Key Takeaway
- Justin Wall's transition from an event planning background to spearheading operations at KNS International illustrates the adaptability required in today’s job market.
- KNS International has grown from a small dropshipping operation to a major player in e-commerce with revenue exceeding nine figures, showcasing the potential of scalable business models.
- The company's strategy involves deep understanding and control over its supply chain, which allows it to maintain high standards of quality and service.
- Customer-centric approaches are integral to KNS’s strategy, emphasizing the importance of aligning product quality with customer expectations to foster brand loyalty.
- Justin discussed the importance of operational efficiency, including the monitoring of key performance indicators like on-time fulfillment rates and cost-per-unit processing to ensure the smooth running of operations.
- The integration of advanced technologies and methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Kaizen are pivotal in driving continuous improvement in their operations.
- KNS’s ability to adapt to consumer demands and market changes is a testament to its agile operational strategy, which has been crucial for its rapid growth.
- Justin highlighted the significance of data-driven decision-making in operations, ensuring that strategies are based on accurate insights and can lead to effective outcomes.
- The discussion also covered the balance between maintaining product excellence and efficient fulfillment processes, which is critical for customer satisfaction and operational success.
- Finally, Justin's insights underscore the broader theme that visionary leadership and strategic operational management are essential for thriving in the competitive e-commerce landscape.
View Written Interview
Hey everybody, welcome back. I am pumped for today's guest because not only is he doing a bunch of really interesting things inside of a big brand and I know he's gonna share a wealth of knowledge, but also this is a portfolio of brands. This is a really big company. We're talking about a company that started drop shipping, for all you drop shippers out there, and is now above nine figures and killing it where they have a portfolio of their brands. We're talking about KNS International And today I am fortunate enough to be talking with their director of operations Justin Wall. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks, Samir. Glad to be here.
Would love for you to just kind of kick things off and tell us a little bit about KNS International and tell us a little bit about the brands.
Absolutely. I think probably my story is a little weird. I'll just kind of describe how I dropped into e-commerce because maybe it just gives more legitimacy to everyone's sort of journey in their career. But COVID graduate, I was planning on graduating in experience design and management, going into more of the events, event planning, and event tech space. Events don't happen in COVID. So I bounced into manufacturing for three years kind of figured out how to do project management and ops management, and learned this whole space. And that ultimately prepared me to drop into an e-commerce role as a director of ops at KNS. And KNS is awesome. Like we've been drop shipping for 20-something years. We started shipping anything we could under the sun. The story begins with drop shipping left-handed hockey sticks. Cause I think our founder said, why not? And we built a business around this idea that, you know, we can be the best in the space and it was about seven or eight years ago, we started doing shoes and having a lot of success with shoes and realizing, you know, the, Hey, this is something that people love. Maybe we can do it better than anybody else as well. And, you know, you just have that entrepreneurial fire, that spirit. So we started to build a brand and the journey collection is kind of our women's line. That was our flagship. We've had a couple of other micro brands and have since acquired Taft clothing, which is a premium men's brand that started in Utah as well and that's just become like our business, our passion. And that's what we love doing every day, is shoes.
I love it. And you just said the best in the business. So I'm curious potentially, how do you define success at the company and how is it measured, especially where you've got this big portfolio? You've also got all these little, not little, you've got all these other brands kind of underneath the portfolio. How do you define success?
Yeah, I do, so I'll take the more philosophical approach. I think Simon Sinek in his book, The Infinite Game, is one of my favorites, he's like, you can't win business. No set of rules says after this point, you're the sum ultimate winner. Everyone's done. Everyone goes home. So I've tried to start to internalize this idea that for us to be the best and to be most successful It just means we have to be able to challenge what we were yesterday and show that we're becoming better than we were yesterday and growing and progressing both in the way that we do business and our mentality around how we treat our customers and the quality of our product, all of those things together. But philosophy aside, obviously there are measures you've got to kind of use to figure out the answers. We've got a lot of financial goals that tell us we're successful.
We are owned by Private Equity, so they have financial goals and we know we're successful as we're meeting targets and we're on track to reach kind of the payout at the end. So I feel like a lot of times at this point it comes down to the financials and how much money can you make and how much can you put away for the business.
Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I love it. I'm especially because you're on the ops side. I get curious about performance there and different aspects of that, right? Because I think it's if you do not have an operations person and you're listening to this podcast and you're a founder or a CEO or like get an operations person unless that is 100 % your skill set. If that's your skill set, then great. Then you're the ops person and make sure you've got a marketer or someone else in your corner helping you grow the business. But that was the most important hire I ever made. And it's such an important role in every business. And so I'm curious in your view, as in your position, like what are the key performance indicators that companies should prioritize when assessing maybe their fulfillment operations, right? And how do these metrics kind of impact just the overall business success?
Yeah, I agree with you on the ops piece. I mean, I joined the team over a year ago. I think I was kind of their first official ops person coming in with at least a little bit of ops experience. So, I mean, what I know is what I know. Granted, there's a lot more there for me to figure out over time. But I think the benefit is getting an outside set of eyes that looks at things from more of like a throughput and capacity standpoint.
I think that's probably the biggest difference of an ops perspective versus finance or marketing or some of those. I'm gonna look at things like what's our on time and at full rate for fulfillment. Like are we getting stuff out when it needs to get out and if not, why? I think that the other benefit that comes with ops is you don't ever stop at the top level. You're gonna dig down to get into the details. And there are tons of methodologies, right? You've got Lean and Six Sigma, you got Kaizen, take your pick but you're gonna understand what's happening, kind of like get a pulse on the operation, know what's happening on the ground floor and the shop floor. And that's where you're gonna be thinking and making decisions to help improve your throughput. So to kind of answer your question, when I look at the success of our operation and what KPIs to kind of use, probably the three biggest things are on time and full rate. And that's just a quick gut check of whether we're okay. The second is our cost-per-unit processing rate and it's easy to just dump it all in together and save all the cost against what you shipped. There's a really clean number. So we like to use that. We can break it down by department too. But I find that the throughput rate for those departments, like your pick and pack rate, and our replenishment rate, are critical to building a really clear view of what's happening on the shop floor and where your bottlenecks are going to be.
Yeah, I love those. That makes a lot of sense. I feel like we've had this complete counterargument with so many guests at this point where some guests are like everything's about the customer, right? Amazon is a prime example. Everything's about the customer. They don't care about the product, right? It's the customer experience. How can I optimize the conversion rate? How can I make the user experience the best, the returns, the deliveries, all that stuff, right? Then you got on the other side.
It's all about the product, right? I gotta make the best product in the entire world. It's gonna speak for itself, right? Maybe Apple, even though of course they do have their experiences and their tech guys and everything else, but just for lack of a better example. Everything's about that unboxing experience and just making the customer happy by creating the best product ever. I'm curious, right, as you're kind of in this position of both a little bit, you're like, hey, we've got these brands where we are trying to make these incredible shoes and these incredible, incredible products, but then fulfillment and everything else, the time it gets delivered, all that kind of stuff, you know. Is it a balancing act for you? Is it, are you like, hey, there are key aspects here that if I focus on that, it's going to develop into meaningful growth? Like, I don't know if I'm asking it the right way, but I'm just kind of curious about your thoughts on it.
So I think you can have all of it and hopefully, I'll be the peacemaker that gets everyone on the same page here. But I think if you're having to compete with the product experience, your customer experience and the success of your fulfillment operation at the same time, something might be wrong. And maybe that's the first red flag. I think if each team in your company has the mentality that we are gonna have the best craft, whatever that may be, and spends their time focused on just polishing and perfecting it. It flows through the sequence, in time, and it has the effect that it needs at the appropriate time. Like I'm trying to get orders out. I don't necessarily want to be thinking about the product per se and being worried about like, maybe I shouldn't ship this product. Does that make sense? So have your product team be the absolute best they can be and make the best product. And when they give it to you, then you can be the best fulfillment operation the world's ever seen right and get that thing out. I think a lot of times like service rates and delivery times now are becoming the biggest thing, the Amazon effect, right? They want it in two days. They want it this morning. Like that's where operations and fulfillment I think have to dial down and figure that out. But knowing that ultimately as long as things get out on time, that's a big part of the customer experience. So it is a balancing act. I think we can trust the rest of our team to help balance it for us.
Yeah, no, that makes sense. I love that. Thank you for being the peacemaker, Justin. I mean, but it is like it's, it's your balancing the customer experience, you're balancing operational efficiencies, cost-effectiveness, right? You're kind of touching upon a lot of these aspects. Right. So, I mean, as, as, right, as, as you're kind of looking at all this, right, you've, you, you, I'm sure you have access to a lot of raw data. And so how do you take that raw data and kind of try to sink it into actionable insights that do drive improvements in operational efficiencies or cost-effectiveness or other aspects of the business?