It is rare to be able to sit with a Retail, Footwear, Apparel & Consumer Packaging Goods (RFA & CPG) executive who can describe intimate details of key ways they helped contribute to brands transformation over the course of three decades.
This 2-Part series is full of ways to capture business value that is rooted in real-life examples. We touch on the evolution of denim; the challenges of overcoming quality and consistency while moving production to other countries; the importance of language, culture and influence of politics in your supply chain; Single Piece Flow Lean Manufacturing; domestic manufacturing; strategic sourcing; sustainability…whew!
If you don’t walk away from this discussion with an enhanced perspective of the RFA/CPG industry, then click the rewind button.
Anton Wilson, RFA/CPG executive advisor, shares his knowledge and perspectives with the concluding belief that transparency is the secret for companies to build a stronger bond with their customers.
Transcript
The transcript is close to a literal transcript of the spoken word. Please excuse any grammatical errors, spelling errors or break in the flow. The podcast is a non-scripted conversation with natural flow aimed to deliver value.
[00:00:02.090] – Intro
Welcome to PLM Evolution, your gateway to the forefront of digital thread and digital transformation and all things PLM. On this show, we’ll unpack the perspectives of industry pioneers, bringing you compelling conversations from the dynamic world of product innovation at today’s leading enterprises. Now, here’s your host, Patrick Sullivan.
[00:00:27.930] – Patrick Sullivan
Hey, everybody. It’s been a little hiatus here from the PLM Quick 30. We’ve gone back to the war room and rebranded the podcast to be Digital Transformation through the Eyes of PLM. And our first guest, I’m very excited to introduce Anton Wilson. He’s the president of Guidance Solutions. But the thing that was so intriguing about our conversation when we spoke almost a year ago now was it’s very rare that I’ve been able to talk with somebody who has a long arc of a career where they’ve actually spanned from design to manufacturing to supply chain and been able to identify areas of value and help improve the business in various scenarios throughout his career. So I’m very excited about this episode. We’re going to have a great conversation. So let’s introduce Anton now, let him talk about himself, and then we’ll start diving into the crux of the conversation. So thanks for joining us. And Anton, I appreciate you being available and your willingness to be on the podcast.
[00:01:47.970] – Anton Wilson
Thank you, Patrick. I really appreciate the invitation. Glad to do it’s. Interesting that I am able to talk to people about the whole supply chain, to retail, conundrum, all the things that need to happen. So, a little bit about myself. My background is in textile technology from North Carolina State University. But I went to work in manufacturing, apparel manufacturing, cut and soap with The Old Blue Bell, which is now Wrangler division, Contour. And I was very fortunate because their training program was, in my opinion, and any opinion of several other people in the industry was outstanding for allowing us to get involved in every aspect of the business. So I learned cutting, I learned product development, costing, distribution, quality. Everything was part of what we learned. And so after several years there, I also ended up working for Lee HD. Lee, which at the time was a division of VF, Vanity Fair, now also Contour brands. And so transition to them learning more about how fashion comes to the fair, because Lee was more fashion driven than Wrangler was, even though we think of both of them as denim companies, they had a wide range of apparel, and Lee was more into the design and merchandising. But one of the things that happened in my career with Lee I thought was interesting was I was brought in. I had already become head of quality for the company. I’d run a factory for them. I’ve been head of engineering for a while. I ran some factories for a while. But at one point near the end of my time there, it had put me into a team that was working on early stages of digitalization payroll and production planning. So I worked cross functionally there with their It department. And so it was the first exposure to that and realizing the value of data collection, data management, everything was decentralized with this process we were putting in place, we could have centralized views and centralized reporting, among other things I did there. I also ran a laundry operation, by the way. So between fabric manufacturing all the way to finished garment, I’ve done it all. Also worked with unions. So I learned to negotiate there. But an interesting thing happened. I was recruited away.
[00:04:33.110] – Patrick Sullivan
So 1 second before I apologize for interrupting, but just for the benefit of the audience, depending on because we have a wide variety of industries that will be listening to this.
[00:04:46.400] – Anton Wilson
Sure.
[00:04:46.970] – Patrick Sullivan
So I’m interested in a couple of things just for the benefit of everybody. The difference between fashion and apparel. And then you were talking about quality and then fabric manufacturing and then running laundry. There’s likely folks that aren’t aware of all the details existing in the RFA world. So would you take a minute to explain a little bit of that and then we’ll step back into the recruiting side?
[00:05:19.620] – Anton Wilson
Sure. I guess I transitioned from apparel to fashion. Is that the early part of my career, I felt that cut and sew was basically just a service and seasons were very long, deliveries were volumes were quite heavy, warehouses were built, and then product was sold out of wholesale. And you really didn’t on the manufacturer side of it, you didn’t really feel the impact as often of seasonality color change, fabric change, style change. Over time, the industry began to shift back in the 70s, moving into the where demand was being driven by more rapid style changes. And so I start to use the term fashion industry because when you look at it from the manufacturing perspective, you see much more changes, shorter volume runs, different ways of value being added that go beyond just your ability to provide labor. So today I tend to use the word fashion industry more than apparel industry. Got it. That’s just my convention. My convention. And again, Lee was more fashion driven both as a strategy but also as a change in the times. They were reacting much more quickly in terms of why I brought in the laundry, is that back in the early 70s, for those of a certain age we remember when you never bought all your denim was bought rigid. The store used to be that if you bought a pair of Levi’s, the first thing you do is fill a bathtub full of water, put the Levi’s on in the tub, let them get wet, and then let them shrink around you. It was rigid denim and it was shrinking. Today, nobody, hardly anybody ever conceives of buying rigid denim. And it was 14 ounce denim back then. It was very heavy. At that point in my career, where garment washing, finished garment finishing, acid washes, stone washes, different treatments were coming in. At Lee company, we decided to put in commercial laundries instead of using outside laundry services, which had been the norm for the industry. And so my factory, I was general manager of the factory. We ran a laundry operation 24/7. We ran cut and sew operations, still two shifts a day, because it was the urban cowboy phase, and denim was hot. But the reality is, by that time in my career, I’d actually had a range of products. I’d actually made tailored clothing briefly and made workwear briefly. Knit shirts, woven shirts, a little bit of underwear outerwear, so a broad range of categories. But in factory actually wasn’t a denim factory. We converted it to denim. So because of the trend. So that’s why I brought up the laundry, just because there are some things that are relevant today, even today’s world, if you just ignore denim. There are many products and many fashion products where post garment processing, including a wash or a rinse or a softening or a shrinkage, are critical components. Those things are not often considered in supply chains.
