? You guys all know this, but we're now working from home. COVID forced digital on us. You had no choice. It accelerated, I think, probably every brand in here. When COVID hit, you were already thinking about digital, and suddenly it was like, turn the dial way up. In all things digital, not just 3D product, but how you work together, how you share product information, how you share anything.
Suddenly it was totally different. I'll ask another question. Raise your hand if you are 100% back in the office. We got one hand. I know they're out there. There's a few of them. They're hiring. I'm in the office. Personally, I would be quite happy never having an office to go to every day again in my career. That's a career goal for me now. I think it's here to stay. I think there's lots of reasons for that. Obviously, maybe some people just appreciate that flexibility, but there's also huge cost savings associated with remote offices. If we can make it work, then it's good. It's good for the planet. It's good for the bottom line. It's not going anywhere. I think another interesting thing is that when COVID hit and well before that, there was a huge shift happening.
Raise your hand if you got kids. Anyone got kids? We got three of them. When COVID hit, they all automatically could no longer use paper, and they're all in Google Classrooms. I think Google Classrooms is something we should watch. Every single kid, I don't know, on the planet, in the United States, I don't know what the ratio is, they're all using Google Classrooms. When they graduate, they will only know Google Classrooms and TikTok. Neither of them are physical. Whether you have six eyes and you're dragon head or you got the Gucci apparel, everyone is digital. Kids are digital. If you're not digital, your company is going to struggle.
I think we need to appreciate that. That's happening. It's already happening, and it's getting bigger. What does this mean to how you work? All things digital, it means nothing physical. If we can solve for that, there's all sorts of value propositions that go beyond DPC, a single product in 3D space for your company, for your work-life balance, all these things. But there's a lot of things that are causing problems. Mostly here, we're going to talk about these barriers. We're blocking you from really being successful in the ecosystem. There's a lot of them. Two are a number of them. First off, I think a big problem, a big challenge is 3D assets themselves, the portability of the assets. They're not just hard to author, and we're getting better at that, and the tools are pretty amazing. But once you have a 3D asset, it's hard to work with. We talk to people who spend an hour and a half rendering something on their computer while they go get lunch. That's a problem. There's solutions to it, but we have technologies issues. 3D is harder to work with naturally than non-3D. File size challenges, you've got proprietary formats, conversion of formats, rendering time, access to 3D is a challenge. Who can get to the asset when they need it? Can your sales team get to it? Can your merchants get to it? Can your customer get to it? These are challenges you guys are working through. There are problems here, and we need to solve them to make a digital experience more accessible to everybody and more scalable.
But it's not just a 3D problem. It is a 2D problem as well. Pull the audience again. Raise your hand if 100% of your products are in 3D already. Browse where? It says yes. Okay. How about 50%? 50% of all your products are in 3D. A few hands. How about 20%? 10%? 1%. Who's got 1%? Okay. Anyway, the point's made, right? This is a transition. It's going to take time. It's going to take a long time. I think different brands are in different velocities. Different product types are naturally maybe higher value by converting all the 3D than others. You're going to have 2D lying around for quite some time. Depending on what brand you are and how you operate, it could be a bigger portion or a smaller portion of what you're trying to get done. The problem is, I haven't talked to lots of brands recently. There's still tons of problems just with 2D. Just absolute massive huge issues. I threw this slide really quick together this morning. I was trying to think through some of the people I've talked to. They had the simple task of, if I've got 2D somewhere like in Illustrator, and I need to get it to other people. The hoops that are jumped through are just comical at times. I've got to save it to my desktop. I've got to call it a certain thing. I've got to make sure the aspect ratio is just perfect. Then I'm going to put it in a SharePoint drive. It's going to get picked up by some job.
It's going to get dropped over there. Someone else puts it in PLM. Then I can copy it into a Miro board. That may not sound exactly like what you have happening in your company, but I bet you it's not far off. There are serious challenges just around 2D, let alone 3D. I think we need to appreciate, if you're going to work digitally, you need to solve for that as well. It's a heterogeneous asset problem, and it's a workflow problem. Another big problem is what I call data disconnect. I've got an image. Cool. Maybe it's named after my style. Maybe. The file name might be the style number. It might be some image.jpg. But I need the other data. I just don't need the assets. I'll pull you again. Primary tool used today to build your line plans, to manage a list of products. What's the number one tool? Raise your hand if it's Excel. It probably is Excel. Nine times out of ten, I don't know what the exact number is, but almost everybody still uses Excel to do their authoring work. Their actual work, hands on keyboards, to think about what their line should be. What products are in, what products are out, what colorways are in, what new colorways do we need, what's my line plan, what are my box line plan, placeholders, etc. Some of you have graduated onto other tools like Smartsheet, which are Excel in the cloud.
