Ep. 13 - How Untuckit Built A Responsible Supply Chain

Justin (Speaker 1): Welcome to the responsible supply chain show where we explore the world of responsible sourcing and resilient supply chains. I'm your host, Justin Dillon. And in each episode, we'll dive into real stories from some of the world's best business, government, and thought leaders protecting people, planet, and profits. Let's get it. Alright.

We are at episode 13. I don't even count anymore. It's just it's just it's all going so so fast. Three more episodes, and this little podcast is gonna be able to operate a motor vehicle in The United States. So what's going on in the world of responsible sourcing right now, you ask?

I'm so glad you asked. Let me ask you a question. Does it seem to you that the trade war is, I

Bjorn (Speaker 2): don't know, like a little

Speaker 1: bit of an armistice? It's kinda quiet. The cannons have gone quiet a little bit. Everyone I know and talk to every day is still on edge. The nerves are just part of the new normal.

So is it time for us to take in some learnings? Because I believe that every crisis is indeed a teacher. It exposes, you know, hard truths we either missed or chose to miss, wolfly ignored. The pandemic certainly showed us how fragile our supply chains are, and now the trade war is exposing the fragility of critical mineral sourcing. That's right.

Say it with me. Critical mineral sourcing. What are critical minerals? Aluminum, beryllium, chromium, cobalt, gallium, lithium, magnesium, nickel, palladium, platinum, all the things that were on that periodic table that were all forced to learn and that we quickly flushed out when we didn't have to repeat it. All of these things are now front and center and being used as little trade war hostages when it comes to tariffs.

Part of China's retaliation to the Trump tariffs was export controls on minerals like these vital to US production of goods and national defense. Now I didn't know this. I just learned this. That 9.3% of The US defense budget is spent in China, and China is the sole source of critical military inputs. Get this.

2,300 Chinese companies are in The US defense supply chain. This is at a time when defense spending is well, I just everyone's on a spree, especially NATO countries. So what does this mean for supply chains? Well, just kinda I don't know. I gotta feel like I've been ringing this bell for a while, but there's never been a more important time than the provenance, the visibility of supply chains.

Choosing a vendor now and in the future is no longer just about price and quality. More and more companies are demanding visibility in supply chains as part of their due diligence. And nobody that I've met yet knows more about that than today's guest. How is that for a transition? That I didn't even practice that.

I just moved right into that. Just had a little had some factoids and then just just right into an intro. Bjorn Bengtsson is the Chief Product and Supply Chain Officer at UNTUCKit, one of the fastest growing men's e commerce companies in The US, where he leads the company's merchandising, product development design, technical design, and product production department. He does That sounds like he's a Swiss army knife or Swedish army knife. Thank you so much.

He's from Sweden. For the past seventeen years, has worked as a professor at Parsons School of Fashion, where he teaches in fashion management master's program. This is a guy who knows how to put a supply chain together, and I thought, you know, you should probably listen to this guy. I know I learned a lot. So here's our interview with Bjorn.

Bjorn, good to see you. Where am I finding you today?

Speaker 2: I am actually working from home today, so I'm in Moncler, New Jersey in the beautiful weather outside and all that. So all good.

Speaker 1: And offices in, New York City?

Speaker 2: We have our office back in the middle of Soho in New York City, so yes.

Speaker 1: Big, big jealousy coming your way from the Bay Area on that one. Hey, you know, thank you for coming on. I've been following you for a while. You know, you work for a company called Untucket. Maybe you can just I was gonna do a dad joke there.

Maybe you can unpack who what Untucket is and who who you're selling to, maybe just give us a quick overview of the business.

Speaker 2: Yeah. The company was started in 02/2011, so it's not an old, old company, but it's we've gone through fifteen years, right, or something like that. So a little bit less maybe. And so I joined them ten years ago, and it was a really small business. It was a $12,000,000 business, and I was the first full time employee, they gave me one assistant and a three seat office in WeWork in Zoho.

It was amazing. This somewhat silly idea, crazy idea that you can make a shirt that is a little bit shorter and you can call it on Target, and then you can build a $200,000,000 business. At that point, seemed like totally insane to me, but that's actually what happened. And I think it's been great ride, great growth for a company based just around this short that is designed to be worn on touch. Today, I have a staff of 20 people about, and I handle all the production, product development, design, technical design.

So everything basically from first idea into our distribution center falls underneath.