[00:08:50.730] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, well, I mean, for the normal consumer, right? You just try on your jeans or you try on your shirt, and you take for granted how complicated the process is and what actually goes into it and all of the different efficiencies. You just pay your price for that particular product $50, $100. And you don’t think about, for instance, the fashion changing in quick turns with low volume, and then you think about a white T shirt, for instance, high volume and categorizing. That from an apparel perspective. But what does it take to actually have a white T shirt, right?
[00:09:31.820] – Anton Wilson
Yeah.
[00:09:33.910] – Patrick Sullivan
Or denim jeans.
[00:09:35.500] – Anton Wilson
It’s funny. White T shirts, for example. Even a white T shirt today has different attributes and properties that you wouldn’t have found 30 or 40 years ago. Because what you just said, we as consumers expect the product to fit exactly correctly the first time and always fit like that after every wash. So, back in the old days, T shirts weren’t pre shrunk. Nowadays they’re pre shrunk. So they weren’t necessarily artificially softened. Now they’re softened, you get a lot of changes have occurred of the consumer. Either the consumer has demanded or we’ve provided it as an industry, as a convenience factor. Now the consumers want what they want, then they get it.
[00:10:22.020] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah. Well, I mean, I told you before we started to record. I can go off into tangents, but I think your story is really relevant. I do want to dive into some of these details, but I think it’ll be blended in into later discussion. So I think you were still at Lee. You had been recruited way. So back to your background.
[00:10:42.580] – Anton Wilson
Okay. So really a really big change in my career and a huge learning and growth opportunity for me was a company called BTK Industries. Billy the kid. It was a children’s wear brand. I’m actually old enough to remember when it was a better department store brand of children’s wear. Family owned business going through a series of leveraged buyout and had lost $42 million in the preceding three fiscal years before they were acquired in basically a bankruptcy sale by a conglomerate and brought me in as BP Manufacturing chief operating officer to turn the company around. It was a classic 80s turnaround story with all the good and the bad. We had to shut down factories, we had excess capacity, warehouses full of product were manufactured for efficiency, but no sales existed and we had to dispose of those. We had a very militant union that didn’t take too time with having their factories shut down and managed through that. But I was able to break even the first year of operation upon $100 million. Well, the interesting thing was they were 100 million dollar company at the time. They were very profitable at $100 million. So the lesson was be profitable, don’t just grow. Now, you could argue that Jeff Bezos with Amazon has altered that story over the last ten or 15 years with grow, don’t worry about profits. But back then it was very critical, especially because the company had been purchased and they wanted to recoup their investment that we turn a profit. So I had to shrink sales. That’s what I had to profitable and turn it around and restructure the organization of the company to eliminate some faith in the management team that had been there years and years of family operations. And we were the second year we were beginning to make a profit. This is also where I became initially involved outsourcing internationally. Because we were an El Paso based company. The ownership of the company wanted to board, wanted to Mexico. So we did some contracting and they wanted me to actually move production, all production to Mexico. But back then I did an analysis with my leadership team and we evaluated the pros and the cons. And the biggest con at that time was that the quality coming back wasn’t equivalent to the quality that we were able to produce. The skill level and training at that time wasn’t what you would have wanted. And so I came into conflict with the board and I was gently offered the door to go somewhere else because I didn’t think that it was the right strategic. Turned out I was right because the brought in my replacement and twelve months later they were bankrupt. So.
[00:14:15.250] – Patrick Sullivan
If you don’t mind me hitting the pause button again, you said something very interesting to me. So my background is in business development and sales, right? So you said one of the key things that you had to do was reduce sales in order to be profitable. Can you explain that a little bit, please?
[00:14:36.810] – Anton Wilson
So look at it this way. We had a sales projection. Well, I guess it’s probably better that I say this. Some of the sales that were recorded never really went. Let’s say that there was some spurious bookkeeping going on. All right, okay, maybe we weren’t really $100 company, but that’s what we were reported in. So that was one part of it, was to say, look, we’re not going to count a sale now, sales did not report to me. The only two areas of the company that did not report to me were sales and finance. But I worked hand in hand with the new head of sales, and we both went over things and we agreed on what was going on, that we were only going to report actual sales dropped a little bit. The other part was we had to recognize that many of the actual sales that were recorded were then netted down based on returns we were selling. We weren’t helping the account balance inventory to demand. Okay? We were just pushing product, giving them incentives to sell or to buy. And the incentives were eating into our bottom line, as were the returns three months later, eating into our bottom line,
[00:15:58.820] – Patrick Sullivan
Okay
[00:15:59.560] – Anton Wilson
We began to become more partnered with the buying organizations that were buying our wholesale brands. And so that was a huge part of it. The other part of it was that I said we had excess capacity, and I had to take the capacity down. And so a lot of the capacity that was in place was put in place just to keep the factory running, a lot like General Motors and Ford were doing in the 60s. They were running their factories full out so they could keep the cost low, but they were stocking building inventory and then having to have inches at the end of the model year during the same boat. So we lowered capacity to a point where it was more in line with what we thought actual sales would be. And we were able to make that more efficiently because I could cut overhead and some operating costs. So all those things came.
[00:16:53.750] – Patrick Sullivan
That’s fascinating. Okay, so I appreciate you explaining that further for me. And so the quality is clear to me. Right. So what happened in your career when you made the transition from BTK?
[00:17:14.890] – Anton Wilson
So, at that point, I took a short term assignment. One would not have thought it was a short term assignment, but I told my wife at the time and said, look, this guy is not going to be a long term situation. Let’s just recognize that this is a fill in. But it was a very unique opportunity, and I actually got a lot out of it. I was only there for a year, but I worked for a family owned business, an equivalent sized company to BTK. It was a very large family owned business. And I reported to the owner, directly to the owner, and I was literally his do everything guy. In the span of a year, I transferred a large screen print operation, one of the largest screen print operations in the eastern US. He purchased it and moved it to eastern North Carolina and restarted. I became general manager of that. When the manager he had in place couldn’t run it profitably, I turned a profit in the first month. Then I designed and built for him a garment dye facility.
[00:18:20.770] – Patrick Sullivan
So one of the things that I really want to try to dive into in these conversations is because you have a unique ability to be able to piece things together, to do the right things, to get profitability or return on investment. And so in the previous discussion, you had said that you had gotten to a break even in year one, which is from bankruptcy. To break even is incredible. And so now there’s an investment to move the screen print to North Carolina, and it was being mismanaged. And in the first year you got it, or, I’m sorry, the first month you were able to get it profitable. Why?
