The case a supplier has to make.
Two or three inquiries a week reach Richard Amodio from factories, fabric mills, and component makers hoping to reach US, UK, and European brands. Almost all of them lead with a capability list.
A capability list is not an argument.
Machines, certifications, floor space, minimum order quantities, a price list. All of it necessary, none of it a reason to change anything. The brand being approached already has factories that can do the work, and switching costs it money, time, and a season of risk.
The approaches that get a meeting answer a different question: where this supplier fits in the line the brand is already planning. That is the same discipline a product proposal has to satisfy inside the brand, applied from the other side of the table.
What a merchandiser asks.
What slot does this fill, what does it replace, what does it cost to switch, and why now. Four questions, asked in that order, usually within the first minute.
In the brand's terms.
Not the factory's terms. A supplier that can describe its capability as a position in someone else's assortment is answering the question that was actually asked.
The pile.
A catalogue and a price list, sent without a case, join the pile. Not because the capability is poor, but because nobody receiving it has been given a reason to act.
A brand's merchandiser reads a factory pitch the way a business reads a product proposal. What slot does this fill, what does it replace, what does it cost me to switch, and why now. A mill that can answer those questions in the brand's own terms gets a meeting. One that sends a catalogue and a price list joins the pile.
Richard Amodio · Before the briefAdvice from the person who used to receive the pitch.
Most advisors to this audience have sat on one side of the table. Richard Amodio has sat on both. As a divisional VP at Eastpak and Timberland he was the executive those approaches were addressed to, deciding what entered the line and what did not. From Hong Kong he ran fourteen factories across China with a team of seven merchandisers, which is the same problem seen from the supplier's chair.
That is the whole of the value here. Not an opinion about how brands might think, but a specific account of how the decision is taken, by whom, on what clock, and what has to be in front of them before it can be taken at all.
What the engagement covers.
Strategic where the question is which Western brands a factory should be talking to at all, and specific where it is one category or one item. The deliverable is a case a brand can act on, not an introduction and not a translation of the existing catalogue.
Positioning.
Which brands the capability genuinely suits, which categories inside them, and where the supplier is one of many rather than one of few. Read against the assortments those brands are actually planning.
Related: product line and item strategyThe commercial case.
For a category or a single item: the slot it fills, what it displaces, the target cost and margin it has to live inside, and the reason the timing is now. Written the way the receiving side writes it.
Related: brand ethos in the productHow the decision is taken.
Who inside a Western brand decides, what a merchandiser needs to see, how long the upstream stage really takes, and where an approach dies quietly because it arrived in the wrong month.
Related: product commercialisationPlain answers.
Including that a capability is not competitive for the brands being targeted, or that the gap is in finishing rather than price. That conversation is cheaper than a year of unanswered emails.
Related: cross-cultural leadershipKnown ground, not a map.
Sourcing in China since 1989, and factory development across Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and Mexico. Suppliers outside those countries are welcome to make contact; the advice is simply better where the ground is already known.