Speaker 1: It's such a unique story and unique business model. And it just goes to show you, you can build a business in any vertical, you can create something new. I love brands that tell you what they are inside of their name. I think that is like, that's one of my favorite ways of positioning. I mean, Bjorn, you strike me as I would call you a pragmatic purist who knows how to operationalize their convictions.

So you're doing what a lot of people who listen to this podcast wanna do, which is pretty rare. You're able to sit on top of a business and actually have values, have things that you want to see actualized in the business. You've had a really unique path into product and supply chain leadership. Maybe you can share, you just talked about before how you just joined, it felt kind of crazy. Maybe you can share some of the moments that shaped your journey to becoming both a Chief Product Officer, but also running the supply chain as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I got into fashion, like many other people, by the way, fashion, not really thinking of fashion, really. I started my last year in college, I needed some extra money. So a friend of mine worked in a men's store in Sweden, back in Sweden. He said, do you want to work Fridays and Saturdays?

I said, yeah, I needed money. So why not? And I totally fell in love with this idea of fashion and style more than fashion, really. And there was a guy who ran this store who was really, really a great stylist. And I kind of just fell in love with it.

And so I quickly shifted from economics into fashion. And I came to The United States, spending a couple of years in Sweden, and came to The United States. I started working with product. I've always been close to product, and I've been anything from a creative director, which I was at Theory Mans, leading the design team only. I have worked with product development.

I have traveled the world and visited many, many, many, many factories. And, the moment for me, it's not just one moment per se with the exception of how I started my career. It's really been people I met and foremost being really curious about how you make things and how do you actually make products, how you make fabrics. And I always ask a ton of questions and based on just being curious, I both have really extended my interest to embrace the total industry and also become a little bit of an expert where you go and how you make clothes and how you lead a creative process and how you build good teams. It's just been a part of many different things that comes together for me.

Speaker 1: Speaking of learning, you're and I don't know if you're still doing this, but you've you've been teaching at Parsons for a while. Maybe you can share with the audience what what Parsons is for those who aren't anyone who's in fashion knows what Parsons is. For those who aren't, maybe share what that is and maybe tell us again, what is it that you're focusing on teaching this next generation of fashion leaders?

Speaker 2: Well, Parsons is probably ranked top five of fashion schools in the world and it's located in New York City. Its claim to fame is that a ton of the American designers have gone to that school, Marc Jacobs, and the list goes on. I'm not gonna do all the names, but many of them can't come out of fashion. Parsons. I've been teaching at Parsons for twenty years.

Just five years ago, I switched over to the master program and I teach like four classes a year about every fall, which is coming up now. I teach an entry level course, which is called the System of Strategies, and it really talks about the fashion industry from a system perspective. So very big picture, how all these pieces fit together, how they it's really an ecosystem that we have a great deal of interdependence in the system. We depend on fabric suppliers. We depend on yarn suppliers.

We depend on factories. We depend on retailers. We depend on marketing. So it's a very great deal of interdependency in this ecosystem. And I try to lay it out with very wide brush brush strokes.

And then they go on to study retailing, marketing, entrepreneurship, and all those things. In the spring, I teach two classes of manufacturing and production, and that is really one third of it I devote to pure manufacturing, and the other two thirds is sustainability. That's really the topics my students are most interested in. I spend a great deal of time and energy kind of laying out sustainability, the progress of the sustainability strategy. That's also what they work with in the final project.

Speaker 1: So what questions most surprised you that your students are bringing to you today? Obviously, they're coming into a very different world than you came into when you entered the industry thirty five years ago. What are they coming with that surprises you today?

Speaker 2: Well, I think they come with a perspective that is likely a lot different than what I had when I entered the industry. And it's also a very international environment. So I have a lot of students from China, from India, from all around the world. So the perspective is also very reflection of the culture. And I also find it really interesting that they look upon fashion a little bit differently depending on where they come from in the world based on culture, etcetera.

So I always learn a lot from my students and definitely get an insight into the brands they shop, why they shop, what attracts them to a brand, if they're brand loyal, which they're not, and why they're not brand loyal, etcetera, as compared to past generations. So there's always a lot of learning experiences, and they have but they have a pretty open mindset because many of them have never studied fashion before, which means

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: They're starting from a clean slate, kind of, you know, so

Speaker 1: Great. You can mold their minds to your will.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Well, I I don't try not to do that, but I try to create platform for them to stand on, and so they have a voice.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It sounds like your your your career in teaching or your your effort in teaching is really similar to the role that you play at Untuck It. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's both in charge of product and supply chain. That's really unique. Yeah.

