RetailReady: Streamlining Supply Chain Compliance

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RetailReady: The Game-Changing Solution for Supply Chain Compliance

Supply Chain Compliance is a billion-dollar issue

Ikea manuals

Lego set instructions

Terms and Conditions

We’re faced with pages of boring paper guides all the time, but perhaps none is as long, boring, and unfortunately needed, as those handbooks used in warehouse operations.

Employees today are forced to comb through hundreds of pages worth of boring details to find guidelines for minute details like how many inches from the edge of the box a sticker should be placed based on its dimensions. This lack of clear guidance often leads to supply chain compliance issues and costly chargebacks.

Not only is it slow, but unsurprisingly, the process is prone to error. Each major distributor (Walmart, Amazon, etc) has its own requirements, and whenever there are violations, the brands are fined. On average, these violations cost brands $40 billion every year.

RetailReady set out to address these supply chain compliance challenges, translating hieroglyphic-like copy into a friendly mobile app, using actual images and examples to provide specific instruction as employees work, eliminating the need to reference their Shipping and Handling 101 textbooks.

Taking this a step further, the company offers a dashboard which helps brands, logistics companies, and retailers to visualize their operations in real time, seeing just how much they’re saving in dodged chargeback costs.

Finally, on the retailer side, the app can automatically detect and report compliance violations, quickly allowing for resolutions and chargebacks.

The numbers:

Traction:

• Have a few early customers

• In the process of raising a seed round after the $500K from YC

Market Size:

• TOM: $30 trillion (8.9% CAGR)

• SOM: $6 trillion

• SAM: $40 billion

Competition:

• Magaya, KPA

• o9 Solutions, Neogrid

• IBM, Oracle

Team:

• Sarah Hamer, Co-founder: former strategy associate at logistics unicorn Stord and cloud expert at Microsoft

• Elle Smyth, Co-founder: PM at Stord, Analyst at BlackRock

Risks:

• Competition: some of the biggest cloud providers have products in the supply chain management space, and they have the relationships, resources, and data that would allow them to create a significant moat from potential upstart competitors

• Employee Behavior Change: this may be a dramatic step up from the Bibles employees have to consult now, and this may be a bit stereotypical, but how many warehouse operators do you think are going to want to use an app to tell them where to put stickers, how to log it, etc?

• Supply chain disruptions: the scars from “supply chain disruptions” are still fresh in my mind post-COVID, and the geopolitical state doesn’t exactly make me confident in continued good vibes in global trade

What I like:

• Industry expertise: The team has been there, done that, and know exactly what would make this massive industry more productive

• Size of the market: Retail and e-commerce is one of the biggest industries in the world

• Full supply chain: RetailReady is a product for any company in the logistics supply chain, regardless of stage, and in addition to expanding its customer base, the company can leverage one customer to engage with other players in the space

Opportunities:

• GTM: To maximize return on effort spent, I'd target the retailers themselves who are hurt by efficiency loss caused by policy violations, and more importantly, they're critical nodes in the ecosystem, centralized through their relationships with brands and logistics companies - by focusing on retailers, RetailReady can help improve supply chain compliance across the entire network

• Add technical talent: The team has industry expertise, but they have one engineer, and that slows progress

• Feature enhancement: I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on all things supply chain, but the fewer features their customers need to go to IBM, Microsoft, etc for, the better

• Taking on Flexport? Bold, but best care scenario, RetailReady shoots for becoming the OS for the supply chain and warehouse operations industry

The team’s expertise makes me confident as they know the problem first-hand. I am concerned that they aren’t publicizing any major customers and haven’t filled their seed round (most YC companies seem to do this before Demo Day), but the company is just months old.

Is this the sexiest industry? No.

However, there’s plenty of money to be made by anyone who can help big companies to save.

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Cheers to another day,

Trey