Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Employee Experience

The Problem

As a global fashion brand, fabric is the essential raw material you work with, and the first thing developed on a seasonal calendar. Prior to implementing Airtable, Calvin Klein did not have a clear, defined path of communication for all of the people involved in that process -- from the mills producing the various fabrics oversees, to the multiple product and design teams reliant on having up-to-date information about which fabrics were being developed, including their cost, lead time, quantities available, material, and so on.

Historically, the department tasked with sourcing, acquiring, and distributing fabric for the brand documented everything on individual, offline Excel spreadsheets. Over time, these became increasingly painful to manage. After going through the manual process of compiling all of the new fabrics available for the next season’s line, the fabric sourcing team needed to move on to developing the following season’s deliverables. But, because a number of teams downstream in the calendar and process were so reliant on the information contained in those single, offline sheets, there was a constant barrage of back-and-forth communication, which was so labor intensive that the fabric sourcing team often couldn’t move on to the next season.

The Solution

Jo Ann Shober, the product development manager tasked with fabric sourcing at that time, realized her team needed a better solution for capturing which fabrics were being developed for a season — both as a way to drive KPIs around fabric development, and also just to make her own teams’ lives more manageable. She came across Airtable via word-of-mouth, and was immediately intrigued by how visual it was. For a design company looking to create a raw material library, the fact that it’s possible to take an image, and then marry it up to a specific fabric and cost, was a huge differentiator to other platforms being used at the corporate level, like Excel. Deciding to explore it further, she began building out a digital fabric library for Calvin Klein, where all of the company's cross-functional partners, hub offices, and mills around the world could collaborate in real-time, accessing and updating information as needed.

The results

Airtable has changed the way Calvin Klein works. It has enabled the company to dramatically improve the entire process of sourcing, acquiring, and distributing fabrics for the brand, not just in terms of reducing manual entries and streamlining communication flows, but also by enabling the company to roll up costs, take account of fabric lead times, and help the fabric sourcing team to identify and get in front of issues almost a year out from when they would actually need to place orders for various accounts.

Additionally, having a visual database of fabrics that anyone can access has been invaluable, and brought significant global collaboration to the process of fabric sourcing. Now, if a hub office is also working on fabric development at the same time as the New York office, those teams have complete visibility into what everyone is working on. And, by allowing vendors to input fabric details directly into Airtable via the company's "forms" feature, the platform has reduced the need for any manual data entry on the part of the fabric sourcing team, as the mills can just add real-time updates themselves as soon as they occur. There are less charts being sent around, less confusion, and everything is now just in one simple and beautiful collaborative digital workplace.  

Metrics

Prior to Airtable, Calvin Klein’s entire fabric sourcing workflow was done via email. This meant dealing with hundreds of emails a season, including fabric requests, prototype requests, charts, and the list goes on. Post Airtable, all requests are now located in one central hub, which updates live, cutting down on hundreds of emails a season and saving employees weeks of work.

Airtable has also greatly improved Calvin Klein’s product development cycle, enabling the company to have a defined start and stop to the raw material development process (approximately 30 days) since all the data is now in one place, and the responsible team can clearly see and make sure it’s complete. Previously, developments took upwards of 60 days or longer to finalize because they didn’t have anywhere to capture that data and make sure it was complete.

Finally, Airtable has helped Calvin Klein to foster a more dynamic and collaborative workplace, improving employee engagement and a feeling of transparency across teams. The system has been so successful at Calvin Klein that now multiple additional brands and other functions within the PVH umbrella have started using Airtable, both for sourcing as well as other use cases related to product development.

The Technology

Airtable

Disruptive Factor

The industry standard in retail has not been to go into a system to look at, or input, information related to fabric sourcing, and this was particularly true at the mills and hub offices around the world. Shober’s vision, and her ability for workflow abstraction — i.e. seeing things for how they should be, versus how they are today — was game changing for her organization. It was also incredibly forward thinking of Calvin Klein to empower Shober with the freedom and ability to use and develop her own technology solution for improving the business.

As Shober worked cross-functionally to train and engage the relevant teams across the company on her new system, it was eagerly devoured. Within a year, everyone was familiar with how to use it, working together more cohesively and more productively. 

Shober has since shared Airtable with other teams within Calvin Klein and its umbrella organization, PVH, encouraging them to use for their own particular use-cases. Speedo, as one example, is now using Airtable to help streamline several different areas of the business. And now, as Calvin Klein looks into building and improving their own corporate IT systems, with the help of Shober, they are taking inspiration from Airtable — from the library concept itself, to various ways they can connect different areas of the business to have similar visibility across teams.

Shining Moment

Shober has been recognized throughout Calvin Klein, being asked to give speeches at their town hall meetings during the Airtable rollout, and also receiving several promotions into more innovation-centric roles. The best part for Shober, however, has been learning about other teams’ workflows and understanding the drivers of creativity and productivity for each team member, so she could help other teams design their own perfect workflows.