Almost never do you have an image there. Sometimes you do, but mostly it's the data. Intro date, target retail, volumes, you name it, category, merch hierarchies. Then you've got the historical data. You're trying to work digitally, remember? I don't have a piece of paper in front of me. What were my units for last year on that colorway? What's trending? How did we sell in red last year? I'm trying to make decisions with my team about a product line. My BI tools, my ERP systems, they're out there. I need that data. Snowflake Tableau, some examples, you may have your own. The problem is this. We've got our digital assets, we've got our line sheets, we've got our boards, we've got our business data, and none of it is connected, not a single bit of it. You spend so much time trying to go get that data, put it places, share with people, create a new Excel file, and then it gets worse. This is a significant problem for all brands. This issue here is blocking your ability to operate digitally because the data is spread out and it's not connected. That leads to all sorts of tactical issues, like copy and paste, super tactical problem. I've talked to brands who hire interns to paste data into Miro or to just brute force their way to a PowerPoint. You're control pasting, you're hunting for data, you're pulling up a spot fire report, whatever it is, and you're just brute forcing your way to that slide you need for that meeting so you can hand it off to sales or you can hand it off to some other team so you can present to your boss.
Absolute brute force, manual authoring. As soon as you're done, the next day, someone's in a spreadsheet. They might have been doing this while you were copying and pasting, or they might have done it three days before you even got to copy and paste and you just didn't know that file existed. It changed the intro date. They dropped that product out of the assortment. It's just dead wrong. You spent three months getting this ready to hand off to your sales team. The cost of producing this data is astronomical, and the end result is something you probably shouldn't trust. This is a huge tactical problem. If you think about digital collaboration, this is right there as a massive problem for your business. Then we get into a change management issue that's much larger than just the copy and paste problem. This is a simplified version of your Box or SharePoint. Think about how many documents exist. As soon as I created that PowerPoint, I gave it to Bob. Bob copied it. He renamed it something, emailed it to somebody else. They renamed it, gave it to somebody else. The retail price was wrong. I don't even know who's got it. When we presented a year ago, I called this the document apocalypse. This is your digital product line. For most people, this is your digital product line right here, except maybe times 10. It's all over the place. Keeping this data accurate is almost impossible.
It is impossible. If you're using this to make business decisions, you're probably making the wrong decisions, or you're making them too late, or you feel like you can't change your mind because then you have to go update all this stuff. Do you guys ever feel that way? Oh my God, we just spent a month and a half getting ready for the line review. Please don't drop anything. Because now I've got to go change it again. It's going to take us another three months. That's a huge barrier to just operating digitally.
I don't know if this is a problem or a root cause, but one of the things that we focus on at Vibe IQ is this idea that documents don't know products. When you're working on a Word doc, or a PowerPoint, or an Excel, those files have no idea what a product is. Not a clue. It's just a row in an Excel file. It's just a JPEG that's on a Miro board. It doesn't know what a size range is. It doesn't know what an intro date means. It's just dumb data. Absolute dumb data. This is one of the underlying issues with the way you operate and the tools you're using is that you can't change something about the product and then have it update because the document doesn't even know what a product is. So if you kind of think about, well, what's the effect of that? One of the effects is the change management issue we were just talking about. There's also this big miss, this big opportunity that you can't realize around what I call feedback loops, right?
So imagine I worked that three months to get this presentation ready, and then it got copied a hundred times. Maybe I distributed it out to my wholesale sales team or my channel merchants or wherever it went, right? 150 emails, a bunch of downloads from SharePoint. Everyone's looking at it. Maybe there's meetings happening to review it. Maybe you're on Zooms. Maybe there's 150 people on Zoom showing that presentation. You got all those copies of the documents out there, all these eyeballs, all these people commenting. They're commenting on an image in a PowerPoint. They're not commenting on your product. They're thinking about your product, but that's not what they're commenting on. They're commenting on some text on slide 14 of a presentation called Bob's pitch to whatever, right?
If you're the merchant, you're the product manager, you're a designer, you will never get that feedback. Not a chance, right? You might get it through an email, through an email, through an email, but wouldn't it be cool if you could consolidate that somehow? If your documents knew what a product was, maybe you could do that. So you're missing out on insights and feedback. Your line is not as good as it could be, right? All these people are seeing this information, but none of it's getting back to the people who could act on it.
And I think that's a huge problem, right? It's not just a digital problem, but when everyone's in a room together looking at a physical garment, they're talking about that shirt. So as you start replicating it into infinite documents, you have a different challenge. Okay, so what do we need? What should we be striving towards, right? Not just digital product creation, but like what is a digital workflow, right? How do we work as a company with our digital assets, but with our product data in my pajamas, in my house, or shirt on up top and shorts down below, right? Classic summer, Brian gear, always keep Brian gear on, Brian gear, always keep the camera tilted up. So an idea to try on, right? An end-to-end digital workflow. I'll just say it out loud. How about this?
