Creating a New Business Model For Fashion, with Omer Kulka, CMO of Kornit Digital
Omer Kulka, CMO of Kornit Digital, discusses how the business model of the future will be demand-based as opposed to traditional supply-demand.
Kornit Digital has always marketed itself as a developer of technology, which, in today’s world is pretty much what everyone says.
“We started, really, to shift and to change our role in the industry,” Omer Kulka, CMO of Kornit said. “And, really, instead of being a technology company from the outside that solves one little problem that may be very painful but is one problem, to really understanding the workings of the entire ecosystem of the industry and really to understand how we can enable a transition that is an industry-wide transition that is so necessary.”
In 2021, it seems like every company is either a tech company or a media company.
So what is it that makes Kornit different from the rest? Well, it starts with the fact that Kornit is creating technology that is more than just an app or a gadget: it’s developing tech to enable sustainable fashion production, which could have quite an effect on a $3 trillion industry. To achieve this end, though, means that brands have to start thinking and acting differently. Instead of supply and demand, it’s going to be all about demand then supply.
Currently, in order to stay on top of trends and to meet the demand that the fashion industry attempts to drum up, brands are overproducing products. That negatively affects not just a company’s bottom line, the resources wasted in producing and then eliminating those items has a massive negative impact on the environment.
“Companies right now actually over produce about 30% just in order to make sure that they don’t miss out too much, that they don’t run out of bestsellers and that they don’t get stuck with too many inventory items everywhere,” Kulka said. “Now, that 30% is a killer. It is a killer economically and it’s a killer environmentally. And, I think, this is where most of the problem lies right now and, I think, this is where the change is really required. So, If I said before that in the past, the people that went to on demand were really driven by a different business model, a unique design that is required. Right now, it’s more about the fact that the business model right now is not sustainable.”
So in order to change the business model, Kornit Digital is actually changing its internal methodology and product offerings.
“The DNA of us as inventors and disruptors is the same, but the scale and the places that we’re taking it are completely different than before,” Kulka said. “And that is super exciting because, at the end, I think that … for me, it’s all about just how much impact you can make and how far you can reach with your impact. And I think that what we see right now is our impact is becoming more evident and clear to a lot more people and I think that we can actually manage to touch more and more people and affect more people’s lives.”
To hear exactly what kind of impact Kornit Digital is having already and where it’s headed, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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