Zack Leonard: 0:03

We help them match them with designers and engineers based on the type of product. So, a cut and sew product would be more just an industrial designer. Whereas if you have mechanical engineering needs like injection molds, you match them with a designer and an engineer. And then if you get into electronics, you're adding an electrical engineer that can either help with all the, PCB development or adding another software side of it if that has Bluetooth technology and stuff that needs to actually have programming into it

Tom Raftery: 0:31

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply Chain podcast, the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Digital Supply Chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Zack. Zack, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Zack Leonard: 0:55

Thanks, Tom. Happy to be here. Yeah. My name is Zack Leonard. I'm one of the founders and current chief product officer and president of a company called Gembah, where we help retail, e-commerce and Amazon sellers create and manufacture consumer goods so they can go make millions and millions of dollars selling their products.

Tom Raftery: 1:16

And how did this idea of what you're doing in Gembah, and we'll get into the details of what you're doing in a second. But, did you wake up one morning and say, why don't I help manufacturers, manufacture, or, what was the, the journey to that idea and that, setting up Gembah.

Zack Leonard: 1:36

Yeah, so it's a great question. So about five years ago, I have two other co-founders. We kind of started meeting, once a month and trying to think of a, a problem. And we did a bunch of research to understand the market. I was in the same day delivery space, so the last mile of logistics, and they were both in the product space. One had a pet products brand, and the other was in the promo product space. And so we all kind of came together and started talking about, you know, this idea and this concept of Gembah. It really started off with helping small to midsize businesses, with supply chain expertise and local, help within their supply chain. So, you know, we thought that, there was a different way to go about it than having to travel to China or going to Alibaba and people had horror stories, going to Alibaba trying to find products. And also when it came to custom products, alibaba's not really your best bet. They did a really good job at cataloging what's already exists in the world as far as making new products or developing new products, or making even slight enhancements to certain products that didn't exist either. And so the genesis of this is really to help that ecosystem first, which was catered mostly towards small midsize businesses that, didn't have that help or expertise in house, we could help give them that local expertise by setting 'em up with people locally, wherever they're doing wherever they have their supply chain set up, with their factory set up. And then it sort of evolved into a full stop, A to Z from concept, helping out with research and developing the product, and then matching designers, and engineers to that product as we continued down, as we found that same customer profile. Not only do they have issues, managing their supply chain, but they also have issues and lack of expertise actually developing new products and extending their brands, to products that may be complimentary or, doing a second iteration of their product. So that's really how the whole, evolution of what Gembah has, started off versus what it is today. And now. Today we've, you know, developed and helped produce over a thousand different products. We have a factory network of over 3000 embedded factories in eight different countries. and we have a design and engineering network of over, you know, 250, 300 designers, engineers that have worked at places like Under Armour, and I've worked on projects like the Tickle Me Elmo and have made some really cool products, for Weber grills and stuff like that. So a very robust, network of both designers, engineers, and factories that can help swarm the customer. Their customers products and help them either develop new products, move their supply chain, or help get more control over their supply chain on a regular basis.

Tom Raftery: 4:19

Okay. And where did the name Gembah come?

Zack Leonard: 4:23

Yeah, so Gembah is actually Kaizen manufacturing theory or, system it's, it literally means the, the place where value is created on the manufacturing floor. And so if you're familiar with Gembah walks, especially in the Japanese culture, basically, you know, people go in the factory and just kind of stand and evaluate what the operations looks like and figure out how they can limit waste or figure out how they can make the operations better. And so in the Japanese Kaizen manufacturing theory, that's what it means. And then the Chinese theory, Gambai means cheers or let's do this. So, it's kind of a mixture of those two to combine, to create, the name Gembah for our business. So it's kind of, work hard, play hard as well. You have the work hard, which is the, always looking for operational efficiency and making sure you have value, and then the play hard, which is, you know, cheers or let's do this

Tom Raftery: 5:14

Nice. Nice, nice. So who's a typical customer Zack?