It sounds like you're blending design and operations together, which, you know, a lot of established fashion brands, that's hard. Once you've been out there for ten, twenty years, it's hard to pull those things together. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about how those two operations and product inform each other.

Speaker 2: Well, I mean, chain right now, supply chain from the very beginning of my career was not that complicated. It was pretty well set up. You know, in those days, had an agent in Hong Kong, and you put all the orders with the agent, and they even went out to place the production, and you arranged for freight, etc. It's changed a lot the last decade, I'd say. And what has made it change is primarily, of course, issues of forced labor that has really had a great impact inside our business and how we create traceability and transparency in our supply chain.

And the other thing was, of course, the pandemic, which made us realize how fragile our supply chain really is and how tied down we are to certain countries and certain ways of doing things. So supply chain has become one of those things that was kind of automatic in the beginning of when I started to become something that you really have to spend a lot of time on, thinking, contemplating, and foremost, you have to strategize a little bit. You know? You can't just say, okay, the next ten years clear because they're gonna be with these 10 factories and it's all set in stone. Well, it's not been like that for the last five to ten years.

It's you have to kinda strategize a lot around that. And that also means that that kinda works its way back to design too. What can you design? And because you have to design into a little bit what the supply chain is that you have at hand, you can't just throw yourself around the world because you need to do great leather jackets. Well, you have to set up a factory to do great leather jackets.

And if you don't have it in your matrix, you need to go and find it. And then you have to evaluate transparency, of course. Is this a factory that's socially compliant? And is this a factory ship sometimes? Is this a factory can do our quality?

And you have to onboard them. And then you add to that the complexity of on target because we have a great deal of complexity, you know, quality requirements. You have to make sure you put them through that whole thing. Everything has been with supply chain, everything has become a little bit harder and and a little bit more difficult, etcetera. And the raid of course, the last thing that happened was these, crazy tariff things that was thrown in our face, like a cake kind of, still wiping off the cream from our faces.

That is also now you have to look at the world again from a different perspective. Well, China was really safe for the past three decades, four decades, and now all of a sudden, it's no longer an option. So we have to move out of China, which we started to do during the pandemic. And then where do you go? Well, everybody in China, all the factories we had, they went into Vietnam.

So we just tagged along and followed them to Vietnam. Not much effect of that, but now Vietnam has tariffs too. I spent a lot of time looking at countries like Turkey, Portugal, Morocco. I'm already in Madagascar which is duty free, which has a lot very long lead time. Another thing, the swiss channel is shut down because of the hutu rebels.

So if you produce in that part of the world, you can't go through the Suez Channel anymore. They have to go around the horn, which makes the lead times much longer, etcetera. So there's millions of things that never have been very, very steady for a long time, and all of a sudden, it's like everything is upside down a little bit. But you have to work your way through it.

Speaker 1: It sounds like an enormous amount of vigilance and whack a mole trying to build when you don't, when nothing seems to stay still. And I've heard you talk about how traceability and sustainability, now you've emphasized those for years. That's what I mean by you being a pragmatic purist, is you clearly are building a company with enormous growth, while also focusing on these. And everything I've just heard you say is sustainability, traceability, these are two sides of the same coin, because as you're moving your plants and dealing with tariffs, you're also dealing with ways in which new factories, new production lines, where you've got to be thinking about all these things together. I often find the sustainability teams that work in supply chain, they have a hard time understanding business cases because they're just trying to hit one nail in the And it's interesting, the perspective that you bring is like, actually, you can hit three nails at once just based on decisions and the ways that you're putting these pieces together.

Can you say a little bit more about how important traceability is when handling all of these problems, tariff and sustainability?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think we were very engaged, I think, industry in total during the pandemic with sustainability. But then in '23, when the business started to trend downwards a little bit, kind of people kinda went off sustainability a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And the interest kinda cooled down a little bit, which is, of course, not all what we should be doing.

Speaker 1: But Right.

Speaker 2: That's what happened. But I think the whole idea, what you always can kind of push for is, of course, social accountability with the way you do business. You're right, transparency and traceability are connected. There's no use to be transparent if I can't trace my product, right? So transparency means that I can declare to the consumer, NGOs, and anyone who wants to look at the information that I know where I source, I have looked at these factories, they meet social compliance standards, and I'm managing the situation.

