Outdoor Apparel Company Achieves Supply Chain Fitness

Overview

Outdoor Voices is on a mission to “Get The World Moving by #DoingThings.” By redefining activewear for today’s consumer, it’s succeeding with flying colors. The five-year-old company with triple-digit growth rates sells directly through its website and brick-and-mortar stores, putting immense pressure on its logistics team to keep new designs moving through its supply chain.

By partnering with Flexport, the logistics team is increasing its
operational efficiency and ability to easily share data with other teams, resulting in smoother product launches, improved customer experience, and higher brand value.

Get the World Moving

Outdoor Voices’ motto is “Doing Things,” a friendly call to action that emphasizes moving your body and having fun with friends. By freeing fitness from performance, Outdoor Voices is redefining the way we look at exercise and inspiring a nationwide community of Recreationalists to join them in moving their bodies and freeing their minds. Thanks to Flexport, Outdoor Voices gains a more efficient global infrastructure for building local communities of customers.

Nate Peterson, the VP of Supply Chain, puts it this way: “We’re dissociating the human from the superhuman,” a telling statement considering how much his operations team does. He and his team, including Operations Associate Brandon Leatherwood, sustain the supply chain for this fast-growing company that sells direct and drops new designs almost every month. “We couldn’t do it without Flexport. They help us know things about our supply chain that we can easily share internally so the whole company can accomplish its mission of getting the world moving,” says Leatherwood.

Supply Chain Stretch

The company keeps its designs flowing into customers’ hands with a 100% vertical supply chain where Outdoor Voices, as the importer and retailer, can’t rely on channel partners to help shoulder delivery burdens. “Our supply chain is a critical part of the company’s success, and Flexport is far and away managing the majority of our volume. Flexport helps us meet critical go-to-market dates and maintain stock, while exceeding customer expectations,” says Peterson.

Log That Shipping Data

On Flexport’s cloud-based technology platform, Outdoor Voices has access to supply chain data that’s more granular, timely, and digestible than anything it has previously seen. The operations team uses this data — and the analytics and reporting capabilities of Flexport’s platform — to make strategic planning decisions that ultimately drive down supply chain costs. “Using Flexport’s data, we can make better projections on freight and shipping costs, which improve our ability to plan and be cost conscious,” says Peterson. Case in point is how 98.9% of shipments reach Outdoor Voices at least two days before their go live date

Sharing With Other Teams

The benefits of Flexport extend beyond supply chain management and its business impact. Sharing Flexport’s data between operations and non- operations teams like marketing and sales helps the whole company rally around its mission of keeping the world moving by getting more products into the hands of its customers.

“We trust the data enough to extend it to cross-functional teams in our organization. Finding where products are at any point in time is now a self- service function. We’re enabling any team to understand the reality — in real time — of where product is in the supply chain,” explains Peterson.

Such sharing improves planning for product launches and marketing campaigns, while protecting influencers and customers from disappointing out-of-stock moments. Outdoor Voices’ experience demonstrates how a highly transparent and predictable supply chain can contribute to building the value of a brand.

Scale the Partnership. Stay Lean.

Even with its rapid growth, Outdoor Voices has kept its operations team small as it expanded its partnership with Flexport. “The partnership with Flexport has allowed us to scale rapidly while also allowing our internal team to focus on the core functions that support our business.” says Peterson. With visibility and control from origin to destination, everyone can stay on the same page in predicting supply chain costs, planning product and marketing rollouts, and focussing on what customers will want next.

“Every year, we’re growing and selling more products people love. Flexport is a big part of that,” states Peterson.