Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news of the.
Speaker 2: Most successful product in all of Shark tanks. If you
Speaker 2: see my underachiever fellow sharks, just remind them as bomba
Speaker 2: sucks my investment.
Speaker 3: It sucks.
Speaker 2: You don't know, it's usually it always is, very honestly
Speaker 2: the entrepreneur. And then you back into how they're making good,
Speaker 2: manufacturing it, delivering it, and then you go into the numbers.
Speaker 1: Of course, one of the biggest challenges with these consumer
Speaker 1: types of products is obviously sourcing the materials and the
Speaker 1: other supplies that you need to make, package and ship
Speaker 1: those things out. And I guess that's where Kareem comes
Speaker 1: in with a lifetime of experience in that area. And
Speaker 1: I am curious not so much as to what kind
Speaker 1: of advice you give Damen and other entrepreneurs, but how
Speaker 1: much you've had to change that advice over the years
Speaker 1: as things like tariffs and geopolitical issues have kind of shifted.
Speaker 3: What the supply chain.
Speaker 4: Is sure, I mean, the supply chain is the most consistent,
Speaker 4: inconsistent market you could ever think of. The only consistency
Speaker 4: is inconsistency. And the problem is is that you have
Speaker 4: this mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors, And the only
Speaker 4: way to really be disruption proof is to be nimble
Speaker 4: and adept and agile and have plan BCD and E,
Speaker 4: because in the end, if the supply chain can't deliver,
Speaker 4: who is the ultimate consumer customer?
Speaker 3: It breaks down all the way back.
Speaker 4: So whether we're talking about a pandemic, or we're talking
Speaker 4: about tariffs or a strike at the ports or whatever
Speaker 4: it may be, the ultimate fulfillment is to the customer
Speaker 4: at the end. So the strategies that we always have
Speaker 4: to look at are really industry by industry, product by
Speaker 4: product to determine how to manage these things.
Speaker 5: Well, you mentioned the pandemic, and this is something I
Speaker 5: always wonder about when it comes to conversations about supply chains.
Speaker 5: Whether or not the experience with the pandemic made supply
Speaker 5: chains may be more resilient, maybe a little bit more
Speaker 5: flexible than they would have been otherwise heading into this
Speaker 5: tarf shock or whether we're talking about too hirely different
Speaker 5: set of circumstances.
Speaker 4: Ultimately we should have learned a lot more, I think
Speaker 4: as it comes to the global supply chain. But you know,
Speaker 4: hindsight's always twenty twenty and you know, as soon as
Speaker 4: things calm down, everybody just kind of turn their attention
Speaker 4: to what was most in front of them, and in
Speaker 4: doing so, you lose some of those fundamentals and those ideas,
Speaker 4: which is how to be robust, how to be resilient,
Speaker 4: how to have your alternatives in place, And that ends
Speaker 4: up being the biggest level of disruption because you have
Speaker 4: all your eggs in one basket and things change, and
Speaker 4: then how do you basically accommodate those changes? So I
Speaker 4: would suggest, and we always are talking to our companies
Speaker 4: and brands that we speak to about what are you
Speaker 4: going to do if there's no product available?
Speaker 3: What are you going to do if your costs.
Speaker 4: Increase significantly or if your supplier just can't deliver anymore?
Speaker 3: Do you have those plans in place?
Speaker 4: And anybody who has a strong supply chain has a
Speaker 4: diverse supply chain. Regardless of what we're talking about, whether
Speaker 4: it's a pandemic, or it's tariffs or whatever it may be,
Speaker 4: the diversity of the supply chain is going to be
Speaker 4: the key to success.
Speaker 5: Well, David, bring us into the lived experiences of some
Speaker 5: of these companies, some of these brands, you know, when
Speaker 5: you're talking to founders, what industries tend to be disproportionately
Speaker 5: impacted by what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Well, anything that you need several different aspects and several
Speaker 2: different components. You know, Listen, when I first started, I
Speaker 2: was making Guatemala, and then I was making a Korea
Speaker 2: that shifted over to China. But then China, these factories
Speaker 2: are opening and closing just as fast. They're owned by
Speaker 2: the government. Right then I moved over to Turkey and India.
Speaker 2: So if you're having different components, right, and so that's
Speaker 2: why you know, I had reached out to find somebody
Speaker 2: like a Kareem. I actually found Koreem because I don't
Speaker 2: have time to deal with all that, right, And that's
Speaker 2: the problem when you are somebody who's building a brand.
Speaker 2: You start a brand and you want to solve a
Speaker 2: problem or bring somebody joy, But all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: now you have to learn manufacturing, shipping, finance, social media
Speaker 2: and all this other stuff. So again, somebody that like
Speaker 2: like Kareem, who has two thousand factories at their fingertips,
Speaker 2: are the ones that you want to go to because
Speaker 2: there is no one answer. Tariffs, quota, it's illegal to
Speaker 2: make a product over here, government, change war, it's all
Speaker 2: over the place.
Speaker 1: I mean. One interesting thing that's come out of this though, Korea. Man.
Speaker 1: We talked a lot about this on this show back
Speaker 1: during the pandemic when all the supply chains basically got disrupted.
Speaker 1: With this idea that companies now and executives had to
Speaker 1: really start to think a lot harder about the supply chain,
Speaker 1: and to a certain extent, it almost ended up being
Speaker 1: a silver lining as companies that never really thought about it,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, we're finding ways to innovate, finding
Speaker 1: ways to be more creative.
Speaker 3: Has that stuck?
Speaker 4: Yes, I do believe it's stuck, and I believe that
Speaker 4: we're creating more and more best practices. And how we
Speaker 4: see that isn't just with businesses, but even at the
Speaker 4: level of education. Look at how many universities now we're
Speaker 4: offering supply chain management degrees and master's program so on.
Speaker 4: We have generations of supply chain professionals that are learning
Speaker 4: from the issues of the past.
Speaker 5: Damn, I'm really curious why you're seeing On the consumer level,
Speaker 5: we keep talking about how prices, maybe the rate of
Speaker 5: change is slowing down, but absolute price is very sticky.
Speaker 5: What are you seeing when it comes to consumer health,
Speaker 5: especially as we head into the holidays.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we saw it to shift where you
Speaker 2: can buy things directly from the.
Speaker 3: Consumer from the maker.
Speaker 2: At the end of the day, Now, when you're buying
Speaker 2: an overseas, you're getting you know, twenty thirty fifty percent increase.
Speaker 2: But if you're dealing with big box stores, embarrasses they say,
Speaker 2: I am not making I'm not selling this to my
Speaker 2: consumer more than nine dollars and nine nine. That's that's
Speaker 2: your problem. And if you don't want to do it,
Speaker 2: I'm going to find somebody else is going to do
Speaker 2: it cheaper with a bigger smile, so they don't want
Speaker 2: to pass that on to the consumer at the end
Speaker 2: of the day, when you're dealing directly with big box
Speaker 2: retailers or retailers in general,