Fabrikatör: The supply operations autopilot
Meet Demirhan and Bahadir. With their team, they are on a mission to make running online stores easy, giving direct-to-consumer brands a tool to plan, execute, and automate their supply chain operations efficiently.
The consumer preference is shifting towards story-driven boutique products over the typical retail. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands like Dollar Shave Club, Casper, and Warby Parker quickly capitalized on this shift and disrupted the deep-rooted verticals like bed mattresses, glasses or shaving products.
How’s that? The capability of outsourcing the supply chain ultimately lowered the barrier of entry into the D2C market. Entrepreneurs are able to scale up their D2C businesses without renting warehouses and hiring logistics personnel. This also enables them to quickly reach higher growth multipliers compared to traditional businesses.
“Despite the advantages, this rapid growth introduces a serious problem for most D2C brands: The biggest risk is missing sales due to unexpected stock outages. This punches a big hole in the cash flow of growing D2C companies,” says CEO and co-founder of Fabrikatör, Bahadir Efeoglu. “The problem becomes even more severe in the fashion industry for example where you need to manage hundreds of stock-keeping units (SKU) due to size and color options.”
Fabrikatör’s mission is to remove the guesswork from the inventory management and stop the revenue loss due to stock outages.
From the back alleys of manufacturing
Recently, the founders made a decision to pivot and position Fabrikatör as a “Resource Planning Platform for D2C brands”. Building on top of their experience in serving manufacturers, now they are ready to build software that empowers the growth of D2C brands.
“We started the APX program as Fabrikatör being the “manufacturing management solution for SMEs”. Together with the Tailormade team, we analyzed different market opportunities and validated our product hypothesis by having deep conversations with industry experts. Following several stages of validation we took the decision of pivoting and building a SaaS product for D2C companies” says Bahadir.
The idea of having a digital employee is not too far
Fabrikatör warns the D2C shop owners about forecasted stock outages before it is too late. When restocking is needed, Fabrikatör creates pre-filled purchase orders for its users. Fabrikatör tracks the status of the order starting from the beginning until products are back in stocks.
The analytical model also categorizes the products based on their sales performances. Slow selling products are reported to the shop owner along with suggestions on how to increase the sales. The suggestions are curated by the Fabrikatör team, fed into the smart algorithm that matches each suggestion with an individual SKU. This way, shop owners get customized suggestions.
“Our goal is to develop Fabrikatör as a solution that can empower D2C shop owners as their digital employee answering questions about inventory, supply chain, and growth.” says co-founder Demirhan Aydin.
A product journey from Istanbul to Berlin
Bahadir and Demirhan became friends during their bachelor’s studies at Bogazici University in Istanbul. Over the years they worked together on several projects and founded Fabrikatör in 2018 in Istanbul. After acquiring hundreds of B2B customers in Turkey, they decided to expand their business to Europe.
“We have great connections in the Turkish startup scene and have access to top tech talent at our alma mater. As we wanted to bring our business closer to our customers and investors, we didn’t want to give up on our strategic advantages back in Turkey. Therefore we moved our HQ to Berlin and kept our Istanbul office as an R&D center where our product team is mainly located” shared Bahadir.
Follow Fabrikatör’s journey on LinkedIn.