Zack Leonard: 5:20

Yeah, so typically a customer that we work with is, kind of three different personas. One is they're just starting out and they're looking for help developing a product. So entrepreneurs that have some funding or have an idea, uh, and are looking for expertise to help actually create the collateral. Another persona is you're, you're scaling smb. So someone who's created one or two hero products and are looking to either move their supply chain cause they've out scaled their current supply chain, or they're looking to create complimentary products to their, uh, existing hero product. And the third, third persona is more of your High frequency Amazon or e eCommerce seller that has a large SKU of products that need helps, you know, managing it, sourcing in different countries or coming out with fast iterations of new products at a high velocity. So, you know, a lot of the Amazon aggregators, uh, we've worked with some of them to help them get a lot of products out in a really fast, uh, timeframe.

Tom Raftery: 6:18

Is it just that you're sourcing manufacturers for them, or, I know it's not So tell me what else it is you're, you're helping, these personas with.

Zack Leonard: 6:29

Yeah, we're helping them when a customer comes in, regardless of the persona and we identify that they're ready for a design, journey, we help them match them with designers and engineers based on the type of product. So, you know, a cut and sew product would be more just an industrial designer. Whereas if you have mechanical engineering needs like injection molds, you match them with a designer and an engineer. And then if you get into electronics, you're adding an electrical engineer that can either help with all the, PCB development or you know, adding another software side of it if that has Bluetooth technology and stuff that needs to actually have programming into it. So the team kind of swarms our customer and helps 'em develop the collateral. And then once they go into the sourcing side of things, we match them up based on the region that they want to go produce it in, and help them kind of source the factories. And then once they are ready to press go on the purchase order, we help them with QC and booking logistics and all that good stuff as well. So we, again, we kind of swarm that team around them, based on the type of product that they have. And that's regardless of whatever persona that comes in, whether that's just starting out scaling s and b or high frequency, you know, aggregator slash e-commerce brand.

Tom Raftery: 7:39

Okay. And there's a pretty noticeable shift for various reasons to get manufacturing out of China now from certain quarters. Is that something that you can help organizations with or are all your manufacturers based in China? I know they're not, cuz you said earlier you've got them in lots of countries. So how does, how does that work?

Zack Leonard: 8:02

Yeah, that's a great question. So, obviously, the geopolitical sentiments and everything that's gone on, you know, rising labor, costs in China, it's starting to become, uh, right zero covid as well. It's getting harder to travel to China. It's getting harder to vet your factory. It's getting harder to, have consistent timelines and accurate, shipments coming through on. From the Chinese side. So, you know, we do help a lot of our customers move outside of China, evaluate supply chains outside of China. We have, teams in Mexico, in India, and Vietnam as an example, that we, help our customers start evaluating what that looks like. And yeah, I, think that if that's something that interests you we, Gembah can definitely help, but rather you do that through Gembah or not, I think it's always a good idea to, uh, start evaluating your options regardless if you wanna get outside of China or not. If you wanna stay in China, there's, there's always, you know, I, I like to have plan A and plan B in case something does happen. Like a covid spike happens and they shut down the factories for a good amount of time. Or shipping lanes get shut down in one part of their, you know, chin, like the northern part of China. You need to move your production down to the southern part of China. The first thing you know, whenever we're looking at, uh, a product to be sourced outside of China is to make sure that they have the capability to do so. So like electronics as an example, still the best place in the world to manufacture electronics and a mass scale is gonna be in China. Whereas if you move into more of a cut and sew as like apparel or furniture, you know, those are things that can be made outside of China pretty well in places like India, Vietnam, and Mexico, and other parts of South America.

Tom Raftery: 9:41

And what if I want to multisource my manufacturing, if I want, at least a third of my manufacturing in Southeast Asia, a third of it, let's say in Central South America and another third of it in Europe. Is that possible?