Processes and tools used to create and maintain an accurate digital representation of your product line as it comes to life, and then iteratively as it changes, you should be iterating more. You shouldn't spend three months to get to a milestone and then not want to change your mind because all the work you did. You should be changing your mind every single day. And that information needs to be provided to the people in different formats at different points in time, to specialize for their job. Merchant probably wants it in a spreadsheet. Or they may, depending on what they're trying to do that day, they might want it in a big board. Sales rep probably wants something very different. So you need it in role-based and task-specific formats, and they need to be quickly generated, and they need to be always up-to-date and accurate, right?
And you want that data to flow and evolve through your entire process, right? Whether it's 3D, 2D, it doesn't matter. It's digital. It's an end-to-end workflow. And I think this is a big thing missing. You guys are missing this. And it's gonna stop you from realizing all the value that can be as you make these investments into digital product creation. So what are some ideas here, right? 3D and 2D assets are made available to whoever needs them whenever they need them, at their fingertips, right? As soon as I think about that style number, boom, I got it right there. I can turn around, I can look at it. It's 3D, front, back, sketch. Maybe it's really early on. I wanna see the colored up sketch. It's right there. I got it at my fingertips. No more copy and pasting, right? Like, forget it. Like, we gotta stop doing that, right? Get rid of the interns. Let them do something else, something more valuable. Every product presentation is accurate when you're looking at it, you know it's right. You're not like, has anyone changed this? Is the intro date still right? Yes, 100%, it is. Like, how do we get to that point, right? Doesn't matter what you're looking at, it's right, correct. It's trustworthy. I can make decisions on that. So I've got my digital assets and accurate product information when I'm making my decision. I'm trying to decide if I'm gonna adopt this product into my region.
I need to know not just what it looks like, but how many units did it do last year, right? What's the intro date? Have other regions picked it up? Wherever that information's at, I need it at my fingertips. So it's not just what it looks like, it's all the supporting information that comes along for the ride. And when there's feedback, wherever it came from, whatever meeting it was in, Zoom meeting, PowerPoint, I want it to be aggregatable, right? If I had 50 different retail buyers reviewing that line, I'd like 50 different points of feedback on, do we have too much orange in the line this year, right? Or are prices too high? Are those intro dates wrong? How does it get back to the people who can make the decisions? And then when I make a decision, when I action it, when I hit the drop button, or I knock the price up on that thing, I want all those documents to be accurate. I change the retail price, I don't have to think about how hard it's gonna be to go redo all those PowerPoints, did Bob copy my presentation 15 times? Who's got it? It's gotta be up to date and accurate, right? Because then I can, then we can iterate, right? Now we can move fast. We need something kind of like this. This will never happen, by the way, but we need something like this, where all these tools that we're using, they're all connected, right? It could happen. I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna tell a story about how this happens, but this is kind of what we need, right?
We need your sheets and our boards and our BI tools to kind of have a common reference to each other somehow, that they all describe a product, right? At the heart of these things are your products. Products will make your company run, but the product's what's missing in all these documents, right? So we need to connect the dots effectively. That's how we get to a digital end-to-end workflow. So now I'm shifting into the Vibe IQ portion of the presentation. So this is the problem we're trying to solve at Vibe IQ, trying to help you unlock this value, right? So how do we do it? We've brought a suite of applications and a cloud platform to market that lets you run that digital workflow, kind of connects the dots, right? It creates the associativity between the visual presentations that you are building, the different formats you're using to drive your decision-making, and the product assets that you need to go make those decisions. We've got four applications. We have an application called Board. You use it instead of Miro. I'll just say it very bluntly. It's like Miro. It's like Mural, concept board. It's a place you can ideate, it's visual, but you can put products into it. And when you put a product into it, it stays accurate. You can create new products here. You can use this for all the different use cases. You might use a board for today, but you're gonna have the traceability and associativity to your product information and digital assets. We also have an application called Showcase.
This is trying to offset PowerPoint. It is a slide show presentation tool. It's a different format than a board. A board is infinite. A showcase has a narrative flow. It's like a presentation. You're telling a story. It has the same associativity to product data. In fact, you change something in a board, that update reflects in all your showcases. We have another application called Plan. It's the Excel killer. By the way, Excel will never be killed. So, but we want to get more work done in a tool like our plan application where the data is associative. You can build a line. You can make drop decisions. You can change intro dates. You can forecast. You can visualize it in some ways inside of the plan itself. And then as you make changes here, that data is gonna update in your presentations and your boards. They're all connected to each other. And we have a showroom application. Showroom application is when you have all 3D, right? We actually can't put 2D here, but if you have enough 3D, you can take that same product information that's connected to your plan, connected to your boards, and present it in a way that helps you understand how it looks together in a more of a retail space. This is based on the Unreal Gaming Engine. All four of these applications are connected to each other. And that they reference a common definition of your product data. I don't have enough time to go through all these applications in detail. We do have a booth here.