[00:19:08.030] – Anton Wilson
So I don’t think I’d like to pat myself on the back and say that I’ve got this really this superpower that allows me to see these. I wish you were that easy. But no, it was really more the individual that had been put in charge of managing the facility knew how to screen print. I wasn’t a screen printer. I understood the mechanics of it, but I didn’t understand really I didn’t understand the quality of it the way he did, choosing the right mesh of screen and knowing when the ink was the right viscosity. I didn’t know that kind of stuff. What I knew was consumption. This goes back to my training at the old Blue Bell organization, the utilization of raw materials, how much ink was being produced for this run, how many people were put on. Like, for example, we had a twelve head screen print operation. How many workers did he put on there? How did he schedule them? It was all about looking at the components of cost relative to the quality that demanded or the demanded and balancing those. He just didn’t do a great job of that. I would like to say this, it wasn’t rocket science. And I should know, because when I went to college, I went to college in rocket science and transitioned to textiles. Yes, it does take a rocket scientist. Yeah.
[00:20:44.830] – Patrick Sullivan
Just a little side story. I saw my niece last night and she was an engineering major for two years, and she has switched over into another major, but she’s taking statistics right now. And she said it’s a very easy class. And I said, well, it’s not really fair for an engineering student to go into exactly and say statistics is easy. Similar story of a rocket scientist going into textiles.
[00:21:24.010] – Anton Wilson
I actually tell people that. Strangely enough, again, back in those days, we didn’t have PCs. We didn’t have desktop computing. We had mainframes. And the most valuable course I ever took wasn’t physics. It wasn’t thermodynamics it wasn’t any of that. It was computer programming. It was the most course I took that taught me to think logically. Because in those days when you built a program, you had to have things sequenced in order and if things needed to be done repetitively. And if you think about industry, industry is about product development in the same way every time. It’s about making this garment the same way every time. It’s repetitive process. You write a computer program in those days in fortrainer Cobalt, you have to back to a certain step number and you’d have to have an exit strategy out of it. And so it really taught you to think logically. What has to happen next? How do you tell someone to do something in an order that allows them to effectively, efficiently, every time? We don’t teach today because PCs don’t function the same way. But the idea of learning to think logically about movement and steps is very critical. So I think whether you’re an artist, a dancer or something, if you have a little bit of that in your background, it’s amazing assistance in a career path.
[00:22:56.730] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, I mean, that’s great reflection, right? Ultimately, I do this podcast because we’re looking for lessons learned. And in reflection of accomplishments, how can people be more efficient and take some of those lessons learned and apply it for themselves? And I think looking backwards, it’s a lot easier to connect the pieces. Right? So, yeah, thank you for that.
[00:23:21.650] – Anton Wilson
After Short Sabbatical, which is not a sabbatical, it was a busy year. Then I went to work for Aizad Lacoste Carolina, which was a division of Crystal Brands, which was itself a spun off division from General Mills. And so General Mills had acquired, like a lot of conglomerates back in that era, they had acquired a lot of disparate companies. They put these together in this case, when they decided to focus on their core competencies. They put these companies together because they were more consumer focused and, quote, fashion driven. It was a jewelry division, samsonite Luggage, a couple of apparel companies, they were spun off in Crystal Brands. So we had no procedures, no policies, no standards. And I was in charge of engineering, product development, quality. And then I became head of production as well. This was my first exposure to actually living and working offshore because our main facility for textiles was in North Carolina, but our production was all offshore. The company owned facilities, but offshore nonetheless. And so for a period of time, I took my wife and children and went down to Puerto Rico and ran not only that factory, which is our largest factory, but also facilities in Dominican Republic and one in Costa Rica. So I got an exposure to what it’s like to be on the other side of the coin to be on the receiving end of what comes out of corporate when it’s a different culture. I also at this point helped open up for our company anyway, opened up Honduras as a contract operation for us, which was again an opportunity to get more involved in what was going on offshoring. I think if there was a lesson learned I think the lesson was I took Spanish in school. I’d learned to speak shop for Spanish when I was in El Paso because over 90% of my workforce, I only had six non Hispanic people working for me and most of them were Mexican nationals who had day passes they could come across the border. And so I learned to speak Mexican spanish. Down to Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. I learned that their Spanish is different. When I was in Mexico asking I want something done right now, I say that and they said you say Aurita. Okay, great. Go down to Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. I wanted them to relaying of the floor very quickly because a new stock coming in. I said I want it done aurita. They said okay. I came back 4 hours later, nothing. Said, you know, I blew up. What’s going on? What’s going on? They said, Mr. Antone, you said we could do it whenever. What do you mean? It sounds like a joke. Began to realize it’s not just language, but it’s culture. You grow up having different just because you all speak English doesn’t mean we all think the same way. Just because we all speak Spanish doesn’t mean we all think the same way. It’s how we grew up. It’s what norms you experience. And so when we started the factory in Costa Rica, for example, we started a dress shirt factory, built it from scratch. And we had to recognize that Costa Rican culture had a different ethic at a different apt than Dominican. So this was another learning opportunity for me.
[00:27:16.730] – Patrick Sullivan
It’s interesting that you explained that story. A couple of things popped into my brain that had happened to me personally. But on the professional side we’re in this world of PLM and digital thread and all of that, right? And so if you think about how the data is created and its intention and then how it’s interpreted as it goes through the lifecycle of the product in discrete world it’s like engineered or the E bomb, right? The engineering bill of material. And then there’s the M bomb and you compare the two of those companies really want those two to be aligned, but there’s different interpretations and. Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. But you go to the people, so the people process and technology and there’s different interpretations on that. So we have a dedicated organizational change management group and it’s really interesting as we engage with executives and then management and then the user community of the different ways that messages are interpreted and need to be created in order to get collective buy in from the entire organization. So your specific example of what was the word? That’s a good one. The perfect example.
[00:28:58.750] – Anton Wilson
To continue that same thing. This was also where I learned basically what you’re talking because our specs were written in North Carolina in English. Now, when we send that sheet to Puerto Rico, english is one of the two official languages of the island. It’s part of the United States. So we had no issues. But when we sent those same specs to the Dominican Republic, we had issues because they didn’t always under. As long as it was a common phrase or a common word, they understood it. But if it was a new way to put a seam together or something like that, it often required physical sample because they didn’t understand. So this is another learning me to recognize that in a global environment, you cannot presume this is a major lesson that we had to deal with later in my career. You cannot presume that what you wrote in English is what’s going to go out on the production floor. There will be a translation step that might or might not compass exactly what you’re talking about. And that’s probably still true in the digital space. It was for us, and again, later my career part, it was true for us. We created digital data, if you will, digital specs. We still had no way to control what went to the production form.