I'm actually actively involved in the factories, social compliance, etcetera. Unless you are all those things, there's no use of being transparent because you're just being like everybody else, and you don't have anything really to disclose because all you can say is I'm making this and this and this factory, which is of course great. But, if you wanna be proud of that and stand behind that, you need to kind of trace product backwards upstream in the supply chain, which is not really that easy with UFLPA. Either, you know, lot of it went to effect. The US Custom is really asking us to go cotton all the way back to farm level, which is extremely complicated, but it's doable.

Then you take something like synthetic fiber. Polyester is really chips that you melt and spin into thread. There's thousands of chip producers in the world. There's no way you're gonna get further back than the spinner of the yarn because it's just, like, impossible to go beyond theirs. In some cases, you can go to tier four.

Other cases, you're gonna have to be pleased to go into tier three because you're not gonna get any further. But, again, all of these, yeah, all of these processes of tracking or tracing your product upstream has limitations, but I think the most important thing in the eyes of US government, the custom, is that you do your best. Right? You do as much as reasonable to track it or trace your product upstream. Stream.

And that's what we're doing at OnTarket. I think it's really not so much about customer sentiment, etcetera. I think it's just your obligation to make sure that you place your product with socially responsible vendors.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And and it seems like you've you've kind of as a company, you've kind of built your even flow. It's it's not I can sense that you kind of have your your way of doing it, and you know what's expected of yourself. You're not trying to chase some activist group's expectations or some watchdog group's expectations. You just know how to do this for yourselves, and it comes from a place of conviction.

I think a lot of companies want to get there. They just don't know how. They just don't know how to find their true north that they can defend internally, that their shareholders can get, and maybe at some point that their customers can respond. I talk to companies every day that are trying to find the place that you found at, at, at, Tucket, which is, we just want find how our strategy and our operations come together, and we can just keep moving and getting a little bit better all the time. And a lot of my job is to help them find small incremental wins in their supply chain.

Speaking of solving problems, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe that you've questioned the effectiveness of social audits.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's not only me. I think many people do that. I know. So social audits first of all, whatever you do, even unannounced audits and, you know, interviews with staff outside of the factory and all of that, it's not a guarantee that everything is perfect, you know.

So you can get very good audits done, but really, I always thought that the best audits is really the ones I do myself. And if you have character flaws, most likely, you will also have some other flaws too in the way you run your business. So Yeah. I think the honesty of factory owners and factory managers comes true pretty much when you talk to them and eat with them.

Speaker 1: There you go. That's it.

Speaker 2: So there's a difference between people who share your views and people who just do what you tell them to do because they want to get your orders, you know?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And I have to tell you, this is not something that is unique to one country. I produce in Italy. I produce all across the globe. There's crappy factories in single country, and there's high quality factories in every single country. So you just have to pick those guys that you really think share your values.

And most of my suppliers been with me for seven, eight, nine years, and they share my belief that if you don't ship the quality we need, you get punished in the end. And I think that is, that has changed also what's happening in the sourcing structure right now is that people are looking for stronger and stronger partnerships. Because number one, if you're an optimistic sourcing person, or for instance, you're supplying Walmart and you need to send a text back to six different factories and pick the best price. It's impossible to do traceability. You can't do traceability unless they're your partner because you're need your help to get upstream.

Yep. You know? So I think, and also, if you are an e com business or you don't ship good product, that product that customer never comes back. You know? You ship in bad quality.

When you talk to suppliers, you really have to involve them in the business and explain why quality is so important in order for them to understand and take part in building your business.

Speaker 1: The universal value we all have is to make money. It's not

Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 1: And any and and so because of trade, we can move each other in the values, not just value, but values that we hold dear and we think are important. I think that, you know, it's one of the reasons why we started this podcast and one of the reasons we started our company is that we believe we can create, we can solve problems for business, for suppliers, and for society and planet just based on better trade and sharing of those values. One thing that I've heard you say, correct me if I'm wrong, but you've said that, and I kind of share this opinion, that consumer behavior doesn't really drive change, policy does. So maybe you can unpack that a little bit, because I was a part of a project called Slavery Footprint with the US State Department built an app that surfaced consumer demand for products made without forced labor and child labor. So it surfaced a moment, a zeitgeist of like, consumers want this.

And I found myself spending a lot of time in the media talking about it. My point was, the reality is there is a small group of people that will buy just based on values, but to be quite honest, there's not a lot of offerings for them. I think that there's a little bit of intellectual dishonesty on consumer demand for ethical and sustainable, when the reality is price is the most important. So while the consumer voice is in the mix, you're talking about it's actually policy that actually kind of connects the dots. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you have to always be I mean, you said I'm a pragmatist, and I'm pragmatic about these things. Work in the capitalistic system, okay? And as you said, we are doing business because we want to make a profit, Right?

