For specialty apparel retailers, when thinking of increasing speed to market (for footwear and apparel) what are the critical factors one should consider? What are the underlying capabilities that need to be enhanced and/or developed—both from a design and operational perspective?

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Enabling speed to market for any specialty retailer requires careful choreography across both internal and external partners along the entire “concept to consumer” value chain. There are dozens of discrete opportunities that need to be considered and incorporated based on their relevance to the brand and product objectives. For example:Streamlined upstream processes: The triad of design, merchandising, and sourcing need to align on the desired development calendar and have the right cross-functional service level agreements and thresholds established for how product development can go from concept to tech-packs by doing things once and doing them right. Example levers would be time spent in various development stages of concept, ideation, sampling, line review—working on the right thing at the right time and avoiding carryovers and overlaps—and hierarchy of sign-offs along the way. Calendar management requires a keen eye on the relevant metrics of material platforming, adoption ratios, sampling, percentage sign-offs at each stage gate, and so on.Enabled supply base: Faster speed to market requires trust and collaboration with sources of supply (own manufacturing, agents, factories, etc.). Understanding supply advantages and leveraging them effectively is critical. Example levers would be giving visibility to factories on the pipeline of work, allowing them to optimize workloads by off season production of low design items and reserving capacity for trend items close to season, coordinating direct buys and material platforming to minimize lead times for textile/synthetic material availability for production, as well as dramatically reducing “transaction” delays (e.g. number of purchase orders, number of design changes, manual vs. digital exchanges, and vendor financing). Of course, at a strategic level, speed brands also carefully evaluate the balance of low-cost country vs. near shore manufacturing capacities.Accelerated downstream processes: Segmentation of factory to consumer supply chain is critical to balance cost/speed with the right level of in-transit visibility for redeployment, delayed commitment of inventory to geographies but early allocation to specific point of sale, carton strategy/floor ready to reduce touches in the supply chain, and network/flow paths designed to emphasize speed when needed. Leveraging 3PL/4PL and global logistics service providers with the right level of performance criteria is important.Empowered governance and enablers: The product development playbook needs to tightly coordinate the concept with consumer activities by ensuring full clarity on processes, roles and responsibilities, individual and cross-functional incentives, and hierarchies of decision making along with escalation protocols, exceptions management, and accountability. The right tools and system enablers can also go a long way in smoothing the wrinkles and allowing the teams to focus on what they do best.There is no single right speed. The biggest challenge brands often face is deciding what is the right speed to market for their consumers, for their customers, for their product categories—and it would not be unusual to have segmented speeds even within one’s own portfolio. In fact, the ability to manage segmented speeds to market is critical to balance costs and service.