[00:30:25.370] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, by the way, if anybody’s watching this versus and listening to it, my head is down because I’m taking notes and I’m putting asterisks by big lessons so that we can highlight those once we publish this. So, yeah, translation is a really interesting, very crucial spot to make sure that you’re aligned. Okay. Yeah. If you could continue down your background.
[00:30:57.210] – Anton Wilson
At that point, I was about halfway through what ended up being my career. It was offered an opportunity to go to Champion. The eyeside. La Cost division was being sold off. And so I worked with leadership of the company to sell them to a buyer. And they made a very I was not going to be part of the team, was going to transition. So I took a role with I accepted a position with Champion vision of what was then Sarah Lee. Now Haynes Brands, they’ve been spun off Haynes, but we were part of Sarah Lee Corporation’s consumer Products division, and this was a major turning point for me. This represented the first challenge for me. I was head of engineering, which included not just industrial engineering and product costing, but I was also in charge of facilities engineering, which in our case represented a full textile array from knitting machines to dyeing machines and everything in between.
[00:32:01.670] – Patrick Sullivan
And just a quick second again for listeners benefit who haven’t had exposure. What is industrial engineering and facilities engineering and if it’s not clear in the explanation, what’s the difference?
[00:32:17.550] – Anton Wilson
In the fashion world, when most people talk about engineering, they mean industrial engineering, or efficiency engineering, if you will. As I mentioned earlier, it’s about understanding the value of time and the value of materials and the consumption of both. That’s really what industrial engineering is about. So it often involves work measurement or measurement of utilization of raw materials. It involves building work AIDS, designing workspace for maximum efficiency, those kinds of things. But it rarely directly involves the building or the mechanical, the HVAC, the air compressor. Sometimes you’ll design an air system for typically don’t lay out those kinds of things in big space, but in facilities engine, we were responsible for everything that sat on the ground. So we built a factory from scratch about ordering materials, the construction schedule, in fact, literally the first project they gave me was to build a new home office because we were moving their headquarters from Rochester, New York, to Winston Salem, North Carolina, to be on the Sarah Lee campus. So I was responsible for building the building in addition to the products that were going through the product line. Okay? That’s the main difference. And most of the time, facilities engineering in the manufacturing and operations world is different from industrial engineering and don’t often report to the same boss or an East Knot director. But this was important for me and for the company, because, as I said, my first job was to build the headquarters. But also the long term strategy was to begin was to move more production offshore. Now, if you look back at what I was describing, my earlier career, at this point, I had not really moved production offshore. They’d been tasked with it at BTK, but the logic didn’t support the analysis, didn’t support timing being right or the location being. So we never actually did it. But when we got to Champion, we were moving to Mexico, which was now roughly 15 years further advanced in skill development, working with American company development, all those kinds of things, we felt like the base was there. So we moved from about 96% production in company owned facilities domestically. Within four years, we were at 50 50. We built factories, multiple factories, and implemented very efficient production systems. And this is where we got into really got into the production system. That, I believe is the way more fashion garments should be made today. They’re not, but they should be. And that’s with single piece lean manufacturing. Conventional sewing was and still is in more factories than it should be. It’s about large volume cuttings, large volume sewing production going through at a time. So you’ll have a bundle, which is a standard unit of work. It could be 30 pieces, it could be 72 pieces. You’ll have a bundle of parts of the same part, and you’ll have another bundle of another part, and you’ll be piecing the pieces. Together. So you’ll sew 30 at a time in one operation or 36 or 72 or whatever. When you finish that, you’ll push it on and you’ll bring in another bundle and you’ll do the same thing over and over again. Single piece flow, or lean manufacturing you can cut the whole water but you only put in one piece at a time of everything. And if there are defined seven operations on a garment you only have seven operators and there are only seven garments in the line or five garments, five operators in the line. And at the end of the day you may not produce as much work out of those same five operators. I can actually show you that you would produce the same volume or the same amount of work but it might not be the same number of finished garments but you would have fewer garments in process. You would have garments cut and sewn and shipped the same day. And all of our new factories that we built in Champion were all on single piece flow. So much more efficient, better operations. Now, the problem with single piece flow is it requires more machinery because you might have 20 machines in the line and one operator actually moves from machine to machine to do her job, his or her job. That’s what makes it unique. That’s how you have fewer operators in place because they do multiple operations simultaneously or not simultaneously, but sequentially. And then they hand it off to another operator who does more pieces, more work on those same pieces. If you haven’t seen. So it’s interesting to see but it doesn’t look like conventional sewing at all. It’s stand up. It’s not sit down. It’s moving, not staying in place. It’s one piece at a time, not 35 or 40 pieces at a time.
[00:37:42.550] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, it would be interesting to have a discussion specifically on the difference. What would be the comparison to single piece flow? Are there just a couple of options or everybody does it kind of differently?
[00:37:58.490] – Anton Wilson
It’s an interesting question. At one point in my career I had an opportunity to do some ad hoc consulting for a mid sized regional consulting firm in the Carolinas, Georgia and Maryland Virginia area. And in that role I was able to into a machine shop that built vending machines. And what impressed me was the way that machine shops are built. And that is that they build a limited number of parts at a time and then a different limited number of parts at a time then a different limited number of parts at a time and then they bring them together for final assembly. That was different from what I was used to where the entire machine would have been gone through and built multiple parts. It was building sub assemblies in parts and then bringing them together. A comparison to making would be that single piece flow is more like that system which is called job shop as opposed to conventional bundle sewing. It’s not exactly like it, but it’s closer to that than it is to progressive bundles. For any of your listeners who have seen job shop, they would probably understand what I’m talking about. You could pick up the part that you need when you need it. That’s really what it faces, because you build an inventory of availabilities, but you only bring the part together when you need it. Yeah, this is somewhat like just in time manufacturing, but it’s just in time manufacturing with entire piece going.
[00:39:46.730] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah. What’s surfacing into my brain is sitting with the CFO and projecting, okay, what’s the return on investment? One year, three year, five year? And I assume the conversations around cost reduction, around quality, I mean, a little bit of the conundrum, I suspect is, okay, you need more machines, but you have fewer operators. I’m sure the cost benefit analysis in one year’s time isn’t there. But if you care about those different things around quality versus hitting numbers in a specific time period, I suspect the decisions can change. And then the benefit, certainly in the longer term outweighs, the shorter term cost savings, is that off base? Is it kind of on target?