Speaker 1: That's it.

Speaker 2: Which means that we look at business first and environment second. We won't look at environment unless it makes financial sense for us to do it or or we have to do it. So my point has always been that unless there's laws and regulations, nothing's gonna really happen because we're gonna continue to do what we've done the past decade. We're gonna continue to do what we do because it's the easiest way to do things and it costs us less money. Now if you expect H and M to totally change everything they do because they believe sustainability is more important than profit, you're fooling yourself.

It's not never gonna happen. Although they have a lot of great initiatives and they're doing a lot of things, they're not gonna change the way they do business. And Sheen, forget about it. It. Okay?

It's not gonna happen. So how do you instill change? Well, you can't relay rely even on the big actors in the business to get together. So you have to even out the playing field. So it has to be penalties or tariffs involved or taxes involved in order so everybody has the same cost.

If everybody has the same cost, everybody will live up to it. And then you're gonna get changed because nobody's gonna be at the losing end of it. So you need both penalties, and you also need incentives. So you need to incentivize good fabrics, good, and you need to penalize bad fabrics. And it's very easy if you're in the industry to understand what is bad fabric.

Spun polyester is the mainstay of Sheen and team on everyone. Why? Because it's world, it's available across the world, it's the cheapest fiber you can buy, and it's just like have good performance characteristics. And today it's like mostly 55 to 60% of all the fiber we buy is spun polyester or polyester. And that is of course connected with a great deal of carbon emission.

So if you want to get to carbon emission, attack the most prominent fibers that is growing the fastest and is most destructive to the environment. So we had about cotton and wool and leather and all. They are minimal part to their footprint of polyester. So go for that. It's a simple solution.

Speaker 1: Well, I mean, you kinda answered my next question. If my question was gonna be if you were to push any one type of policy, what would it be? But I think I got my answer, is

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: You think there should be a polyester tax?

Speaker 2: Yes. Absolutely. A spun polyester primarily. Yeah. So because that is you know, the whole policy making in Washington right now has been a cover up for for punishing China.

Right? The the minimus is China, Ting Mu and Xi. You know, don't don't punish the country. That is just inefficient because there's spun polyester all across the globe. You have to go after something that has an impact.

And and, of course, the current administration is not so interested in their environmental initiatives, but you have to really go after what has the greatest impact. We kinda want to fix all the problem at the same time. And that's why it takes so long time. It the EU laws takes time and they get pushed onwards in time because they're administratively complicated, etcetera. The the solution is not to fix everything at once.

Can't get a circular economy the next twenty years. Okay? That is a long term goal. But we have to stop global warming. And if the fashion industry wants to do its part, it has to go after the biggest sinner on the fabric level.

Speaker 1: We've seen so many revisions of CSDDD and, you know, I gotta be honest with you, the CSDDD has gone back and forth and been beaten up in the EU, and there's a lot of talk about how it's been watered down and all the rest of it. The reality is it has to be implementable. And businesses, when you've got something that is so difficult to address, it just seems like it's just too far. I'd love your take on, you know, what you're seeing happening around CS triple D.

Speaker 2: I think EU is going about it in the wrong way, you know? They're packing too much in, and they're trying to push through too many different things, and they're making demands that are unreasonable, especially under reporting requirements, that companies, it backfires on them because everybody says, yes, yes, yes. And then it's time for implementation, and everybody starts saying no, no, no, no. Because just as in our own political life here in The United States, people represent something. Right?

And the in EU, you represent your country, and you don't wanna hear a ton of criticism for the fashion industry when you go back to Spain and get a call from Inditex and all that. So you're saying, okay. These reporting requirements, we're not ready for them Yeah. I know. We had five years to prepare, but we're not ready yet because we haven't done anything yet.

So then they push against. That means the implementation is too difficult Yeah. For it to actually happen, which means that you have to back down, and you have to start to kind of attack the things you think is most important. And don't misunderstand. The EU does a lot of good work with their environmental initiatives, and they're much further ahead than we are.

But I also feel it's, like, many times overly complicated. And the same goes for the green bills we have here in United States, which I think is New York, Massachusetts, is it California, is it four states, I think.

