Major Global Retailer Launches High-Profile Apparel Brand in Fourteen Months
Problem
An international golf manufacturer and retailer recently brought on a very well-known professional golfer to build a new apparel brand when his exclusive deal with a competitor was set to expire after more than twenty-five years. The new brand was scheduled to launch in 12 months but did not have a name, employees, or a product. The clock was ticking, and the company needed to build an elevated brand experience around an iconic athlete while simultaneously meeting its objectives within its core hard goods market. They brought in Excelerate to manage this quickly-evolving and highly important project.
Approach
This timeline and launch represented a massive strategic program management project involving stakeholders across almost all functional areas (Finance, Product, Operations, Facilities, Legal, Marketing, and Executive) of the organization. Excelerate began by conducting extensive stakeholder interviews to understand resourcing needs including incremental headcount and other operating expenses as well as capital expenditures to build out warehouse space and other infrastructure. Ongoing cross-functional core team meetings occurred weekly with workstream leads, and executive steerco meetings every 2-3 weeks. This meeting cadence ensured key decisions were made and other issues could be addressed.
The majority of the project operated with strict confidentiality under an internal NDA. If word leaked out there would have been potential financial damages as well as a negative impact on a carefully choreographed brand launch. All planning meetings and status updates had to be scheduled carefully to include only team members "in the know" and approved to contribute.
On the product side, Excelerate held extensive planning sessions to reverse engineer an accelerated product development calendar that would normally take more than eighteen months and condense it down to fourteen. This was a tall order: vendors hadn't even been selected nor had a logo been designed. Weekly meetings were held with operations to track tasks and milestone dates to open up a separate section of the warehouse with new racks, conveyor systems, and pack stations in preparation to fulfill high volumes of ecommerce orders.
Finally, Excelerate conducted multiple workshops and meetings with the ecommerce team and corporate finance, and further facilitated requirements gathering for the new website launch that included a new payment processing vendor among other changes.
Results
Excelerate’s key strategic project and program management (SPM) kept the project on time and its team members accountable. By bringing in Excelerate, the brand managed to condense a typical 18-month schedule down to 14-months. Importantly, they did not sacrifice quality or due diligence in accelerating their timetable as Excelerate brought its SPM experience and expertise to bear. The brand launched on time, ecommerce sales easily exceeded their launch goals, and the team that was built to support the launch has continued with plans for sustained growth.