[00:40:40.180] – Anton Wilson
Yeah, you are partly on target. But one of the things that we haven’t talked about, at least not in depth, sort of touch on when I was talking about the difference between the apparel industry and the fashion industry is that if we looked at a timeline, if we overlaid a timeline of changes in fashion, retailing with my career, what you’d see is, at about this point in my career, we were also at the point where companies, both wholesalers and retail companies, were saying that we’re turning product faster. We need to get it faster. We need systems and source supply chains that get it to us faster. And the problem with the progressive bundle system ultimately is speed. Because the labor content is the same. 1 minute of labor to sew a seam on a garment in a progressive bundle system is the same as 1 minute of labor to sew it on in a single piece flow system. The labor content is not any different. What’s different is that the output speed is much more fast, much more rapid done. And so I can wait to cut until I actually need the product. So now I have not created, I’m not tied up working capital in unfinished product. I have working capital in raw materials, which represents a lower cost basis as I cut it in a progressive bundle system. Now I move working capital into a different stage with much higher value now being added to it, but unavailable to me to recoup because it’s sitting in whip. It’s sitting in working process, single piece flow. It moves right from raw materials to finished goods same day. Now, that’s what I sell to the CFO. I sell to the CFO you’re not going to tie your money up sooner later, and you’re not going to wait longer to get your money back, you’re going to get it back sooner. At that point, the CFO’s eyes light up big time. Huge. Because even though the equipment represents an investment in capital, you write it off on a slower pace because you’re depreciating, it doesn’t hit you as badly. It does use up the capital that you have, but you get a higher ROI on the that you’re producing here.
[00:43:11.070] – Patrick Sullivan
Got it. Yeah. Thanks for diving into that. Ultimately, it’s interesting, depending on the folks that we speak with. Right. The conversations with the CFO are very different than the conversations we would have with the business owner, or if the strategy is defined, and then they know that they want to implement functionality, this conversation around business value and the objective to our point about translation steps, some of that gets lost along the way. And so by the time we’re talking about feature functionality, it’s impact to the user, and somewhere along the line, the objective and the value isn’t gone. You rarely go back to it if it’s not clearly defined from the organization. So you really got to have your act together to say, hey, this is the vision, this is the strategy, thereafter, here’s how we’re going to measure it. And there’s lots of different ways, so evaluate it based on these things that we’re trying to achieve. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that.
[00:44:22.740] – Anton Wilson
It’s interesting what you said about the reaction from a CFO versus, say, ahead of production or the supply chain. I’ll come to that later in my career where it became extremely divergent. The acceptance of a strategy between those two parties was just on opposite ends of the spectrum. But I’ll come to that in just a minute. Okay, so from Champion, I was actually recruited away to Target, and there was a reason for that. There’s a lot of consolidation going on on the manufacturing side of the business, production, moving offshore. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to move offshore myself and lead manufacturing efforts. Whereas when Champion came calling, it was an opportunity to work on the other side and take what they wanted. What they needed was somebody with my type of background, because just prior to them coming to me, they had made a strategic change in their merchandising strategy, where, like many retailers of that time this is in the mid 90s, where they would go to markets, they would La market, New York market, and they would shop different vendors, assortments. Vendors would put together these assortments. The vendors would do the design, and the buyer would go in the room. I want that, I want that. Can you make this change to that? Yes, we can do that. Can you do this in four colors? Yes, we can do that. So basically, there was no brand consistency. There was no thought of brand and this is where I learned from this, I learned the difference between a brand and a label. Because in those days, the merchandisers would relabel product what we called a white label, private label back then. But Target said, look, we want it to be a brand. We actually want people to feel a branded experience, to expect consistency, to get consistency. And so they came, they recruited me. First time they called me, they said, we want you going to work for Target. I said, Holy cow, you want me to move where to Minnesota? I’m a southern boy. They called back months later and said, look, we really just come up here. Please come up here and talk to us. It was a great meeting. And so I took the role. And so my job was to establish standards and methods and procedures to assure a quality branded experience. By that I mean I didn’t define the brand characteristics. As far as she the 35 year old female with two kids, I didn’t do that. But I said, okay, if she’s a 35 year old female with two kids and this is what the brand is supposed to be, it’s supposed to fill this part of her lifestyle, then these are the standards we need to put in place. This is the construction. These are the fabric types. These are the tests that we need to perform. This is the fit we need to get. And so the great thing about that for me personally, is that I literally walked in essentially carte blanche to do things the right way and not worry about preconceived notions because they had never done it before. And so I was able to do things that I was able to take advantage of all the things I had learned on the other side, on the manufacturing side, to see what worked, what didn’t work, and to build a system or a methodology and a set of processes that were unique to Target and were very successful. So, for example, we were the first in the industry to do digital color evaluation. We basically said, we acknowledge the fact most people don’t understand this, but the least reliable instrument to evaluate color is the human eye. No two people see color the same way, and the same person doesn’t see color the same way. During the course of the day, as their eyes get tired, they see color different. So we were able to digitize that. When I say we digitized it, what I mean was we created digital color standards. We didn’t tell the vendor what color to make, sending him a swatch. We sent him a digital file and said, this is the color curve you need to match. We were an initial sponsor of Size USA.
[00:49:15.330] – Patrick Sullivan
Just real quick on the standards of color, because I’m interested in that one, because I’ve seen inconsistencies, depending on which supplier is providing that, how much variation. And I don’t know if it’s if you measure it by percentage, if you give them the standards, like, for instance, everybody assumes black is black, right? But there’s shades of black. More than two.
[00:49:41.630] – Anton Wilson
Hardest colors to make, by the way.
[00:49:45.610] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, maybe I should pick an easier one.
[00:49:47.920] – Anton Wilson
No, go with black, by all means.
[00:49:52.030] – Patrick Sullivan
So if you choose that standard, how much variation do you get? If you have, let’s say, four or five suppliers, how close are those five swatches?