Speaker 1: Don't you have a fashion law? Isn't there a fashion law in Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, that is that is what they're trying to get through.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And Yeah. The green kinda green law. But it's like that is so general and so sweeping that there's no way that's gonna pass anywhere. Okay? It's not gonna go anywhere because especially not under this administration, but it's not, like, really realistic.

It's just, a big wish list of things we should be doing. Yeah. I I become a little bit cynical about this. I think there's only the only thing that's gonna help is laws and regulation. Nothing else gonna really trigger the process that we want.

If there everybody was like Patagonia, we wouldn't have any issues.

Speaker 1: There would be

Speaker 2: no issues. Yeah. We are not Patagonia. There's a lot of companies that anti, exactly opposite of Patagonia. So, you know, so nothing's gonna happen on our own initiatives because there's not enough people around that will take assume that type of responsibility and be that generous with their company.

Speaker 1: Jeanette, Patagonia, one of the things that they don't get credit enough for is their intellectual honesty and humility that they even with the wearing the the crown of jewel of being responsible, are self disclosing and that there's still more for them to do and they find things all the time, which I think should be the standard for It should be the true north of every company, which is we're going to do the best we can. And even we don't even hit our own standards. I think companies get nervous that if they self disclose that they're not perfect, which spoiler alert, none are, that they're going to get hit somehow. Just think we'd be on that. Last question.

Look, show's designed, this podcast is designed to really help and empower this generation of responsible sourcing, responsible supply chain professionals, of which you are, as I mentioned, you're the pragmatic purist, you've done it all. Is there one piece of advice that you can give anyone who's just advancing in their role, in their career, that they should, that would be helpful for them, not just to succeed in their career, but also exceed in the impact that they want to create?

Speaker 2: My number one rule is, if you're going into fashion in general, you really have to love what you do. Because it's not, like, really an easy industry to be in because we deal with problems every day. It's always problems. The successes are far between, you know? So, you know, so we have it's a uphill battle all the time, so you really have to love what you do.

So that's number one. The number two I already touched on. I think curiosity is the greatest way to get learning experiences, you know? So don't just try to do your job. Well, try to learn too.

Okay? And try to understand the people that maybe don't give you instructions and Mhmm. Or your boss, but the people you work with, try to ask them, you know, what are your problems? What what what is this about? And how do you make this fabric?

Why is this important to you? And what do you do about it? You will find yourself that people have a lot of wisdom that you don't have. Everything I know, I think I've gotten by being curious. Just ask questions.

People love. It's such a good icebreaker too. You know, when you meet the supplier and quite don't know how to go about with a conversation with them, ask them questions. You know, they love to talk about what they do, and they're proud of what they do, and give them an opportunity to talk a little bit rather than just kind of telling them what they should be doing and and what you expect from them.

Speaker 1: I love that. Curiosity is a big theme in my life, in our company, and we we push that as much as we can here. So, Bjorn, thank you so much for coming on. You've been a great guest. I've learned a lot from you and anyone who's Anytime,

Speaker 2: Justin.

Speaker 1: This is the one thing, the part of the show where we take one idea and dig into it a little bit more. Bjorn's advice to the next generation of supply chain professionals is to be and remain curious. Curiosity is more of an art form than a science. It can never truly be perfected, just practiced. It's also antithetical to everything school and work experience tells you to be because curiosity requires you to be vulnerable and admit that you don't know something.

That doesn't get you very far. Most of us would rather be curiosity's cousin, which is cleverness. Clever people solve problems. They are resourceful. They figure things out.

We have a saying at our company that everything is figureoutable. Clever people can see what others don't. They can see trends before they are obvious. They can see around corners, but they are not just strategists. They don't sit in the stands and talk to the people on the arena floor.

They throw themselves into problems and fix them from the inside out because they know that problems can't be fixed from the outside in. Now, everyone wants clever people on their team. But no one shows up on earth clever. The truly clever ones among us are the most curious of us all. Their vulnerability and lack of understanding of things is their superpower, not their weakness.

It's what drives them just like a swimming pool coach yelling at a swimmer from the side of the pool. If you want to be clever, you're gonna have to admit to yourself that you don't know much. Only then can you be truly curious, and curiosity is what leads to being clever. Thank you so much for listening. Please don't forget to hit the subscribe button, and also please give the show some love.

I know I'm begging here, but I beg for stars. I everyone does it. I'm doing it now. It's right it's just if you just move your it's right there. You're you're just you're listening to me.

It's just now move your finger. Hit the star. Don't hit the 4. Hit 5. We need way more there

Speaker 2: you go. You got it. You almost got it.

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