Zack Leonard: 9:57

It's definitely possible. It's just gonna depend on the type of product you have. So again, more of the apparel, cut and sew fashion, those types of things are gonna be much more readily available in that type of demographic or that type of spread between, you know, the thirds that you mentioned, if you're doing something like injection molding, there's a very limited amount of places that can handle that type of, customization at mass scale, and China's still probably your best bet. And, the other thing that is interesting is that, you may not know this, but your audience may not know this, but by sourcing in places like Vietnam, you're already doing multi-sourcing to a degree, right? Vietnam is very limited access to raw materials. So they have a lot of assembly factories, which are the ones that actually put everything together as far as access to, the plastics or the mills or, the wood or the metals that they assemble the final goods at, they don't really have a lot of access to that. So they're sourcing from places like India or China, as such. So that's why if you do start the evaluation of going into Vietnam, typically you're gonna see larger and longer lead times as a result of that, because Vietnam has to import a lot of their raw materials to get into the assembly lines. Uh, whereas places like China and India have a lot of access to raw materials. They, they have access to the plastic, they have access to the, the mills, and they had access to the wood and the, and the metal metals a lot, more readily available than places like Vietnam.

Tom Raftery: 11:26

Okay. And you, you've mentioned a couple of times, fabric and electronics. Are those the two primary industries that you're dealing with, or are there many, or, how does that kind of break out?

Zack Leonard: 11:39

Yeah, we have, categories of excellence based on types of products. So baby products, sports and outdoors, home and kitchen, some electronics. so it's pretty broad as to what we do, but, certain products, you know, like food and makeup, like those types of products we typically don't touch because if you're importing those into a different country, there's a lot of regulations that go along with it. And, you know, we try and avoid things like that.

Tom Raftery: 12:03

That's fair enough. Fair enough. Do you have any, referenceable customer wins that you can speak to?

Zack Leonard: 12:11

Absolutely. yeah, we, we have a ton of case studies on our website that can be referenced, but I can bring one up in particular that, you know, we're pretty proud of. There's a company out there called the Ollie World and they make a revolutionary baby swaddle. and they came to us you know, a little over, almost two years ago, and we're still working with them today, but you know, they had some pretty poor experience with, their existing supply chain. And what we found out is that they were using a sourcing agent. A sourcing agent was using, multiple factories. And so they had inconsistent quality control over their final product. And their sourcing agent wasn't telling them that that was happening. And so, you know, it took. Took us to, you know, evaluate that and hear the story and kind of start working with them to figure out what was going on. And then finally, and we made the decision that we wanted to, you know, source both inside and outside of China. And we opened up, you know, sourcing, in Vietnam, India, and China. and successfully, you know, started to get production back up and running. Gave them full control over their supply chain. As we don't, we're not a sourcing agent. We put people directly in touch with the factory and we're kind of an extension of their, of their team. So think of us sitting, standing more shoulder to shoulder as opposed to, you know, in between the factory relationship. That's our, that's what probably the differentiator between us and the sourcing. The biggest differentiator. Between us and the sourcing agent is we actually want to be your team as opposed to, you know, someone standing in between. But anyway, yeah, so we've, we've started to, help them ramp up production in different countries, and now they're facilitating orders and, you know, big box retailers like Target as well as on their e-commerce site. So really helped them through a, what was a challenging time in their business and got their production back up and running. And now they're one of the, I think they were just awarded the best baby swaddle in a, in the world, or at least in America. They were ranked number one. So, huge win for that company and we're just happy to be a part of that journey with them.

Tom Raftery: 14:06

Okay. Phenomenal. And you mentioned the three different personas. everything from the, the startup with an idea right the way through. Are there a lot of those. Startups with just an idea that you kind of take from inception through to full manufacturing, or is that just a one off from time to time?

Zack Leonard: 14:25

I think historically that was a good mix of our customers. But as we grow, and I think as the economy has turned, I think a lot less people have that budget. So we're starting to see a shift to more of the small, the midsize business persona as well as the, larger brand aggregate or e-commerce seller. You know, I think that's just the nature of how time goes. Like when there's less disposable income, then there's not as much time you can devote towards, you know, your passion projects and see if you can get something up versus, you know, when times are good and you have a lot of cash, you can start taking those, bets and those risks. So it kind of just depends on, you know, how the market is and how things are going. But we help all of those different personas depending on, you know, if they have the ability to withstand that financial, part of, the, the equation?

Tom Raftery: 15:12

Cool. Cool. And where to next for Gembah? What, what are your, mid and longer term plans?