We can talk you through all of these and how you could use them if you come visit. I just wanna highlight a few things about the applications. First off, if you don't give your users a solution that feels like a document, they're probably not gonna use it. I've been working in this space for 20 years. I worked on Flex PLM, I worked at PTC. For 20 years, figured out you can't kill Excel and PowerPoint unless you make it feel like Excel and PowerPoint. So our application designers, our user experience teams, we're focused on building applications that your users will know almost immediately because they feel like what they're already using. That's key, because otherwise they're gonna go back to using documents, right? They have all the stuff you expect to have in documents. In fact, I call our applications document tools at times. You can author together, commenting, change tracking, all the kind of table stakes that you expect inside of a document we have inside of our applications. The key difference though is they all understand what a product is. Whenever you see an image of a product, whenever you see a retail price, it is referencing the definition of a product that is managed inside of our platform. And what this means is no matter how many boards you have, how many showcases you have, whether Bob copied it 10 times or 100 times, if you change that retail price, it's gonna update. And that change may have came not from one of our apps or from a change in another system. Might have changed in PLM. That historical data might have changed in your business intelligence tool. It supports not just 3D but 2D, right? It's a heterogeneous digital asset solution.
We think you're moving towards more and more 3D but this will help you bridge the gap. It'll help you work with the products maybe that you never turn into 3D. You shouldn't have to lock into one particular format. It's neutral in that sense. No more copy and paste, you drag and drop, right? So behind all of our documents is a library or a database of all your products. You can search it, find them, bring them into your presentations, bring them into your boards, add them to your plans, do carryovers, do multi-channel adoption. There's lots of use cases for this but you don't have to paste it anymore. The nice thing here is that that picture of the shoe changed whether it was a sketch or photo, it gets modified, a new version is available, it's gonna update everywhere. Your data will stay accurate. Pricing changes, pricing changes will propagate. When you open up a document, you open up your presentation and your user and you're like, man, I wonder if it's accurate, the answer is yes, it's accurate. Your next question might be, what changed? We have change tracking in the tools as well. You can pull up a panel and you can see, oh, price changed last Tuesday, Jeff changed it. He's a price changer. He's a price changer. The other thing that we're doing is we're allowing you to aggregate feedback in analytics. When you have 150 presentations in the ecosystem, you don't even know where they all are, they've been renamed, copied, modified slightly for different meetings. As people interact with those documents and they comment on products, we can funnel all that back to the product itself so that now if I'm the product manager in charge of that product, I can pull up that product and see, oh, look at all this feedback that's coming in across these 150 different presentations I have.
That came from a buyer at one of my retail partners, that came from my boss, that came from someone on my team. It's all there for you to work through and look at. We're also capturing interesting things like who's seen it, how many people have seen the product in the past week, month. Borrowing some ideas from e-comm. E-comm is an analytics platform. Every impression, click, add to cart that's done occurs and is captured for e-comm analytics. We're doing the same thing except on presentations. We can do that because it's connected to the product data. Like I said, this information is all over your enterprise, right? So another key aspect of the Viya by Q solution is that we are integrated. We run in the cloud. There's a lot to the technology story of Viya by Q. One of the key things you guys should take away today is that we've put integration at the forefront of everything we do because we know every one of you has product data in different locations. PLM solutions, business intelligence solutions, ERP, homegrown stuff, using different kinds of CAD, right? You have digital asset management solutions. To get that information to the fingertips and available to the people making decisions, integration is a key part of the story. This shouldn't feel like a burden or a large thing, a big hurdle you have to overcome, but it's an important part of making it work inside of your complex enterprise. Okay, so I'll wrap up here. We've got five minutes left. Okay, so I'll wrap up here.
We've got five minutes left, but I just wanna leave you with this thought that there's actually a huge opportunity for you, for all of us, to achieve the sustainability goals or the reduction in cost goals, the faster cycle times, quicker to market objectives that come with the idea of digital product creation. We're just working digitally. But it's not easy. I've met with lots of the brands here. I know you guys are struggling in certain areas. You're making lots of headway. What we're trying to do at Vibe IQ is unlock that, right? Give you a foundation that you can run your digital process on. Wherever you are on the journey, whatever authoring tools you're using, whatever kind of product you're developing, we can help you work more efficiently and either unlock that value opportunity or increase it. We're gonna give you a higher return on the investments that you're making right now today. And that's what we're trying to do here at Vibe IQ. With that, I'll wrap up. You can ask, I got five minutes for questions now, yeah? Or you can find us in the expo. Be glad to talk to you there.