[00:50:03.690] – Anton Wilson
So, to clarify, Target, my team did not develop the science behind digital color evaluation that was already being done by various organizations. And so there is something called the scientific name for the literal name for it is CMC Delta E, which basically is an organization that quantified a delta, a difference, an acceptable difference, through multiple years of testing and analysis between one color and another color, that would be acceptable. Okay. All we did was take that CNC Delta E and begin to use it whenever color came in for approval. Now, got it. I can’t tell you on a percentage basis, a lot of people try, but I can’t tell you that it’s 10% different or 5% difference. What I can tell you is, within a delta of 1.0, which can be measured on an instrument, on a computer, the differences that you see are not that you are not likely to see differences. You’re not likely to it’ll look like we used to have expression we want, and it went hand in hand with this. We would say to the designers, first of all, don’t pick two blacks. Pick one black. Or if you’re going to have two blacks, make sure they look that they’re far enough apart that it will look like two different blacks. Because we don’t want one black that goes out there and looks like it’s three different colors. We want them to be separated. That’s the whole point. So we actually created an internal color space around each color in the color wheel. We just said, if you’re picking a color in here, this is the color. You can’t pick anything else around here, because you do you confuse the guest. Go to this different sphere and pick this blue. This sphere. Pick that blue. Okay. Interesting. It was a multi year project, and we were able to upgrade our keep in mind, and you sort of touched on this at Target, the volumes were so large that you had a brand and you had, let’s say, a navy, you would have multiple products in the assortment of that brand that would be that navy. They were not made in the same textile mill. They were not dyed at the same time. They were not dyed in the same place. They were not sewn in the same location. But they had to come together and to the guest. Shouldn’t matter to them. So we had to have a process that matched, that made sure that the color from Mill X in China and the mill y in pakistan or the mill z in north carolina, that they all matched, that those submittals when they came in, we went from a 35% 1st time evaluation approval 85%. Nobody in the industry was touching that. Yeah. And that’s an underlying current of what I was trying to accomplish. And target. When I say I started with a clean slate, a carte blanche, if you will, to do the right thing, is I was trying to get people to understand that we want a methodology. Everything that we do that gives us an approval. The first time we look at it, the first time we see something that comes from outside, we expect it to be right, and what do we have to do to make that happen? So we started with color. The next thing we moved to was fit. When you have 100 different vendors with 100 different pattern makers making garments to fit on one human body, a female, a 35 year old female, the odds of getting them all to fit the same were pretty slim. Because we only use measurements. We tell them it needs to be this much chest or this much waist or this much hip, but we don’t tell them the three dimensional architecture of that body. I use this example. Take your finger and make a circle. Put a pencil in it. The pencil is your spine. The circle represents your hip and your hip and your waist. You can move that thing all the way around. You have the same measurement, but it’s different architecture, and this is the human body. So as much as we converted from providing fit guidelines in flat measurements to fit guidelines in 3D architecture, we were the first one to require our vendors to have standard mannequins to actually fit product on. And those mannequins were produced by albanon. We were an initial supporter of albany, and albanon wanted to sell one mannequin. I said, no, I want 100 of them. Put them out in every vendor location. And when we developed those mannequins, as I said, we were an initial sponsor of size USA. So we got the data and began to analyze it first early on. And so we developed these 3D models because size USA was based on body scans, not flat measurements. So we were able to create the architecture of the 35 year old female, of the 21 year old male. So we were able to do all these different things, and we had unique bodies for each of our brands. And so when we went to that model, all of a sudden, our fit approval rate or sampling procedure went from an average of 2.5 to 3.5 samples per approval. We went to less than 50% of our first samples. Coming in were the proofs right out of the gate.
[00:56:06.950] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, first of all, it’s really interesting for me to think about. So I grew up in a small town in the had a certain impression of Target. It’s interesting to talk about the standards and the brand consistency that you’re talking about in the mid ninety s and beyond, because my perception of the brand began to change probably in the early two thousand s to consistent to, I would say, what it is today. That’s one that’s just kind of going off in my head. So this is really interesting to talk about, the preparation and the work that was going in years in advance, right? And then two, because I think everybody could probably relate to one, you have a vision and strategy and what does it take to actually implement it. Like the details that proliferate over time. And then you just mentioned 3D. I’m curious if you’re doing that back then and you have those improvements, I mean, 3D in this world, and conversation on digital transformation, digital thread, and 3D in the fashion world and flow and fit and all of that, how do you view 3D today versus back then?
[00:57:38.920] – Anton Wilson
In 1999, I went to the Bobbin show, which no longer exists, but back then it was the industry’s biggest trade event, biggest convention event, where everybody was showing off the latest, greatest widgets and everything else. I went specifically, I didn’t need to go anymore in my role at Target, but I went anyway for one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to find somebody that had 3D modeling, had digital modeling capabilities for fit evaluation, and nobody had it at the show. Went back the next year, there were like three or four vendors who were now starting to provide it. I have been an advocate of 3D modeling, basically from that time on. I tried multiple times at Target to get a trial run. The problem at Target at that time, now Target today is using some 3D model. When I retired and they divided my job into three components, the person who took over this part of the job was able to get some 3D modeling put into effect, and it’s now become a standard part of their procedures. But at that time, we had a chicken and egg scenario because in order to do 3D modeling, you needed because we didn’t do patterns, and 3D modeling was based on patterning. You had to do the pattern first to then assemble it in three dimensional space. We needed the vendors, pattern departments or product development departments to invest in the software, and then we needed to invest in the software to be able to evaluate it and then make modification. And it was a chicken and egg. And so literally this went on for years. We won’t do it unless you do it, we won’t do it unless you do it. And so it never happened. But 3D modeling has to happen, has to happen today. And in our industry, the fashion industry, lags industry in general by decades in this regard, we’re the last to embrace it. And there’s another reason for that, and there is that a lot of the designers, if you still think of our fashion industry as in its entirety, for every Target out there, there are 500 individual designers who work from their own little niche brands or who work for smaller companies. They’re very tactile. They still want to see the real product. They’re very reluctant to give up that aspect of their role. And so I think that’s been one of the drivers of it. There are many, many suppliers out there today who have 3D capabilities. There are more the brands are starting to do 3D.
[01:00:32.670] – Patrick Sullivan
What’s your opinion in terms of that change? Is it more of organizations deciding that that’s the way it’s going to be, or do you feel like it’s generational in terms of if you get it into the educational programs early, especially with the younger generation can do many things on their phone still that I cannot do. But they’re very familiar with it. They’re comfortable with it, user friendly, and I’m sure being some of them could do designs on their phone versus needing a computer. Do you think it’ll take a generation of training before 3D really takes hold? And it’s this top end industry kind of treating it as R and D until it becomes a standard thing. When do you think that tipping point will happen?