Zack Leonard: 15:18

Yeah. So midterm, you know, we're, uh, a tech, tech enabled service, so we're trying to continue to develop the technology that we have to help, you know, get a. Better customer experience, more data, better honing in on, the ability to help match our customers faster, with our, factory network. Um, and I think longer term, we wanna be seen as the, the verb of, go Gembah that, right? So if someone has an idea for a product, they think of us as that place to go. To get that product made.

Tom Raftery: 15:54

Nice. Nice. And what's your, what's your go to market for that?

Zack Leonard: 15:58

Yeah, I think it's technology. As we continue to develop the technology to make it faster and more accessible for everyone to reach out to these factories and reach out to these really talented, designers and engineers, that helps us scale, much faster. So that's our bet is that the technology is going to, make the experience much more accessible, easier and, and faster, and hopefully cheaper than if they were to try to go effort themselves or even with some help internally.

Tom Raftery: 16:26

Okay. I'm curious as well, given that you've got all these different customers, are you able to pull out any trends, looking across them, any interesting data that you can extract and use?

Zack Leonard: 16:42

Yeah, typically we don't share that stuff cause that's kind of our secret sauce but I think if you look at the categories that people are searching, you know, from mass volumes, you know, it kind of aligns with the, categories I talked about earlier, which are, you know, baby products and. And, uh, electronics and, and home goods and oh, sports and outdoors, you know, as far as products that, you know, most people are looking to either get into or sell. But yeah, I mean, that, that's all I can really share, share right now.

Tom Raftery: 17:11

Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Zack, is there any question that I haven't asked that you wish I had? Or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Zack Leonard: 17:25

Yeah, I mean, I think, the biggest thing that people come to us and, and ask that maybe hasn't been asked is how easy or hard is it to actually source in different countries? and so, you know, it, like I, I kind of alluded to earlier is depending on the type of product, it can be challenging and I think people are really used to how China, uh, operates, which is very fast, very sophisticated, and they have a, you know, tens of thousands of factories. Whereas these other countries, they don't have that level of sophistication. So if they're, you know, China's the gold standard of, of communication and iteration and, and speed. You know, think of places like India. probably 10 to 15 years behind in terms of infrastructure and, and communication standard. Like they don't have an Alibaba. I mean, Alibaba has some factories in India on them, on that platform, but, there isn't like a readily available way for you to search that. And so the expectation should be that it's gonna take a little bit longer. And I think also what the requirements are to actually go source product there is different. So in China, Look at their catalog of products in Alibaba, or if they send you a catalog and say, I want you to make this, maybe make some slight tweaks and then go, go sell it. Whereas places like India and Mexico are much more set up like contract manufacturers where they actually want a, a design pack or a tech pack or a bill of materials, and they're gonna want, they're gonna want a samples before they'll even talk to you. Just having that, understanding going into it, that it's not a quick, one month endeavor, it takes way more time than, To start, you know, getting to the final, like ready to place a PO point. So it's, again, if you're looking to, switch your production before Chinese New Year. Like, that's gonna be a very tough endeavor. That's, you know, two and a half months from now. But if you're looking to make a longer term investment and get out of China and go to places like India, Vietnam, or Mexico, it can take, you know, six to 12 months to finally get pos up and running depending on, you know, how much collateral and how much you're willing to invest in it, and the timing that you're, you're, you're willing to, to spend on it. So, that'd be my advice to the, you know, your audience is, Go down that path, but know that's gonna take a little bit longer than working with places in China

Tom Raftery: 19:35

Interesting. Interesting. Cool. Zack, that. If people want to know more about yourself or about Gembah or any of the things we touched on in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Zack Leonard: 19:47

Yeah first you could always go to our website, gembah.com. That's G E M B A h.com. You could also, you know, Reach out to me on LinkedIn, Zack Leonard, and I'd be happy to help in any way that we can.

Tom Raftery: 20:02

Fantastic. Great. Zack, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Zack Leonard: 20:07

Thanks for having me, Tom. Great to be here.

Tom Raftery: 20:10

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, simply drop me an email to TomRaftery@outlook.com If you like the show, please don't forget to click Follow on it in your podcast application of choice to be sure to get new episodes as soon as they're published Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find a show. Thanks, catch you all next time.