[01:01:26.520] – Anton Wilson
I think what you’re describing has already happened, is already happening. I think part of the reason that Target was able to do it in the last ten years versus the tenure before that is because at Target scale, the buyers who make those final approvals, the designers, the older ones are aging out. And the newer ones are coming in and the newer ones going in are getting exposed in their design schools to 3d modeling. And so there is that aging out and replacing with the newer, younger, well, differently trained people is happening. I think that’s a huge component of it. I do think that the larger the organization, the more you have the inertia of change, of having to fight the inertia of stasis. This is the way we’re doing it. You have to fight that more. Smaller organizations are much more rapidly adapting to it, but I’m pretty sure I know it’s being taught in the schools. The problem is, we experienced this when I was still before I retired. We would get a designer who would say, you know what, I designed in 3D when I was in school, but the buyers don’t want to see it that way. That was the inertia. They had to come. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it, but they couldn’t sell the output to the person who had to make the buy decision. Those are the people that had to age out too, and that’s happened.
[01:03:02.810] – Patrick Sullivan
That’s interesting. Well, just real quick, because I want to be respectful of your time, I have a little bit more time.
[01:03:11.710] – Anton Wilson
Okay.
[01:03:12.500] – Patrick Sullivan
So I’d like to propose this because I think we’ve got a lot of fascinating things throughout your career. And so maybe we put this into two sessions if you’re willing to do it. So this first session would be kind of the arc of the career, right? And we’ve got tangible lessons learned. And if you’re up for a part two, we dive into some of these roa things and talk about this digital transformation topic and really how to dig down and uncover it.
[01:03:48.170] – Anton Wilson
Okay, I’m fine with that.
[01:03:51.370] – Patrick Sullivan
Let me give you one more. Theoretically, it’s the final. But let me give you one more key takeaway from the time at Target that will lead into that next part, and that is that Target, the idea of the fashion driving sales, along with all these other quality changes that we put in better fit, better color, better materials, et cetera, began to take hold. And we began to realize that a competitive advantage for us would be in bringing things to market faster. And so I became one of four members of what essentially was a permanent or a standing committee. We work on product development, calendarization, and ancillary and associated process changes to make it real. And so for about the last eight years I was at Target, we worked on these things. We met continuously. And one of the things that the first iteration that we rolled out after a few years of work was to take 13 weeks out of our calendar from first meeting until the product was in store. And we continued to take that down. And we learned a lot. When we talk about where we need to go as an industry or what still has yet to happen, that’s going to inform a lot of the things that I would want to talk about. So I want you to be aware of that.
[01:05:30.970] – Anton Wilson
Yeah, taking 13 weeks, that’s a full quarter.
[01:05:36.710] – Patrick Sullivan
Exactly and I don’t want to rush the career conversation because there’s plenty of fascinating things that I think are pieces of the puzzle that are worth diving into.
[01:05:50.690] – Anton Wilson
Oh, yeah, there’s more that I did. We can talk about that when we come to the second phase, if I can go back.
[01:05:58.210] – Patrick Sullivan
Okay, so your life at Target, you talked about brand consistency, and they brought you on board for standardization methodology. First was color. Second was fit. Were those the two main?
[01:06:14.890] – Anton Wilson
No, we took on fabric next, so anything that would have been considered in other industries would have been considered R and D, fabric materials, et cetera. That also fell under my Bailey whip. And the problem with brick, remember, we were moving away. You can’t move a I believe when I started, we were about five or $6 billion in apparel sales at Target. Now, by the way, my first job, first role at Target wasn’t just Target, it was Marshall Fields, it was Dayton’s, it was Hudson’s, it was Mervyn’s. We had close to a thousand stores. But they weren’t all Target stores at the time. And I had teams in Minneapolis, I had a team in Chicago. I ended up with teams in seven or eight foreign countries. Because of other things that we did. We began to move technical design overseas. I mean, a lot of other things that we did. But when we moved to fabric, one of the things they had to recognize that it was a slow transition to move away from the vendor developed model to the internally designed model. When we got to the vendor design model, vendors were picking the fabrics for us. We didn’t have much choice in the fabric. As we moved to an internal design, we could pick the fabric but we still let the vendor choose the mill. And so one of the things we had to end up doing in this transition in this line calendarization process is we had to bring fabric sourcing in house. Which was unusual for a retailer, so unusual for a brand. But for a retailer where we would designate these are the mills that you have to get this fabric from. We standardized the fabric across the mill. So that was another phase of things that we did. Anything to do with R and D. We tried to standardize it to the point that, again, that we can expect first prototype that we saw would be correct. That was the whole strategic objective. First time approval was the mantra.
[01:08:29.810] – Patrick Sullivan
And so what other components went into that? So we’ve got color, fit, fabric
[01:08:35.080] – Anton Wilson
Trims, but use elastics. Those kind of things all fill in. I think if there’s anything else, this is probably the big ones.
[01:08:44.870] – Patrick Sullivan
Okay. I mean, all of this is really fascinating to me.
[01:08:51.930] – Anton Wilson
Well, if you think about it, here’s another way to also imagine the scale and why it took so long to make this transition. We had thousands of suppliers and when I use the term supplier in this case I really mean a vendor. I don’t mean factories. We had thousands of suppliers who themselves had tens and factories. So we had thousands of factories to work with. We had hundreds of mills that we were working with at sales level. We would develop from scratch. We would develop over 5000 new sticks per year. That had to go through some sort of process. We had to make all those work like clockwork. And so that’s one of the reason why it took so long to make it happen was getting all those players to understand. As I explained when we were doing color the changes to the color process we were frustrated because the mills weren’t playing nice with us. And as I explained to my partner in this, my color manager, I said we understand that the industry, whether it’s color in that case or fit or fabric the industry is like a school of fish. There’s hundreds of them all doing the same thing because everybody’s expecting them to do it the same way. We just turn one of those fish around and we’re saying, no, don’t do it that way, do it this way. Because we’re starting from a clean slate. We’re having to try to get them all to turn around while everybody else is saying, no, we’re doing it the right way, you’re doing it the wrong way. And so that’s the problem, is when you got that kind of scale, but at the same time, we were able to drive sales from 5 billion in apparel per year to close 14 billion time frame. It was a huge change.
[01:10:48.430] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, that analogy is really good. And by the way, it’s interesting for you to say it took a long time, but how long were you at Target?
[01:11:00.330] – Anton Wilson
15 years.
[01:11:01.970] – Patrick Sullivan
15 years? Going from 5 billion to 14 billion. How long did that take?
[01:11:08.550] – Anton Wilson
15 years.
[01:11:10.390] – Patrick Sullivan
Okay. All right. Well, no wonder you say it took a long time, but at the scale that you’re talking about, it’s not like you’re controlling it in house. Right? You’ve got all of these relationships contracts that you have to work with and get that consistency and then see the product reviews and make sure that they’re happening in a predictable manner. And I commend you on having the patience and diligence of being able to persevere, because, one, it’s a fun issue to kind of encounter and then to have a team of folks that you can collaborate with that ultimately start believing in it and saying, hey, there’s something to this. It’s a tremendous accomplishment.
[01:12:02.610] – Anton Wilson
Well, believe it or not, that’s another layer to the onion. When I first took the position, I had nine people. When I retired, I had over 200. I had to build that team. I had to put that team in place. And just like in the procedural changes with the textile mill, for example, in many cases, we were hiring people who had excellent policies, excellent work histories, but I had to unteach them the methods that they had used before and get them to adapt what we wanted them to do. And then, of course, at some point, the light bulb went off. And then eventually, whenever we hire a new person, the first thing that the old doctors would say is, don’t fight it. Do what they tell you. It works. It’s the whole thing. You have to overcome a certain amount of inertia before it begins to take hold and then grow organically. That was a lot of what we had to deal with.
[01:12:58.010] – Patrick Sullivan
Was there target branded Kool aid that you gave to the new hires?
[01:13:03.290] – Anton Wilson
There were more than one target Kool Aids. You want to make sure it was.
[01:13:10.850] – Patrick Sullivan
It was a consistent color, though, for sure.
[01:13:13.060] – Anton Wilson
Yes, it was.
[01:13:14.750] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, listen, Anton, I’ve got five pages of notes here, and I don’t think we’ve even finished your career. We’re in the middle of the Target experience, which there’s a lot to dive into, but let’s just take a couple of minutes and just wrap this up. Let’s call this one episode one and then let’s plant the seed for what you’d like to prioritize for episode two. I’ve got a number of asterisks of things that I’d like to dive into in terms of business value and again tying it back to digital Transformation Digital thread. But I think this is a great anchor from which to start diving into those and I think people are going to get a lot of value out of this episode as well. Do you have additional thoughts of things that you’d like to prioritize?
[01:14:09.010] – Anton Wilson
Well, strangely enough, you started out recollecting the initial conversation we had where I was talking about getting into the going back into the factories in my role at Target or through my team at Target and discovering the inefficiencies that were built into the cost structure. We haven’t even gotten to that yet, so I think we definitely want to do that. We haven’t talked about something that we had yet to talk in general, which is that another one of my functional roles at Target was to be a core member of the team that was developing the specification system, which ultimately became PLM or became for us PLM and other aspects of digitalization of the process. Yes, talk about that we have yet to talk about. I do want to come back and talk about this lean manufacturing and single piece flow and how it is and should be a basis for bringing manufacturing back to domestic facilities and how brands and retailers can and should utilize domestic sourcing profitably, how not to view it and how to view it and how to use it. Those are things I do want to talk because I think it sort of goes to your open objective, which is to talk about what needs to happen now, how can it happen, what can we do to help it along?
[01:15:52.450] – Patrick Sullivan
I think those are excellent topics and it’ll be interesting to see what feedback we get from the listeners, especially those in the RFA industry. Because I know that you’ve been participated in panels in the past and I’m envisioning some panels with some clients at upcoming conferences where these topics about domestic manufacturing and domestic sourcing and the profitability associated to those things is a very relevant topic. One, the sourcing issues out today with the supply chain, and then two, the global economy of there’s always cheaper labor, but is that really the best balance and what does that mix look like? So I know you’ve got some great insight and appreciation for it. So Anton, do you have any other words of wisdom in closing that you want to pass on?
[01:17:00.870] – Anton Wilson
I guess the only word of wisdom I would pass on based on what we’ve discussed to this point, is that I remember very clearly an article that was in the Wall Street Journal about ten or so years ago. Well, must have been more than ten, maybe twelve years ago about Toyota. And it was the wisdom of Toyota that said, we will move production around the world to take advantage of markets, both labor and sales, but we will always, always have a factory in Japan because we need our leaders to understand how products are made. They need to have real world, hands on experience with production. That is a missing component of what I would call training and development and career path and opportunities in our industry today, at least in the US. I think what made it possible for me to be successful, maybe not the only reason, but certainly a major contributor was having hands on experience was actually working with machines, working with production workers, helping analyze fault reasons and fix them, and an understanding sequential necessities of moral materials coming in, finished products going out, et cetera, et cetera. Those things would benefit our industry a lot if we would do more of that. I think that’s a missing component. And that’s the part of my career that I wish I could pass on to other people. That type of knowledge, I won’t call it wisdom, but that type of knowledge is something that I think would help a lot if we had more of that in abundance. And unfortunately, because of the way we’ve transitioned the industry, whether it’s know NAFTA, which everybody wants to blame, it was happening before NAFTA. Let’s be honest about it. All it did was open the spigot a little bit bigger, but we’ve abandoned it, recognizing the good that we’ve lost. I wish more people would have the opportunity to do that. And the desire. It’s so impactful, so helpful.
[01:19:24.370] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, I appreciate you sharing that. And I think, especially coming out of the pandemic, I feel that people have a bigger appreciation, at least for the moment, of that personal connection. And I was just on a virtual call yesterday and everybody was on camera and somebody was in the office, like corporate office, and everybody was kind of shocked.
[01:19:57.790] – Anton Wilson
What are you doing?
[01:19:59.470] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, we just did a year program and everybody was virtual and coming out, and then they’re back in the office. But it enhances the relationship, it enhances the understanding, it expedites alignment, and ultimately, to your point, those tangible experiences that help you make better decisions. And I think that’s great insight and that article and the philosophy of Toyota in Japan, I think it’s very relevant. So thanks for sharing. Yeah.
[01:20:33.850] – Anton Wilson
Yeah
[01:20:34.210] – Patrick Sullivan
All right. Well, Anton, I’ve taken up a lot of your time today, but it’s been great. Yeah, thank you. I feel the same way, and I’m really inspired and I’m really excited to share all this information with the audience and very interested to hear everybody’s feedback. And so if you thought this was great, I know that the next episode is going to be great. So everybody, thank you so much for joining anton, I appreciate everything that you shared today and the collaborative conversation, it’s been really fun for me.
[01:21:08.060] – Anton Wilson
Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been great. Thank you. Great.
[01:21:12.710] – Patrick Sullivan
All right, everybody, so look out for episode two, and we’ll continue to have further discussion. If you want to reach out to me or anybody at ArcherGrey, feel free. You can go at info@archergrey.com. And that’s G-R-E-Y. Since we’re talking about colors, let’s get specific. So thank you again for listening, and we will look forward to connecting with you guys soon. Take care.